Jeff Bezos is right: PowerPoint is your enemy

The more your story moves people, the greater the chance of them making the right decision. As this neat trick from Amazon shows, great business stories need words and not slides

One of the best TV programmes about business storytelling is the BBC’s Dragons’ Den, now in its 21^st series, in which entrepreneurs pitch for money from a panel of multi-millionaire gurus. The next time you watch it, count how many times one of the Dragons uses the word ‘story’. It didn’t occur to me until my colleague Liane pointed it out.

They talk about how ‘your story really inspired me’; they admonish them for ‘not telling us a very compelling story’; they make decisions based on ‘the quality of your story’; recently, Peter Jones wiped away a tear (and opened his wallet) because he was so moved by the story being told.

Each episode contains about half a dozen mentions of that word – story. It’s almost as if the ideas being presented to these business leaders are only worth investing in, if the stories being told by are good enough. The numbers matter but not as much as the words.

I’m not surprised. Sceptical clients worry that the word ‘story’ has negative connotations – essentially, making things up – rather than focusing on the way it can change people’s perceptions about the value of a piece of work. With a well-constructed story, the data matters more. Facts on their own don’t influence people to make a decision but the way those facts are presented within a story does.

Anyone who has been in one of my masterclasses will have heard me talk about the Significant Objects project. It’s an anthropological experiment which showed how apparently worthless objects were turned into items that people would pay a small fortune for, simply because of the stories that accompanied them. It’s worth reading about here.

I’d also highly recommend emulating the approach that Jeff Bezos has instilled throughout Amazon, by severely restricting use of PowerPoint. There are so many problems with PowerPoint when it comes to internal storytelling. People’s styles are different, the tools encourage needless embellishment, people add rather than take away because it’s easier to do so, a complex idea is too often reduced to long bullet-pointed lists or blocks of unreadable text.

Two of Bezos’ most senior executives share their so-called ‘narrative information multiplier’ approach in a book I’ve been reading – Working Backwards. It’s a little dry and perhaps could have done with an edit to remove all the meandering business-speak but it’s full of great advice about how to pitch, present and persuade through storytelling.

In particular, Amazon uses a six-page document in every meeting before any discussion begins, to describe, review and then propose any idea. It’s Amazon’s version of Dragons’ Den. Essentially the narrative ‘places the team’s ideas and reasoning centre stage…it won’t matter whether the presenter is a great salesperson, introvert, new hire or VP, what matters will be found on the page’.

Because the material is less dense and not obscured by multiple fonts, meaningless images and complicated graphics, everyone in the room understands the issue, idea and decision.

What Amazon shares with the world of journalism is that these six-pagers are collaborative efforts. In the newsroom, most stories start with a departmental editor, then writer, joined perhaps by a picture editor, digital editor, graphics specialist, sub-editor, maybe another writer, and then at least other two senior editors before it reaches the reader (assuming media cutbacks haven’t hit too hard). At Amazon, the insistence on creating a narrative means everyone gets involved in making it work. Powerpoint can often feel like a solo endeavour, people adding bits at the end. Storytelling in business should be the opposite – done properly it fuels and enhances collaboration.

And that teamwork always uncovers what I think of as a story’s most important element Its emotional core. We don’t want decision-makers to just know something, we want them to feel it.

That’s how to tame a Dragon!

WATCH THIS

Friday Night Blind is a brilliant 10-minute film that tells the story of a group of friends who get together for a bowling night with a difference. None of them can see. It’s a piece of storytelling full of emotion, humour and bold film-making and worth watching for how concise it is, something we can all benefit from! American organisations such as the New York Times, Washington Post and – in this case – the New Yorker are way ahead of British news organisations when it comes to this kind of visual storytelling.

LISTEN TO THIS

I’m addicted to the World Service radio station and the Dear Daughter series of podcasts, which returns for a third season, is wonderful. Presented by Namulanta Kombo, it’s a chance for parents to pass on words of wisdom to their children. Instead of presenters dominating the podcasts, contributors do. These are stories that will inspire and move you.

READ THIS

When I started out on my second career more than a decade ago, I feared that nobody needed writing skills anymore. How wrong I was! Now, some of the business leaders I work with, tell me that they worry some of those new to the world of work don’t always have the requisite reading skills. They get bored too easily. This is a fascinating piece from an academic about what he believes is a problem amongst graduates that is already impacting the world of work.