Jeff Bezos Turned Narrative into Amazon's Competitive Advantage

I&#x27;ve written documents for Jeff, and IMO, the six-page narrative memo is a key part of Amazon&#x27;s success. It&#x27;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&#x27;s leadership makes better decisions than their competitors in part because they are routinely supplied with better arguments than their competitors.<p>&quot;Writing is nature&#x27;s way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is.&quot; -Dick Guindon, via Leslie Lamport

Article starts out well and then veers off into strange and scattershot coverage of unrelated Amazon factoids.<p>It doesn&#x27;t fully cover the communication principles of the 6-pager. The missing parts are:<p>- 6 pages is the upper limit; the memo can be shorter<p>- 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<p>- You can push extra information into the appendix if needed to convince those looking for more evidence<p>- 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<p>The basic thrust is to bring the discipline of scientific style article writing into office communications (and avoid Powerpoint anti-patterns in the process).

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.

This just gave me a lot of respect for Bezos. Leader type personalities usually can&#x27;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.

I think he&#x27;s right in general about capturing the detail. You must be able to write down succinctly what you&#x27;re selling before you talk about it to an audience. It&#x27;s analogous to writing down your design for software before you actually code it. If you can&#x27;t then something doesn&#x27;t add up.<p>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&#x27;t true.

I realized I want to read all of these shareholder letters from &#x27;Day 1&#x27;. 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:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@austenallred&#x2F;every-amazon-shareholder-letter-as-downloadable-pdf-4eb2ae886018" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@austenallred&#x2F;every-amazon-shareholder-le...</a><p>PS: Have any of you read all of Buffet&#x27;s shareholder letters? Would those be worth reading from the beginning?

A surprisingly effective tip from an Edward Tufte seminar was using 11x17 paper to create a 4 page &quot;booklet&quot;.<p>Unsurprisingly non existent from Tufte was figuring out how to apply any of this to my current work culture.

I 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.

Is there an example of one of these memos online anywhere?

If PPT and even bullet points are disallowed, what about charts&#x2F;graphs? It would be pretty annoying if every chart&#x2F;graph had to be described in prose.

The emphasis on the word &quot;narrative&quot; is a little odd to me. In the book &quot;The Everything Store&quot;, Brad Stone, the author, describes an awkward encounter with Bezos: one of the first questions Bezos asked Stone was &quot;with this book, how are you going to avoid the narrative fallacy.&quot; 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.

The 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&#x27;ve become (I think!) a little more cautious about things that I claim, whether it&#x27;s online or in person, especially in a technical context or when carrying out an argument. And I&#x27;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.

I think corporations are going to have to learn a lot from Open Source practises - Agile is probably the first in road that &quot;code&quot; is making into the corporate world despite its mutated appearance<p>One of them is discussion over email (ie persuasive long form writing, combined with data driven evidence)<p>The other is of course ... voting

I think writing gives you an incredible edge in life. If you really believe, you can write the story of your life.

I&#x27;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?

Narrative and brutal exploitation, a winning combo!

love the (intentional?) irony that the first 20 something paragraphs say absolutely nothing besides &quot;bezos like longform narrative, and he wrote it in a very short email once&quot;.

I suggest what might be happening has less to do with writing rather than the structured approach required to do such writing.<p>Obviously all of this works for Amazon so that&#x27;s great, I wouldn&#x27;t see any reason to change it, but it&#x27;s probably worth thinking about a little.<p>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.<p>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&#x27;s Orders and effectively understand what is going on.<p>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.<p>Little things like: &quot; 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.&quot;<p>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 &#x27;details&#x27; meaning, even if everything falls apart, training and skills can take over so the mission could be achieved. The &#x27;say it twice&#x27; is essentially a double affirmation of the objective.<p>Once everyone is on this same wavelength, it&#x27;s interesting to see how people can become operationally synchronized.<p>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&#x2F;technical etc. to contemplate various issues.<p>If this were to be done well, then it could be abbreviated into another format.<p>Another reason I&#x27;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 <i>book selling</i> company, so in a way, it kinds of makes sense for them to value the &#x27;literary&#x27; in some way, and this odd behaviour (which actually does work) helps them differentiate their &#x27;movement&#x27; in a material way and reinforce ostensible &#x27;culture&#x27;.<p>It&#x27;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.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Five_paragraph_order" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Five_paragraph_order</a>

Yep, they are using it right now to draw attention away from Jeff&#x27;s naked drama.

While 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.<p>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