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Jeff Bezos Turned Narrative into Amazon's Competitive Advantage
- writepub 8y agoWhile dense writing makes it harder for the presenter to gloss over details, it makes it that much harder for the audience to grasp the idea. PowerPoint is designed for the audience. Maybe a presentation for a live audience, and a dense paper for offline consumption is the optimal setting. The audience can remain engaged, and if an idea seems worthy, a deeper dive into the dense paper format occurs
- xfitm3 8y agoThe entire point is that presentations are easier to game than a narrative. If the audience can’t be bothered to read the paper it’s time for the audience to be replaced.
- GoodJokes 8y agoYou’ll make a good dictator one day.
- jrauser 8y agoTo the contrary, clear writing make it much easier for the audience to assemble complex ideas. Poor writing definitely makes it harder, and it turns out that the vast majority of people are poor writers, mainly because they don't practice. You might not have experienced high-quality business writing because it's so rare. Powerpoint does have its uses; I've written and delivered lots of talks using powerpoint. But informing an audience about to make a high-stakes decision is not among them.
- tverbeure 8y agoAbout a year ago, I decided to start writing about my home hobby projects on a blog. It's a nice plus when others read it (but I have no idea because there are no trackers) but the two biggest advantages are: 1. I'm now much more inclined to finish a project. 2. Writing about it forces me to truly understand the subject. There have been many times where things became clear only because I had to explain it to myself in words. And you're right: the more I do it, the easier it becomes. It's very satisfying.
- mooreds 8y agoI wrote about this a few years ago. http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/2188 http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/2188 I find blogging to be immensely helpful in crystalizing my thoughts as well as giving back.
- SubuSS 8y agoYay Amazon/Snap reunion! I think the mix up between enlightenment/information vs decision making is the key here. You see presentations at Re:Invent all the time, because they are the former. Leadership decision making definitely requires the nuance a standalone document can provide. Amazon takes it a step ahead by imposing a condense requirement: now you need to write well too. RE other comments about fluffing / buzzwords, you probably are highly misjudging the level of intelligence of this particular audience. IOW I would love to try and see someone try to push such a doc with Jeff et al :)
- xfitm3 8y agoMy interest is piqued. Can you point us to some examples of high quality business writing?
- jrauser 8y agoJeff's letters to shareholders are pretty good. Here's a recent one: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312518121161/d456916dex991.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312518... Because of its audience and goals it's necessarily less technical and more essay-like than a typical s-team memo. For obvious reasons, I can't link to any of those. An example that's close and is in the public domain is Jacobsen's TCP slow start paper: https://ee.lbl.gov/papers/congavoid.pdf https://ee.lbl.gov/papers/congavoid.pdf. He's advocating a specific change in the TCP protocol and marshalls evidence beautifully to make his argument.
- dingaling 8y agoThere's a lot of padding and ambling in that memo. For example the entire first paragraph would have been more parsable as a list of achievements. And then there is this: "may be because customers have such easy access to more information than ever before – in only a few seconds and with a couple taps on their phones, customers can read reviews, compare prices from multiple retailers, see whether something’s in stock, find out how fast it will ship or be available for pick-up, and more." Everything after the clause "... then ever before" is superfluous. Shareholders know what sort of information customers can obtain, and how. He implies that with the weak "and more" at the end. But too late, he has already wasted the reader's time. I'm not particularly impressed by that writing style, it reminds me of 16 year olds trying to impress me with their verbose history essays. The idea of business writing is to COMMUNICATE. If the reader reads an entire paragraph and hasn't learned anything new then the author has failed. If the reader needs to use a highlighter to pick-out pertinent information from a sea of words, the author has failed.
- maxxxxx 8y agoBased on a lot of meetings I attend I suspect that the people who don't read or understand the 6 page format shouldn't maybe be at the meeting. A lot of meetings spend a lot of time with catching up unprepared people and almost nothing of substance gets achieved.
- a-priori 8y agoIn the Amazon format, meetings begin with dedicated reading time. The presenter hands out copies of the memo, and everyone spends 20 minutes or so reading silently. Then they discuss the memo as a group. People aren't expected to read it beforehand.
- foobiekr 8y agoI would love this rule. Love it.
- ahartmetz 8y agoI think PowerPoint is for convincing. Text is for understanding.
- deathanatos 8y agoI feel like your message implies that the PowerPoint should come first. Why should I allow you to convince me of something that I do not understand? No, I should read the text first, to understand (which hopefully will simultaneously convince me!) and then the PowerPoint is no longer needed.
- ahartmetz 8y agoMy message implies that PowerPoint serves to convince people of things that they don't understand, that's right.
- ak217 8y agoArticle starts out well and then veers off into strange and scattershot coverage of unrelated Amazon factoids. It doesn't fully cover the communication principles of the 6-pager. The missing parts are: - 6 pages is the upper limit; the memo can be shorter - The format is designed to drive the meeting structure by requiring attendees to read the memo in the first 10 minutes of a meeting, followed by discussion - You can push extra information into the appendix if needed to convince those looking for more evidence - The memo is self-sufficient as a unit of information, unlike a Powerpoint that relies on the presenter (or a video of them) to contextualize and connect the information The basic thrust is to bring the discipline of scientific style article writing into office communications (and avoid Powerpoint anti-patterns in the process).
- philipodonnell 8y agoI too was frustrated with this article. What is a narrative memo? Is there an outline? Examples?
- RobertoG 8y agoWe are just reading the text. Maybe the answers are in the attached Power Point.
- eyjafjallajokul 8y agoAmazon employee here - Here's an overview of how Amazon does "Working Backwards" narratives - https://www.forbes.com/sites/innovatorsdna/2017/08/08/how-does-amazon-stay-at-day-one/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/innovatorsdna/2017/08/08/how-do...
- mwexler 8y agoThat was a good read. Thanks for pointing it out.
- jamesblonde 8y agoThe first few lines are a straight out lie! Alexa was not developed internally at Amazon - it was bought in, on the cheap - https://www.logicalclocks.com/what-is-it-with-european-data-companies/ https://www.logicalclocks.com/what-is-it-with-european-data-... .
- sys_64738 8y agoI think he's right in general about capturing the detail. You must be able to write down succinctly what you're selling before you talk about it to an audience. It's analogous to writing down your design for software before you actually code it. If you can't then something doesn't add up. If you want to produce a bullet point powerpoint from the document then it should be possible to do it in a few hours. But the reverse isn't true.
- jrauser 8y agoI've written documents for Jeff, and IMO, the six-page narrative memo is a key part of Amazon's success. It's so easy to fool both yourself and your audience with an oral presentation or powerpoint slides. With narrative text that has to stand on its own, there is no place for poor reasoning to hide. Amazon's leadership makes better decisions than their competitors in part because they are routinely supplied with better arguments than their competitors. "Writing is nature's way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is." -Dick Guindon, via Leslie Lamport
- SatvikBeri 8y agoThis is now one of the things I screen for at any new job. At my current company, we've banned PowerPoint for any internal communication, and use text for just about everything.
- maxxxxx 8y agoI wish my company did that. Even if you write a document usually they ask for Powerpoint so after a while everything regresses to bullet points on slides.
- fermienrico 8y agoA lot of companies I have worked at use PowerPoints as the ONLY means of documentation. Presenters have slides that cram so much information that they become unstructured glob of textual-visual noise with jpegs, flow charts, long paragraphs and drawing snippets, etc. People have forgotten to write structured documents that logically layout your thoughts.
- nlawalker 8y agoSo, so many people hate reading and writing. They abhor it. Black and white text on a page looks like history class homework. You could strap them to a chair and hold their eyes open and they wouldn't be able to make it through two double-spaced pages. In my experience, one of the most common agendas for a meeting is "here is a document that the author is going to read to you."
- codemac 8y agoA surprisingly effective tip from an Edward Tufte seminar was using 11x17 paper to create a 4 page "booklet". Unsurprisingly non existent from Tufte was figuring out how to apply any of this to my current work culture.
- jrauser 8y agoI've seen a couple companies try to adopt the Amazon-style narrative, and they both failed. I think the only way it can happen is if leadership demands it and is absolutely unrelenting. People will resist at first, but in time (years) they will come around. Some people may have to exit the organization and be replaced for this change to work. Amazon's organization circa 2004 was large and resilient enough to support this kind of change. A random startup might not be able to. There are important norms in Amazon's culture that support this method. Time is always set aside at the beginning of the meeting for people to read the paper. They know that no one will read it before-hand, so they make time in the schedule. Also, the main document is at most six pages, but you can supply an endless number of appendices. This gives people a place to put supporting information that feels too important to cut entirely.
- maxxxxx 8y ago" I think the only way it can happen is if leadership demands it and is absolutely unrelenting. " I should add that the leadership should do it themselves and lead by example. When we introduced Agile the developers were the only ones who went to training while management continued as usual so our Agile quickly devolved into micromanagement. Same for code reviews. It's very important that the more experienced devs closely follow agreed-on coding styles.
- jrauser 8y agoI agree completely. It's also important that the audience can actually tell the difference between good writing and poor writing and give useful feedback. You can't just ask people to write and hope for the best.
- GoodJokes 8y agoLol, it’s pretty easy to game a 6 page document. When you work in an industry rife with buzzwords and jargon everything turns into bullshit. Jeff Bezos turned exploiting workers into its competitive advantage, full stop. Please cease the great man worship. It is so cliche, dull, shallow, embarrassing.
- empath75 8y agoIs there an example of one of these memos online anywhere?
- harshitaisanerd 8y agoHis letters to shareholders? https://www.zachpfeffer.com/single-post/2017/10/21/Links-to-all-of-Jeff-Bezos-Letters-to-Shareholders-1997---2017 https://www.zachpfeffer.com/single-post/2017/10/21/Links-to-...
- gcb0 8y agolove the (intentional?) irony that the first 20 something paragraphs say absolutely nothing besides "bezos like longform narrative, and he wrote it in a very short email once".
- ahartmetz 8y agoThis just gave me a lot of respect for Bezos. Leader type personalities usually can't (be bothered to) write well and often seem to be more doers than thinkers. Bezos has a very clear and pleasant writing style and obviously understands the usefulness and practicalities of deep thinking.
- pixelpp 8y agoYep, they are using it right now to draw attention away from Jeff's naked drama.
- SketchySeaBeast 8y agoWhat part is Jeff trying to draw attention away from? If anything he's been incredibly open and forthright about the entire "drama", which seems to be the exact opposite of what the blackmailing parties want.
- lifeisstillgood 8y agoI think corporations are going to have to learn a lot from Open Source practises - Agile is probably the first in road that "code" is making into the corporate world despite its mutated appearance One of them is discussion over email (ie persuasive long form writing, combined with data driven evidence) The other is of course ... voting
- calebm 8y agoI think writing gives you an incredible edge in life. If you really believe, you can write the story of your life.
- reubenswartz 8y agoI highly recommend making writing part of the interview process if it will be important for the job. Some people sound brilliant when talking, but as others have noted, having to write out the details forces you to organize your thoughts.
- mooreds 8y agoCommit messages count as writing, IMHO.
- deathanatos 8y agoAnd some people are better at it than others. I just watched three to five commits scroll by with subject lines of "updates" and no body … which tells me nothing about why the code is changing, or why this is the right change.
- gnicholas 8y agoIf PPT and even bullet points are disallowed, what about charts/graphs? It would be pretty annoying if every chart/graph had to be described in prose.
- latencyloser 8y agoI'm not sure about Amazon, but we do the memo thing at Jeff's other company, Blue Origin, as well. Charts are fair game and I've used them a few times. I've noticed others at the company use them too, but sparingly.
- otterley 8y agoI work for Amazon. Charts, graphs, and other supporting data are permitted in the appendix, which can be of any length. They are forbidden in the narrative itself, however.
- sandGorgon 8y agoif charts and even data is prohibited, then how do you make a business case for something ?
- yawaramin 8y agoLike otterley said, you put the data in the appendix, and refer to it like a citation. This is standard practice in any technical document already.
- Aeolun 8y agoYou use ‘it is known’ a lot, with a bunch of references to the appendix?
- otterley 8y agoTypically you'd make a succinct verbal statement in the narrative like "customers tell us ____" or "___% of ______ do ______", and show the survey or other relevant data that supports the statement in the appendix.
- kpwagner 8y agoThe emphasis on the word "narrative" is a little odd to me. In the book "The Everything Store", Brad Stone, the author, describes an awkward encounter with Bezos: one of the first questions Bezos asked Stone was "with this book, how are you going to avoid the narrative fallacy." The narrative fallacy basically means crafting stories where there should be none (e.g. interpreting data with a neat reason that seems plausible, while the reason may be completely wrong and is not proven by the data). See Nassim Taleb for more on the narrative fallacy.
- bilater 8y agoThe memo idea is a brilliant idea when Jeff Bezos and his team use it. Unfortunately it has been bastardized by inept middle managers. I saw this firsthand at Amazon. People spending hours debating about spelling errors and sentence phrasing; talking about how a paragraph is going to confuse a hypothetical person who would in reality never read it. Instead of using the memo for what it is meant for...to communicate about your project in a clear way. I saw people spend 45 min on a paper about a product and then 5 min on demoing the actual product. I think the paper applies more in high level strategic meeting and is not a universal panacea for every project you do. But people are not that subtle and its either all papers or nothing.
- cm11 8y agoOf course your last sentence is true. Just hypothesizing, but I imagine the ensuing discussion is the point. Perhaps the discussion took place because: - There's disagreement... in which case, this is a needed conversation. It probably should happen before the meeting, but it's way better to have now than to kick down the road because sentence phrasing seemed beneath us. - There's politics/personality issues... in which case, maybe the conversation isn't enjoyable, but that clash is going to happen at some point. If not this meeting, then the next. One of the larger points going on in this thread is that articulating things forces reality checks—between you and your idea, between your idea and others' ideas, between the team's ideas and reality, etc.
- bilater 8y agoGood points but nowhere close to why this happens most of the time. I can't see how sentence phrasing can cause a whole project to go in a direction it was not intended for. Often times the people most active in these white paper discussions are non-technical people who don't do any actual work rather than running from meeting to meeting who are trying to get in their two cents to show how valuable they are. At the end of the day - this creates an atmosphere for the PM to shine and the Engineer to take a backseat. Maybe it's different in more technical parts of the company but this is the dynamic in Finance/Legal/HR.
- Papirola 8y ago
- zeofig 8y agoNarrative and brutal exploitation, a winning combo!
- nkh 8y agoI'm curious to how much time is allocated for writing these six pagers? Both total leadtime and actual writing time. Anyone with experience have any insight?
- sonnyblarney 8y agoThis point in particular ... a properly written '6 page' anything can take a week of planning, writing and editing to produce! I think we need more details!
- zacherates 8y agoBezos discusses how long they take to write in the 2018 Amazon Shareholder Letter [1]: "... they mistakenly believe a high-standards, six-page memo can be written in one or two days or even a few hours, when really it might take a week or more!" [1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312518121161/d456916dex991.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312518...
- sonnyblarney 8y agoI suggest what might be happening has less to do with writing rather than the structured approach required to do such writing. Obviously all of this works for Amazon so that's great, I wouldn't see any reason to change it, but it's probably worth thinking about a little. I do not believe PowerPoint is inherently a bad format, nor do I believe that written is better, moreover, I think a lot can be lost in prose. The reason I believe this is due to some military experience with SMEAC NATO orders format [1]. This format can be used by Corporals on up to Generals, by all NATO forces such that a Polish recruit could sit in on a US General's Orders and effectively understand what is going on. Aspects of SMEAC exist to enable tired and sleep deprived commanders and soldiers to create coherent and complete plans, and to ingest them as well. Little things like: " You must always repeat the mission twice so that any squadies not paying attention have a chance to catch what it is they are meant to be doing." At all levels, the Mission Objective (which is a specific format) is repeated twice. Always. The impetus is twofold: if well trained staff understand the mission objectives, then the rest is 'details' meaning, even if everything falls apart, training and skills can take over so the mission could be achieved. The 'say it twice' is essentially a double affirmation of the objective. Once everyone is on this same wavelength, it's interesting to see how people can become operationally synchronized. My feeling is that a SMEAC-like format for meetings would likely be ideal; something that requires a specific approach, with checklists that force product/technical etc. to contemplate various issues. If this were to be done well, then it could be abbreviated into another format. Another reason I'm just a little skeptical, is that every big movement has a series of behaviours and attitudes that help embolden the koolaid. Amazon started as a book selling company, so in a way, it kinds of makes sense for them to value the 'literary' in some way, and this odd behaviour (which actually does work) helps them differentiate their 'movement' in a material way and reinforce ostensible 'culture'. It's probably worth some further analysis, and maybe some data points as well, because there are many things that make growing companies unique, I wonder if we should just assume those unique things are drivers or just arbitrarily correlated aspects. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_paragraph_order https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_paragraph_order
- arooni 8y agoI realized I want to read all of these shareholder letters from 'Day 1'. Luckily some guy has already compiled them all into one PDF that I just sent to my [Amazon] Kindle. Reading about Amazon on an Amazon device lol. Hope this helps you too: https://medium.com/@austenallred/every-amazon-shareholder-letter-as-downloadable-pdf-4eb2ae886018 https://medium.com/@austenallred/every-amazon-shareholder-le... PS: Have any of you read all of Buffet's shareholder letters? Would those be worth reading from the beginning?
- calimac 8y agoMost who comment did not read or comprehend the narrative. Bozo framed his argument. Nothing more.
- yawaramin 8y agoThe part about actually sitting down and writing out a proposal and finding the challenges with it hits home with me. Over the past year or so I've become (I think!) a little more cautious about things that I claim, whether it's online or in person, especially in a technical context or when carrying out an argument. And I've often found that actually questioning my own claims and then having to go and research them and figuring out whether I can actually make a claim, gives me a better overall understanding of the arguments.