I’d start by going back in time and place you where Jeff Bezos was when all entrepreneurs started out. At the beginning, Jeff worked out of a simple office building with a handful of employees and he’d be hands on for everything. The very first customer support emails Jeff wrote or co-wrote. He reviewed the work and thought about all the policies. He could direct the team and set the tone and pace.
That works just fine when you’re an early stage company and there’s just a few of you and you can do a standup each morning and its hands on. But guess what, that breaks once you grow like a weed and you found product-market fit. You look around and you have a team of 100, 250, 500, and you realize there’s all sorts of meetings around you and you can’t be a part of every decision.
To me what’s so remarkable and notable, is that Jeff sought to figure out ways to inject his lens of thinking into all those meetings, and then sought a set of processes that would reinforce the way he would think about or do the work itself.
That was a nice episode of a16z podcast, Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More. It interviews two long-time Amazon executives who wrote the new book, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon.
Jeff Bezos thought hard about how to actualize the concept of mission command in the business context. There’s a really nice list of rules they follow, so get the book, but one is that meetings revolve around narratives rather than PowerPoints.
The problem is that people slowly talk through PowerPoints and it takes forever to get to the punch line. Nothing is well structured for discussion and decision making. Moreover, sometimes the best orators can convince you to follow a bad plan, and terrible orators fail to convince you of a great plan — there’s a bias.
Formulating thoughts into a 6-page narrative, including core tenants, data, and courses of action, is a much more succinct way to convey information. The writing process is also better at integrating complex ideas.
At the beginning of a meeting, the first 20 minutes are nothing but people reading the prepared paper. People are busy, after all. Collaborative tools can allow folks at the meeting to insert comments or questions and give time for the presenter to prepare responses. The remaining 40 minutes of a meeting can then move to the highest valued questions and decisions.
Government leaders could learn a lot from these practices. It’s not just a question of style. Narratives provide higher quality information and more specific instructions from leaders than PowerPoints. Narratives provide a competitive advantage:
A good narrative is very data based and fact based document. Writing good narratives is way harder than making a good PowerPoint. Honestly, a lot of companies don’t do this because it’s hard.
… A former former colleague of mine, Derek Anderson who is Chief Financial Officer at Snap, he made the observation once that Amazon has a narrative information multiplier. It’s a strategic advantage the company has over other companies because their executives are seven to eight times better informed about what’s happening in their company, and they’re better able to give super granular, specific feedback to those teams. [emphasis added]
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