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The 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 A

The 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 ago
Of 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 ago
  Good 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
cargo cult in action

cm11 8y ago

Of 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 ago
Good 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

cargo cult in action