Quote from Ndubuisi Ekekwe on April 20, 2018, 6:42 AM

There are many things you can learn while reading the richest man on earth. Amazon's Jeff Bezos is now a zen-master and has largely supplanted Warren Buffett in this annual verbose of shareholder letters as I noted yesterday. One of the most fascinating aspects of Amazon's operations is memo writing. It turns out that Amazon likes memos more than PowerPoint slides.

Bezos goes on to explain how high expectations apply to a staple of Amazon operations: The company memo.  Amazonians do not come to meetings armed with PowerPoint presentations or any other kind of slide presentation, but with “narratively structured six-page memos,” which attendees read silently at the start of the meeting. He writes:

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The great memos are written and re-written, shared with colleagues who are asked to improve the work, set aside for a couple of days, and then edited again with a fresh mind. They simply can’t be done in a day or two.

This will be a tough order for many companies. Imagine the challenge of asking a staff to develop a six-page memo. In some companies, that could be the work. But if you have gone through a top technical program where writing is part of the training, it would not be scary.

I do believe only the people at the strategy/leadership levels in Amazon would be writing these memos. The thesis is that when you write you are forced to think more critically. That is the biggest value from this process. It is working for Amazon and we need to pay attention. Indeed, when you consider the efforts, time and the critical thinking that go into memos, you would agree that PowerPoint allows people to get a pass.