In 2004, Jeff Bezos banned PowerPoint from Amazon’s senior leadership meetings in favor of narrative memos, read in silence at the start of each meeting. The idea was that a well-structured and tightly argued memo communicated its ideas in a way that a deck built around bullet points could not. As Amazon moves into the AI era, it is developing internal tools that can help produce polished documents much more efficiently. Its internal AI assistant, Cedric, promises to deliver “six-page narratives in seconds,” according to Kristi Coulter, a former Amazon executive.

But no matter how good Cedric’s outputs are, using an AI tool to trim the traditional writing process down to mere seconds undercuts what made well-written memos valuable in the first place. The memo itself was never the point. What mattered was what writing the memo forced the human to do. As Bezos put it, there is “no way to write a six-page, narratively structured memo and not have clear thinking.” The process, not the output, was the real source of value. 

Bezos wasn’t promoting writing for its own sake. Writing mattered to him because it was a forcing function for rigorous thinking about important decisions. As one Amazon veteran told Coulter, writing the memo forced them to confront their own ideas and clarify what they wanted to say. And this often meant that writers would change their mind several times while writing the narrative.

It is true that building meetings around memos disciplined the readers as well.

Source link