What is Amazon founder's Jeff Bezos's empty chair rule for meetings? Know here

One of the most famous personalities in the world of business and management is Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, who introduced a number of effective measures that influenced the company’s organisational culture and productivity. Some of these are the one empty chair rule, the two-pizza rule, and an unconventional way of structuring meetings.

The one empty chair rule is a good example of how Amazon’s organisational culture is built around the customer. During the meetings, one chair is always left empty to represent the customer, and his or her interest is always taken into consideration. This practice supports Bezos’s concept of putting the customers first and focussing on the long term.

Accompanying this is Amazon’s two-pizza team rule, which requires that the number of attendees in a meeting can be fed with two pizzas, usually between six and eight people. This guideline is to ensure that the teams are small and compact so that they can be able to improve on their communication and decision-making. Bezos opines that when there are many people, the group ends up being inefficient and the conversation gets watered down, making the small teams efficient.

Also, Bezos has banned PowerPoints in upper management meetings, which is known as the no PowerPoint policy. The participants are not allowed to present information in bullet-point format, but instead they have to write out narrative memos. These memos, which can take up to six pages, give a clear framework of the topics to be discussed and force the presenters to organise their thoughts and present them before the general discussion.

Another interesting feature of Bezos’s meeting strategy is the so-called silent start. In every meeting, the participants are first encouraged to read various materials that have been available to them in silence. This practice ensures that everyone is in agreement with what is to be discussed, and also helps one to think deeper on the issues that are to be discussed. The silent reading period not only helps in concentration but also makes all the participants contribute to the discussion, those who are shy in general or do not like speaking in front of others.

They are a manifestation of Bezos’s vision to build a company culture that is obsessed with efficiency, simplicity, and customers at Amazon.