The Unprofessional Boy #8
Races, Rainforests, and Reads
Hello, readers.
It’s Tuesday. Tíw’s day. The day of the god Tíw or Týr, whom the Romans equated to Mars: you know, the namesake of the Mars Elon Musk wants to nuke. The god of war. That means —today, at least— there’s no choice but to keep fighting the good fight.
Last Sunday, the crew team had our first real boat race. I, as in practice the week before, rowed bow in an eight. It’s a curious position, because you have a great view of everyone else’s oars, of the rhythm of the boat. It’s important that you stay in sync, of course, that you follow that rhythm and not throw off the direction of the boat, but you have a great deal of information to work with. No one else in the boat can see you, effectively, because there’s no one behind you; it feeds into the meditative quality I described last week, heightens it: the need to intentionally subsume yourself into that pattern is paramount, despite the lower degree of intra-boat scrutiny. So you’re not thinking independently; your every consideration is in mimicry, in adapting to the minor modulations of circumstance. We weren’t entirely in sync, but the other team was far worse; we won, though there’s a lot to work on, as evidenced by my imperfect form and my drying my clothes on a tree.
Later tonight, I’m also representing the Marshall Chess Club in a match against San Francisco’s Mechanics’ Institute— it’s a clash between the two oldest chess clubs in the country. Here’s a little more information; it’s scheduled from 8:30—10:00 EST, if you’re interested in tuning in on Twitch.
With that self-promotion and introspection concluded, let’s fulfill the tagline of this newsletter and maybe get to some actual reading and learning. Specifically, let’s dig into the oft-asked question “how the hell does Jeff Bezos write?” The majority of the articles I’ll be referencing are sourced from Rahul Ramchandani’s blog post Writing Culture at Amazon, which I noted was a great compilation last week.
In short, Amazon is an innovator in the art of communication. The concept of a “two-pizza meeting” —limiting meeting size to a number which can be fed by two pizzas— has gotten a lot of play from mainstream news. Another way to limit wasted time is to make these meetings more effective: to not use PowerPoint and presentations. Instead, the mandate —at all company levels— is for the would-be presenter to draft a narratively driven, comprehensive six-page memo. The meetings are then structured to allow the most focused and efficient informational exchange possible: “typically 15 minutes of silent reading/note taking followed by 30-45 minutes of deep dive questions and clarifications,” as Matthew Tippett says.
I think it’s worth noting that Jeff himself is a tremendously skilled communicator; the article Jeff Bezos: A CEO Who Can Write pulls out the most representative questions from his many shareholder letters. Here’s a link to all those letters in PDF format, if you’re interested. I think that’s why this policy works. If initiatives don’t come from a deep understanding of the problem, but to make change for change’s sake or push an agenda, they fail. It would be easy for this decree to end up analogous to “Christian” rap music, begrudgingly followed by some, mostly ignored. It’s because it’s treated honestly, observed as a genuine thought process from the top down, that employees come away admiring the directive.
The Beauty of Amazon’s 6-Pager is one of those praiseworthy postmortems, and it allows us to understand what concrete issues this mandated writing addresses. After reminding us of the drudgery, office politics, and frustration that plague most meetings, the author paints a picture in which those problems don’t exist. “This is what meetings are like at Amazon,” he writes, “and it is magical.”
A presentation, so the thinking goes, is easy for the speaker: there’s no detailed work in phrasing, no thorough research, no attention put towards fashioning a digestible structure. It’s an ineffective method of conveying information. A memo is thought-out —it must be, by virtue of its existence— and it’s a reviewable document, lowering the barrier to full understanding. One might think that the time spent in its creation is a waste; in fact, it merely means that the reasons for the meeting are internalized and articulated by the party calling it. These benefits mimic the merits of writing I elaborated on last week; they’re twofold, for the writer and reader. A small up-front investment of time forces the decision-making process to run smoothly.
The other tools Amazon uses to make that dense writing communicable (and therefore useful) are narrative and compression. Concision and legibility are consistent qualities of great business writers, and they’re adjectives that I’m trying to work towards despite my hatred for editing, proclivity for semicolons, and affection for run-on sentences. Finding the shortest, clearest ways to communicate an idea —compressing it into the smallest possible space— is something Jeff believes to be extremely important.
Eugene Wei, in his post Compress to impress: “one of his great strengths as a communicator was the ability to encode the most important strategies for Amazon in very concise and memorable forms.” A concrete example, he continues, can be found in Jeff’s first shareholder letter. It’s an “entire philosophy, packed with ideas, compressed into two words. Day 1,” and it’s familiar enough that it likely doesn’t need to be explained further, as often as Jeff hammers it home. That packaging works not only to remind others of goals and principles, but instill them. Wei writes that he “can recite these from memory even now, over a decade later, and so could probably everyone who worked at Amazon those years.”
The antecedent to that quotation is Jeff’s theming of years, “Getting our house in order” being the most famous one, and this tool in particular imbues the short, memorable expression with narrative. The story, the arc he shows the reader, is one that inspires, one with an easily intelligible path. Well-written documents make a meeting; understanding the power of a good story is How Jeff Bezos Turned Narrative into Amazon's Competitive Advantage.
To me, Amazon’s success demonstrates that there’s a lot of space to innovate in these seemingly plumbed areas, and that incumbents gravitate towards inefficient solutions. Maybe, it seems to say, somewhere in these books, there’s an answer, or a trick, or a system superior enough that other factors don’t matter. That’s a tantalizingly dangerous, simplified idea —there are always more pieces of the puzzle than we think— but it’s an important lesson, to realize that these underappreciated, taken-for-granted factors really do have import. That if we buckle down on them, really think about their best implementations, maybe we’ll end up discovering that the bar isn’t all that high.
That’s the zero-day exploit, I think, to make sure it’s never Day Two. To ensure that it’s always the metathesis of the word: Tuesday.
Work
In the future, I’ll be attempting to internalize these insights, and that mindset; one implementation, specifically, will be my work in the brand-new, content-production Nexus Team of my college’s business club the Entrepreneurial Exchange Group. I’ll post any work that goes live— for the time being, here’s a piece I’ve written about Amazon, taking a different, more business-focused approach (in the form of a specific framework I’ve been assigned; please criticize the content, if you choose to write a response.)
I’ve also written a book chapter, which pushed me over my 2018 mark. I’m happy with that.
Links
The podcast episode “Jeff Bezos' Shareholder Letters. All of them.” was thrown up on my Twitter feed (here) as I was writing this piece; I’ve only listened to part of it, but it strikes me as a thoughtful exploration of the ideas above.
[Earmark]Grow the Merry-Go-Round by David Perell is a fantastic piece about the benefits and limitations of cities, the strength and (in the US) drawbacks of transportation, and improving the ecosystems in which people flourish.
If you’re looking for the really long reads, this is the wrong place but I did I recently list a few of my favorites; it might be fitting, then, to complete the
Top Ten: Fictional Books
Worm by wildbow
Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card
Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer
The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien
Watership Down by Richard Adams
Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
The Green Futures of Tycho by William Sleator
The Long Walk by Stephen King
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J. K. Rowling
The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan
I don’t have a book on that compilation above, not yet, but I’m writing things I’d want to read that hopefully someday will make the list. I don’t know whether this newsletter would make the list of my top ten favorites; one day, I hope that it will. Thank you for helping me get it there.
Orion Lehoczky Escobar