Why it’s so important to write well, according to Jeff Bezos

In 2004, Amazon He vetoed PowerPoint presentations at his management team meetings. He replaced it with six-page memos and was adopted as the opening ritual of all company management meetings: a reading, up to 30 minutes, of the memos of each of them.

At that time, when the brevity seemed to express better than any other way the vertigo of the time and there were barely three years left on Twitter to impose on the world the now old magic figure of 140 characters, the communication of Jeff Bezos The STeam (acronym of Senior Team which is pronounced like the word “steam”, which evokes the engines), sent on June 9 at 6:02 pm, was strange. Under the theme “No PowerPoint presentations yet in STeam” he said:

A little more to help with the “why”.

What we are looking for is a well structured and narrative text, and not just a text. If someone creates a bulleted list in Word, it would be just as bad as PowerPoint.

The reason it’s more difficult to write a four-page memo than it is to ‘write’ a 20-page PowerPoint is that the the narrative structure of a good memo forces you to think better and to better understand what is more important than another and how things are related.

PowerPoint-like presentations give us permission in some way to treat ideas superficially, to iron out any feelings of relative importance, and to ignore the internal interdependence of ideas.

Bezos’ indication has stuck, and if anything, has deepened over the years, as revealed Sumit grrg, who carried out an analysis of the 23 letters to shareholders Bezos sent so far, as advanced on Medium. “And while they taught me a lot about the genius of Bezos and Amazon, I was also amazed at how well written and articulate they were,” he explained.

In one of them, that of 2017, filed with the Securities Exchange Commission (SECOND) from the United States, Bezos explained what it means to write well and the problem of distinguishing between really good text and fair text, because “the difference is subtle”:

It would be extremely difficult to write the detailed requirements that make up a good memo. However, it seems to me that most of the time readers react the same way to good memos. They recognize it when they see it. The standard is there, and it is real, even if it is not easy to describe.

This is what we found out. Often times, when a memo isn’t great, it’s not due to the author’s inability to recognize high standards, but a mistaken expectation of scope: it is mistakenly thought that a six page high level memo can be written in a day or two, or even in a few hours, when in reality it could take a week or more!

Bezos’ general formula is simple: “The big memos are they write and rewrite, are shared with colleagues who are asked to improve their work, put aside for a few days, then edit once more with a fresh mind“.

Bezos also raised the issue of talent: there are people who have an easier time expressing themselves in writing than others, without this diminishing their skills as experts in engineering, marketing or resources. human. “Beyond recognizing standards and realistic expectations of scope, what about skills?” He asked. “Are you sure to write a first class memo you have to be an extremely skillful writer?” Is this another necessary element? ” Answered:

Not so much from my point of view, at least not for the individual as part of a team. The football coach doesn’t need to be able to shoot, and a filmmaker doesn’t need to know how to act. But both must recognize high standards in these areas and teach realistic expectations of scope. Even in the example of writing a six-page memo, there is teamwork. Someone on the team will need to have the ability, but it doesn’t have to be yourself.

At Amazon, he added, it’s common for the names of the authors not to appear in memos, to reflect that there has been a process of consultation and collaboration from the whole team.

Perhaps a key is found in this ability to “recognize the high level” in a text, which is not necessarily associated with the talent to produce it: a person can appreciate literature very much and be able to distinguish an excellent text from it. ‘acceptable text, for example. “Average writers don’t recognize what makes their work different from that of the best writers in their field,” he observed. And this lack of recognition never points them in the right direction. They can’t get better because they don’t understand how something better is.“.

To recognize a good pitch, or a good performance, or a good writing, it is necessary to have seen several times a good pitch, a good performance and a good writing. In this particular case, it would simply be read. Having studied grammar or seeking tips for effective written expression is no substitute for teaching on how to create good text which, almost inadvertently, is achieved through reading.. It’s not uncommon for Bezos to suggest something like this: after all, Amazon started out in a garage, selling books.

Already in 2012, he explained it to Fortune, for a profile dedicated to him through the corporate and business publication, in which he spoke of the importance of starting STeam meetings by reading memos, which he called “stories” and not documents. “For new hires, it’s a strange initial experience. They are not used to sitting quietly in a room and studying with a group of executives. “This act of community reading, as described in the article, guarantees the attention of the participants. And, above all, it forces you to write well.

“Full sentences are more difficult to write,” he said, compared to titles in a PowerPoint document or bullets in Word. “They have verbs. Paragraphs have subject sentences. There is no way to write a six-page, narratively structured memo without having clear thinking“. A version 2.0 of the sentence from high school language lessons: what is clear for the reason, will be clear for the expression.

Bezos’ criteria for what it means to write well seem to have resonated positively, to the point that in 2015 Brad porter, who had long ceased to be vice president of robotics at Amazon by then, reflected on what he had learned from him: “Imagine for a moment that you could go to a meeting and everyone present had a very deep context on the subject you are going to try. That they were familiar with the critical data for the business, ”he suggested. “That’s how meetings are at Amazon, and it’s magic.”

And he quoted Bezos: “The traditional type of corporate meeting starts with a presentation. Someone comes up to the front of the room and presents a PowerPoint presentation, like a slide. From our point of view, we get very little information, we get thumbnails. It’s easier for the presenter, but difficult for the audience. Instead, all of our meetings are structured around a six-page narrative memo. Faced with a traditional PPT presentation, executives interrupt. If you read an entire six-page memo, on page two you have a question, but on page four there is an answer ”.

KEEP READING: