to-be list

Many of us create to-do lists to remind us of things we want to accomplish. But people rarely have to-be lists. Why? To do’s are activities or events that can be checked off the list when done. To be, however, is never done. You can’t earn checkmarks with to be’s. I can take my wife out for a lovely evening this Friday, which is a to do. But being a good husband is not an event; it needs to be part of my nature—my character, or who I am.

Lynn G. Robbins

"What Manner of Men and Women Ought Ye to Be?" General Conference. April 2011

PowerPoint makes us stupid

PowerPoint has been slowly killing the U.S. military from the inside. As this 2010 article from The New York Times explains, from generals down to frontline officers, America's military staff spend their time making, giving, and listening to PowerPoint presentations instead of, you know, preparing for war.

The money quote from that piece actually comes from none other than Gen. Jim Mattis, who said at the time that "PowerPoint makes us stupid."

For example, PowerPoint reduces everything down to bullet points and inane charts. This "stifles discussion, critical thinking, and thoughtful decision-making," officers in the Pentagon have said.

It's also a huge waste of precious time. Indeed, junior officers are nicknamed "PowerPoint Rangers" for all the time they have to spend making slides. As The New York Times reported: "...when a military website, Company Command, asked an Army platoon leader in Iraq, Lt. Sam Nuxoll, how he spent most of his time, he responded, 'Making PowerPoint slides.' When pressed, he said he was serious."

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry

"General Mattis, save the U.S. military. Ban PowerPoint." The Week. January 17, 2017

the power of listening

Giving performance feedback is one of the most common ways managers help their subordinates learn and improve. Yet, research revealed that feedback could actually hurt performance: More than 20 years ago, one of us (Kluger) analyzed 607 experiments on feedback effectiveness and found that feedback caused performance to decline in 38% of cases. This happened with both positive and negative feedback, mostly when the feedback threatened how people saw themselves.

Whereas feedback is about telling employees that they need to change, listening to employees and asking them questions might make them want to change. The research findings suggest that attentive and non-judgmental listening seems to make an employee more relaxed, more self-aware of his or her strengths and weaknesses, and more willing to reflect in a non-defensive manner. This can make employees more likely to cooperate (versus compete) with other colleagues, as they become more interested in sharing their attitudes, but not necessarily in trying to persuade others to adopt them, and more open to considering other points of view.


Guy Itzchakov and Avraham N. (Avi) Kluger
"The Power of Listening in Helping People Change." Harvard Business Review. May 17, 2018.

Also check out Avi Kluger's homepage, and his TED Talk on the subject.

outlaw powerpoint

Jeff Bezos has a non-traditional management style at Amazon, and he says Amazon’s unique twist on meeting structure is the “smartest thing we ever did.”

“Many, many years ago, we outlawed PowerPoint presentations at Amazon,” Bezos said at the Bush Center’s Forum on Leadership in 2018. “And it’s probably the smartest thing we ever did.”

To replace the PowerPoint presentations, Bezos created a new way to hold meetings: Meetings start with each attendee sitting and silently reading a “six-page, narratively-structured memo” for about the first 30 minutes of the meeting.

″[The memo is] supposed to create the context for what will then be a good discussion,” Bezos said.

Those participating are encouraged to take notes, and after the reading period is over, they discuss the memo.

Bezos says the reason for the group reading is that “executives will bluff their way through the meeting as if they’ve read the memo because we’re busy and so you’ve got to actually carve out the time for the memo to get read.”

Taylor Locke

"Jeff Bezos: This is the ‘smartest thing we ever did’ at Amazon". CNBC. October 15, 2019.

the complaint sandwich

Psychologist Guy Winch recommends a formula called “the complaint sandwich”—a series of three statements calibrated to make people more receptive to changing their ways. The first “slice of bread” in the sandwich is a positive statement that will hopefully make the listener less defensive when the complaint itself arrives.

“The meat of the sandwich is the complaint itself,” Winch said. “And here’s the trick: The meat has to be lean. In other words, all you need is the one incident to make your point.” Don’t present a compendium of every offense; just stick to the specifics of the present situation.

The final component of the sandwich is another positive statement, this time one that might motivate the other party to do things differently.


Joe Pinsker
"How to Complain". The Atlantic. June 29, 2019.