10 ms·

I'm in love with this idea. The information density (in terms of time) of a well written memo is much greater than that of a presentation. Many 30 minute pres

I'm in love with this idea. The information density (in terms of time) of a well written memo is much greater than that of a presentation. Many 30 minute presentations could be read in 5 minutes. The written word is also a great equalizer. A "presenter" can be judged based on their content rather than their public speaking ability.

ekianjo 14y ago
6 pages is a bit too long, though. In a famous Ranked 1st Consumer Goods company (i'll let you guess which one) all team memos to management are only allowed to be of a single page. This is really hard to adapt to it at the beginning but decision making is so much faster.
- _pmf_ 14y ago
  > This is really hard to adapt to it at the beginning but decision making is so much faster. Yeah. God forbid that anyone making decisions should have to deal with actual details; in the worst case, this would actually make them have to think.
  - ekianjo 14y ago
    It does not mean it does not have details, but you have to sort out the details that matter for management. That's how they can make decisions instead of drowning them in pages and pages of information.
    - agent00f 14y ago
      While it is a valid goal to cut down on irrelevancies (like empty lingo), it's the exact the wrong mentality to consider detail the enemy of good decisions. Good decision making stems from understanding a problem comprehensively, not via often misleading generalities. I would even question whether it's possible to accurately summarize anything more trivial problems in a single page; the sort of menial issue that doesn't warrant a widely-distributed memo in the first place.
      - ekianjo 14y ago
        Then your doubts are not limited to 6 pages either. How do you determine the right number of pages then? 6 pages may be summarizing thousands of pages of information for all you know. How is this enough ? In the end what really matters CAN and SHOULD be summarized, and if additional details are needed there is always a place for sharing and discussion with management.
        agent00f 14y ago
        I was remarking on this point: >In a famous Ranked 1st Consumer Goods company (i'll let you guess which one) all team memos to management are only allowed to be of a single page. This is really hard to adapt to it at the beginning but decision making is so much faster. I'm sure less info makes decisions faster, but this seems rather the opposite of a virtue. Eg. GWB "the decider".
        ekianjo 14y ago
        It does not mean there is less info. It means the info is more dense, more concise, well prepared and summarized and straight to the point. It's not because you have 6 pages that it's a guarantee to avoid putting 5 pages of garbage or unnecessary prose.
        mpyne 14y ago
        It also means you can, by definition, not put more than 1 page of details into a given issue. As usual the Navy/DoD seems to have this figured out: BLUF: "Bottom-Line Up Front": Concise description of the problem, recommended solution w/out corroborating detail. FYSA: "For Your Situational Awareness": This may help the boss understand the problem better, but it isn't something they need to know or understand right now. FYI: "For Your Information": Boss, you need to read this before making your decision. If you can't trust your underlings to use each appropriately so that you can triage what you have time for, then you either need new underlings or you need to take responsibility for training them better. A 1-page limit on decisional memorandums is just as artificial as a 64-KB limit on code page size for executable programs.
  - chaz 14y ago
    Cynicism not necessary. It depends on the culture of internal communications and the purpose of the memo. Are these weekly update memos on activities to be discussed at the staff meeting? Is it asking for permission on something? Is it just informational? Receiving dozens of these a day can be daunting, and forcing limits on length force articulation of what's new and a clear question being asked. Sounds very basic, but lots of memos are poorly written. Google and other companies are known for very brief updates (may be called memos in your organization), as short as a single line, sent per week. No need to send multiple pages of details: http://blog.idonethis.com/post/16736314554/silicon-valleys-productivity-secret http://blog.idonethis.com/post/16736314554/silicon-valleys-p... These memos are different from the author's post, which is really not about memos, but rather an alternative means of presenting all of the information required to get to the key discussion in a meeting. I don't think is anyone is suggesting that 6 pg emails should be the memos, and something is wrong if the 6pg emails are replacing decks that are being sent around via email.
  - wisty 14y ago
    Presumably management can (and should) drill down. I suppose it stops middle managers from covering their asses with excuses like "Yeah, I said there was a risk of it all exploding, in paragraph 3 of Appendix II". If they find out something important was left out, they know there was an attempt to hide it.
  - stephencanon 14y ago
    One page suffices to give an immediate “yes” or “no” for the vast majority of decisions. If more details are required, you could just ask for them, or even call a meeting.
- amirmc 14y ago
  > "6 pages is a bit too long, though..." It does depend on the structure of those 6 pages. If I had to do these regularly I can easily imagine settling on a (largely) routine format, e.g 1st page is overview, 2nd page is problem detail, 3rd page is solution/implementation, 4th page risks/mitigation blah blah blah. Note that the article says the first 30 minutes of the meeting is reading the memo. It doesn't take 5mins to read a page so there's ample time for people to formulate an opinion/questions before discussion actually starts (based on enough info in the memo). This is already an order of magnitude better than any powerpoint talk I've been in where people just shoot from the hip.
  - rschmitty 14y ago
    Isn't it an indicator when you are defending 6 pages not being too long with a "blah blah blah" already?
    - bentcorner 14y ago
      5th page: Links/resources uhh.. 6th page: "Questions?" page with a cute picture
      - saraid216 14y ago
        A detailed diagram or a slightly extended discussion of a topic will easily get you another page.
    - stfu 14y ago
      I guess the 6 page idea comes from getting more substance from these presentations. Sure you can threw around 1-page bulleting lists all day, but if you want to include stats, references, screenshots, visualizations and have some reading-friendly formatting, the 6 page look about right.
    - amirmc 14y ago
      Not in the slightest. I just didn't want to spell out each heading (I just threw out the ones obvious to me). If I'd said "etc" instead of "blah" would you still have picked on it? (I sometimes use those interchangeably when speaking). In any case, the actual structure I'd use would evolve over time, based on my experience of such meetings.
- smackfu 14y ago
  So do they write their memos in a word processor or something, to get a page count? Most of our "memos" are just emails.
- beat 14y ago
  Back in the day, President Reagan insisted that all decisions he needed to make be given to him in the form of a one page memo with a yes/no checkbox. We made fun of him for being stupid back then, but now I appreciate the wisdom of it. If he needed to know more, he could always ask, but a one-page yes/no decision forced some efficiency. Of course, the effectiveness of this approach depends a great deal on the quality of your staff.
- sib 14y ago
  They don't have to be 6 pages at Amazon (and the discussion starts after everyone's done reading, not after a prescribed 30-minute period). Oftentimes what is requested is a 2-pager. However, even the 6-page ones are not full of fluff; they're usually packed with data and analysis. Fluff tends to get pulled out pretty aggressively in favor of more information that's been requested sometime during the drafting and review process. By the time a document gets to Jeff, many eyes have seen it.
lifeguard 14y ago
It has been my extensive experience that anyone above mid-level manager will ONLY read a power point -- ie a summary, a graph, and a couple of bullet points. Never a email longer than four sentences and never, ever a report. Maybe meetings are different?
- davros 14y ago
  Its worse than that. In many companies, a slick powerpoint presentation weighs far more than thoughtful analysis. I've done the experiment and presented the same recommendations based on the same logic in two ways. The concise email got a 'good idea we should think about that' - the powerpoint three weeks later (same words, nothing in the business had changed) got a 'brilliant work we need to drop everything and do that now'. These are smart and capable people too. They're just somehow got this deep bias about only pretty powerpoint could be important.

ekianjo 14y ago

6 pages is a bit too long, though. In a famous Ranked 1st Consumer Goods company (i'll let you guess which one) all team memos to management are only allowed to be of a single page. This is really hard to adapt to it at the beginning but decision making is so much faster.

_pmf_ 14y ago
> This is really hard to adapt to it at the beginning but decision making is so much faster. Yeah. God forbid that anyone making decisions should have to deal with actual details; in the worst case, this would actually make them have to think.
- ekianjo 14y ago
  It does not mean it does not have details, but you have to sort out the details that matter for management. That's how they can make decisions instead of drowning them in pages and pages of information.
  - agent00f 14y ago
    While it is a valid goal to cut down on irrelevancies (like empty lingo), it's the exact the wrong mentality to consider detail the enemy of good decisions. Good decision making stems from understanding a problem comprehensively, not via often misleading generalities. I would even question whether it's possible to accurately summarize anything more trivial problems in a single page; the sort of menial issue that doesn't warrant a widely-distributed memo in the first place.
    - ekianjo 14y ago
      Then your doubts are not limited to 6 pages either. How do you determine the right number of pages then? 6 pages may be summarizing thousands of pages of information for all you know. How is this enough ? In the end what really matters CAN and SHOULD be summarized, and if additional details are needed there is always a place for sharing and discussion with management.
      - agent00f 14y ago
        I was remarking on this point: >In a famous Ranked 1st Consumer Goods company (i'll let you guess which one) all team memos to management are only allowed to be of a single page. This is really hard to adapt to it at the beginning but decision making is so much faster. I'm sure less info makes decisions faster, but this seems rather the opposite of a virtue. Eg. GWB "the decider".
        ekianjo 14y ago
        It does not mean there is less info. It means the info is more dense, more concise, well prepared and summarized and straight to the point. It's not because you have 6 pages that it's a guarantee to avoid putting 5 pages of garbage or unnecessary prose.
        mpyne 14y ago
        It also means you can, by definition, not put more than 1 page of details into a given issue. As usual the Navy/DoD seems to have this figured out: BLUF: "Bottom-Line Up Front": Concise description of the problem, recommended solution w/out corroborating detail. FYSA: "For Your Situational Awareness": This may help the boss understand the problem better, but it isn't something they need to know or understand right now. FYI: "For Your Information": Boss, you need to read this before making your decision. If you can't trust your underlings to use each appropriately so that you can triage what you have time for, then you either need new underlings or you need to take responsibility for training them better. A 1-page limit on decisional memorandums is just as artificial as a 64-KB limit on code page size for executable programs.
- chaz 14y ago
  Cynicism not necessary. It depends on the culture of internal communications and the purpose of the memo. Are these weekly update memos on activities to be discussed at the staff meeting? Is it asking for permission on something? Is it just informational? Receiving dozens of these a day can be daunting, and forcing limits on length force articulation of what's new and a clear question being asked. Sounds very basic, but lots of memos are poorly written. Google and other companies are known for very brief updates (may be called memos in your organization), as short as a single line, sent per week. No need to send multiple pages of details: http://blog.idonethis.com/post/16736314554/silicon-valleys-productivity-secret http://blog.idonethis.com/post/16736314554/silicon-valleys-p... These memos are different from the author's post, which is really not about memos, but rather an alternative means of presenting all of the information required to get to the key discussion in a meeting. I don't think is anyone is suggesting that 6 pg emails should be the memos, and something is wrong if the 6pg emails are replacing decks that are being sent around via email.
- wisty 14y ago
  Presumably management can (and should) drill down. I suppose it stops middle managers from covering their asses with excuses like "Yeah, I said there was a risk of it all exploding, in paragraph 3 of Appendix II". If they find out something important was left out, they know there was an attempt to hide it.
- stephencanon 14y ago
  One page suffices to give an immediate “yes” or “no” for the vast majority of decisions. If more details are required, you could just ask for them, or even call a meeting.
amirmc 14y ago
> "6 pages is a bit too long, though..." It does depend on the structure of those 6 pages. If I had to do these regularly I can easily imagine settling on a (largely) routine format, e.g 1st page is overview, 2nd page is problem detail, 3rd page is solution/implementation, 4th page risks/mitigation blah blah blah. Note that the article says the first 30 minutes of the meeting is reading the memo. It doesn't take 5mins to read a page so there's ample time for people to formulate an opinion/questions before discussion actually starts (based on enough info in the memo). This is already an order of magnitude better than any powerpoint talk I've been in where people just shoot from the hip.
- rschmitty 14y ago
  Isn't it an indicator when you are defending 6 pages not being too long with a "blah blah blah" already?
  - bentcorner 14y ago
    5th page: Links/resources uhh.. 6th page: "Questions?" page with a cute picture
    - saraid216 14y ago
      A detailed diagram or a slightly extended discussion of a topic will easily get you another page.
  - stfu 14y ago
    I guess the 6 page idea comes from getting more substance from these presentations. Sure you can threw around 1-page bulleting lists all day, but if you want to include stats, references, screenshots, visualizations and have some reading-friendly formatting, the 6 page look about right.
  - amirmc 14y ago
    Not in the slightest. I just didn't want to spell out each heading (I just threw out the ones obvious to me). If I'd said "etc" instead of "blah" would you still have picked on it? (I sometimes use those interchangeably when speaking). In any case, the actual structure I'd use would evolve over time, based on my experience of such meetings.
smackfu 14y ago
So do they write their memos in a word processor or something, to get a page count? Most of our "memos" are just emails.
beat 14y ago
Back in the day, President Reagan insisted that all decisions he needed to make be given to him in the form of a one page memo with a yes/no checkbox. We made fun of him for being stupid back then, but now I appreciate the wisdom of it. If he needed to know more, he could always ask, but a one-page yes/no decision forced some efficiency. Of course, the effectiveness of this approach depends a great deal on the quality of your staff.
sib 14y ago
They don't have to be 6 pages at Amazon (and the discussion starts after everyone's done reading, not after a prescribed 30-minute period). Oftentimes what is requested is a 2-pager. However, even the 6-page ones are not full of fluff; they're usually packed with data and analysis. Fluff tends to get pulled out pretty aggressively in favor of more information that's been requested sometime during the drafting and review process. By the time a document gets to Jeff, many eyes have seen it.

lifeguard 14y ago

It has been my extensive experience that anyone above mid-level manager will ONLY read a power point -- ie a summary, a graph, and a couple of bullet points. Never a email longer than four sentences and never, ever a report. Maybe meetings are different?

davros 14y ago
Its worse than that. In many companies, a slick powerpoint presentation weighs far more than thoughtful analysis. I've done the experiment and presented the same recommendations based on the same logic in two ways. The concise email got a 'good idea we should think about that' - the powerpoint three weeks later (same words, nothing in the business had changed) got a 'brilliant work we need to drop everything and do that now'. These are smart and capable people too. They're just somehow got this deep bias about only pretty powerpoint could be important.