A Paragraph to Ponder

From an interview with Washington Post Company CEO and Chairman of the Board Don Graham discussing Amazon Jeff Bezos - link to the interview.

EK: Tell me about those conversations. What are Bezos’s thoughts on the media? What kind of news consumer is he?

DG: Here are a few things I’ve learned in the past two weeks. When Jeff holds meetings at Amazon he asks people not to use Powerpoints but to write an essay about their product or program or what the meeting is to be about. For the first 10 or 15 minutes everyone sits and reads the essay. His point is that if you write at length, you have to think first, and he feels the quality of thought you have to do to write at length is greater than the quality of thought to put a Powerpoint together. He also says to get to know people he calls daylong meetings about books where everyone reads the same book and talks about [it]. So he’s a reader.