A new executive at Amazon walks into a meeting, and nobody gets up to present. Instead, everyone gets a six-page memo. For about thirty minutes the room is silent. People read, and make notes in the margins. Then the discussion starts.
New people, Jeff Bezos has said, are “a little taken aback.” He calls it study hall.
The rule behind it goes back to an evening in 2004. At 6:02 p.m. on June 9, 2004, Bezos sent an email in a thread titled “No powerpoint presentations from now on at steam.”“Steam” reads as the S-team, Amazon’s name for its senior leadership team. His message began: “A little more to help with the question ‘why.’”
What he wanted, he explained, was well-structured narrative text. Bullet points typed into Word would be just as bad as PowerPoint. Then he gave the reason: “The reason writing a good 4 page memo is harder than ‘writing’ a 20 page powerpoint is because the narrative structure of a good memo forces better thought.” Slide decks, he went on, give people permission to gloss over ideas and lose track of how they connect.
Bezos says he would rather people read the memos before the meeting. It doesn’t work. People don’t have time, so they come having skimmed it, or not read it at all, and try to catch up. “And they’re also bluffing like they were in college having pretended to do the reading.” So the reading moved into the meeting itself.
That flips who does the hard work. PowerPoint, Bezos said in 2023, is “easy for the author and hard for the audience. And a memo is the opposite.” In his 2017 letter to shareholders, he wrote that weak memos usually come from people who think a six-page memo can be done in a day or two, or even a few hours. “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.” A great one, he wrote, probably takes a week or more.
The readers get something back. In a slide presentation, Bezos says, senior executives interrupt halfway through with a question the next slide would have answered. Reading a memo, he writes questions in the margins, then crosses them out, because by the last page they have been answered.
The silence also keeps rank out of it for a while. Everyone forms a view from the same pages, alone. Bezos says he always speaks last in meetings, because when he goes first even strong-willed people start to wonder whether they were wrong. By Amazon tradition, he wrote, the author’s name never appears on the memo. It comes from the whole team.
Somebody still wrote it, though. Lex Fridman asked Bezos what it feels like to have written the thing and then sit there while everybody reads it.
“I think it’s mostly terrifying.”
