Assuming you have or have had a job at some point in your life, then you’ve probably been in a work meeting.
If you’ve been in a work meeting then it’s likely that you’ve been in one which you were woefully underprepared for and hoping nobody would ask you to contribute to.
Just sit there like you know what’s going on, while some middle manager you have never spoken to before lectures a room full of bored people on quarterly targets.
If you are called on to say something, you can probably bluff your way through it well enough until you give what sounds enough like an answer and it’s someone else’s turn to be under the microscope.
But how do you get around the work meeting where your participation is unavoidable?
.jpg)
“I don’t really know what to say but if I talk long enough you’ll want me to stop and that’s basically an answer.” (Getty Stock Photo)
If you’re an old work colleague of mine, you pray for an intervention that comes in the form of someone setting off the office smoke alarm by clogging up the canteen toaster with pitta bread, leading the entire building to be evacuated for over an hour resulting in the meeting being cancelled.
If you’re the Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, however, the answer is slightly different as he’s got an unusual way of making sure everyone is switched on for a meeting.
That former CEO and entrepreneur explained why he wasn’t a fan of PowerPoint and instead preferred to have his meetings in a certain way.
Speaking to the Lex Friedman Podcast, Bezos said: “My perfect meeting starts with a crisp document, so the document should be written with such clarity that it’s like angels singing from on high.”
The Amazon boss explained that his meetings would start with a ‘six page narratively structured memo’ and then everyone would spend half-an-hour sitting together reading through the same document before discussing it.
How would Jeffrey do it differently? (Cooper Neill/Getty Images)
“They end up coming to the meeting having only skimmed the memo or maybe not read it at all and they’re trying to catch up,” he said of the kind of situation he was trying to avoid by having this approach.
“They’re also bluffing like they were in college having pretended to do the reading.
“It’s better to just carve out the time for people. So now we’re all on the same page, we’ve all read the memo and now we can have a really elevated discussion.”
It means the person hosting the meeting is well across what they’ve got to talk about and everyone there is also up to date on developments.
Elsewhere in his quest to win capitalism, Bezos has hired staff with no prior experience based on just two questions in the job interview and once called his own company’s customer support in the middle of a meeting to prove a point.
