What can we learn about meetings from the richest man in the world?

Mar 2, 2021 | How-to and Meeting Tips, Meetings in the media

WSJ article "How Jeff Bezos Has Run Amazon, From Meetings to Managing"

WSJ: How Jeff Bezos Has Run Amazon, From Meetings to Managing

I would like to share a Wallstreet Journal article that highlights the management principles Jeff Bezos uses and made him and his company so successful. Some of these valuable principles are related to meetings, which may be useful for you as well.

Many meetings are pointless and a waste of time, so Jeff Bezos insists that meetings are productive. The following guidelines help Amazon to make sure its meetings are productive:

Preparation

The presenter of a topic has to write a memo for everyone that serves as the basis for the discussion. Writing things down forces you to sharpen your ideas and formulate convincing arguments. Solid preparation is the key to having a successful meeting. For your meetings a memo might not always be necessary, but preparing with a good agenda is. Here is some information on how to create a meeting agenda https://meetingking.com/how-to-create-a-meeting-agenda/ and an overview of how MeetingKing can help you to create your agenda with very little work while making sure that all the details are taken care of https://meetingking.com/agenda-software-to-easily-create-meeting-agenda/.

Timing

To make sure that people are focused and alert, meetings should take place after 10 am and before lunch. You don’t want participants dozing off during the “after lunch dip”.

Decisions

Meetings are not a goal in itself, they should be a means to reach a goal and usually that goal is to make decisions based on a well prepared discussion. The focus should be on how to move your organization forward. Jeff Bezos said “If I have three good decisions a day, that’s enough. They should just be as high quality as I can make them.” Documenting your decisions and related tasks is at the core of MeetingKing, so you can focus on your business and don’t have to waste time on meeting logistics, like working out the minutes in Word and manually sending out email messages with those minutes. MeetingKing automatically creates and emails professional meeting minutes from your short notes. What is more, your tasks are available in the powerful built-in task manager and can even be exported with Zapier to your task management tool of choice. More on how to write meeting minutes can be found at https://meetingking.com/writing-meeting-minutes/ and how MeetingKing makes writing meeting minutes easy at https://meetingking.com/meeting-minutes-software/.

Obviously having productive meetings is not the only key to success, it is one of many, but an important one. Other principles highlighted in the Wall Street Journal article are: Extreme customer focus, get 8 hours of sleep, innovate and accept good failure. For more details you can read the article at: https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-jeff-bezos-has-run-amazon-from-meetings-to-managing-11612314552.

Happy Meetings!

About Post Author

Edwin Siebesma

Edwin is the former CEO of WinZip Computing as well as VP of sales of the largest electronics and appliances retail chain in The Netherlands and VP of commercial affairs of a large retail chain in Peru. In all these capacities he attended and chaired many meetings and was frustrated by the lack of an integrated tool that followed the entire workflow around meetings from preparing the agenda, writing the minutes to manage tasks. There are many task management tools and note-taking solutions, but nothing covered all stages of a meeting. After leaving WinZip Edwin started Meeting king to help people have more effective meetings.

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