Jeff Bezos's ideal meetings are 'messy' and so full of discussion that it runs late: 'Very skeptical of...'

Earlier this year, Jeff Bezos revealed another one of his unconventional management tactics which involved placing an empty chair in every meeting for the most important entity in the room.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has recently shared an insight into how he likes his official meetings to be--messy and so full of discussion that it runs late and disrupts schedules. Speaking at The New York Times’ DealBook Summit last week, he revealed that he also instructs everyone to speak in reverse order of seniority, starting with the most junior person while he, typically at the top of that hierarchy, speaks last. This, Bezos said, helps combat “group think".

The 64-year-old said that the strategy prevents the boss’s thoughts from unduly influencing the opinions of everyone else in the room. Bezos added that it is very rare for him to speak up in the middle of meetings and he does so only if he has an unwavering opinion on a topic.

“I’m actually personally very easy to influence ... but a couple percent of the time, no force in the world can move me, because I’m so sure of something,” CNBC Make It quoted Bezos as saying.

He added that his most productive conversations “wander” around, instead of strictly following the agenda. “Most of the meetings that are useful — we [hand out] six-page memos, we do half-hour study hall [where] we read them, then we have a messy discussion,” Bezos said. “I am very skeptical if the meeting’s not messy.”

Earlier this year, Bezos revealed another one of his unconventional management tactics which involved placing an empty chair in every meeting for the most important entity in the room: the customer.

This symbolic gesture served as a constant reminder to Amazon’s team to keep customer satisfaction at the forefront of every decision, Unilad reported.

While Bezos’ habit of leaving a chair vacant might seem odd to outsiders, the impact of such a gesture is undeniable. According to the Amazon founder, “If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell six friends. If you make customers unhappy on the internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends.”