We have all experienced that presentation using PowerPoint that “almost killed” us. So is there a place for it in today’s technopreneur world? Steve Jobs famously stated, “People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint”. Jeff Bezos has banned it outright in meetings, and Elon Musk and Richard Branson don’t use it. Although Sundar Pichai allows it, he highly discourages the use of actual bullets.

In his 2018 annual letter, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos repeated his rule that PowerPoint is banned in executive meetings. According to Bezos, new executives are in for a culture shock in their first Amazon meetings. Instead of reading bullet points on a PowerPoint slide, everyone sits silently for about 30 minutes to read a “six-page memo that’s narratively structured with real sentences, topic sentences, verbs, and nouns.” After everyone’s done reading, they discuss the topic.

A whiteboard is well known to be very effective especially in selling complex technology solutions. Unlike PowerPoint, it enables one to really engage with a customer, following their line of inquiry and be hyper-interactive (without the fixed structure of bullets). And most powerfully, whiteboard selling is done through visual storytelling such as mind-maps or flow diagrams.

In his book TED Talks, Chris Anderson writes, “Those classic PowerPoint slide decks with a headline followed by multiple bullet points of long phrases are the surest single way to lose an audience’s attention altogether…. When we see speakers come to TED with slide decks like this, we pour them a drink, go and sit with them at a computer monitor, and gently ask their permission to delete, delete, delete.”

So here is why narrative and pictures are better than bullets for meetings:

1. We retain better

Our predecessors sat around campfires swapping stories. We process our world in narrative, we talk in narrative and–most important for leadership–people recall and retain information more effectively when it’s presented in the form of a story, not bullet points.

2. We focus better

The brain cannot do two things at once and do them equally well. When it comes to presentation design, we can’t read text on the screen and listen to the speaker while retaining all of the information. It can’t be done.

3. We “get it”

“I’m actually a big fan of anecdotes in business,” Bezos said. as he explained why he reads customer emails and forwards them to the appropriate executive. Often, he says, the customer anecdotes are more insightful than data. Amazon uses “a ton of metrics” to measure success, explained Bezos. “I’ve noticed when the anecdotes and the metrics disagree, the anecdotes are usually right,” he noted. “That’s why it’s so important to check that data with your intuition and instincts, and you need to teach that to executives and junior executives.”

4. We are more inspired

Bullets don’t inspire. Stories do. Simply put, the brain is not built to retain information that’s structured as bullet points on a slide. It’s well known among neuroscientists that we recall things much better when we see pictures of the object or topic than when we read text on a slide.

So is PowerPoint dead? Can we live without bullets? At Corniche, we use “decks” to summarize information, such as an Information Memorandum or an introduction to a company, which is sent to the prospect in advance. In this context, bullets can be more “digestible” – and we are not trying to talk at the same time. It is a reference that someone can refer back to.

But we certainly can live without bullets in meetings!