What’s the smartest thing Amazon ever did?

Amazon.com has notched up some massive successes since it began in 1997: Prime delivery, Amazon Web Services, the Alexa device, and Prime Video to name a few.

Even with these achievements, founder Jeff Bezos has talked up an internal, organizational innovation that had made a huge difference to the company.

“The smartest thing we ever did,” Bezos says, was outlaw PowerPoint presentations in meetings. Instead, for the first 30 minutes of a meeting, senior executives are asked to silently read through a 6-page memorandum that one of them has written. Only then is the issue at hand allowed to be discussed.

Because they are so busy, executives tend to pretend they have read documents prior to a meeting, then bluff their way through it. By reading a 6-page memo in real time, Amazon’s top team members are forced to really take in and think about what is being proposed.

For the memo writer, structuring and writing a 6-page narrative memo forces them to really think through their proposal. This can be avoided if they just throw together a few slides with some dot points.

Having a narrative structure does not mean spinning a nice story. It means that you have to provide a logical, sequenced argument to support your idea. You have to lay out your assumptions, but also reveal through logic the enticing endgame that you believe your product or service will make real.

In a private email from 2004, Bezos wrote: “Powerpoint style presentations somehow give permission to gloss over ideas, flatten out any sense of relative importance, and ignore the interconnectedness of ideas.” Sentences and paragraphs enable this clarity. Dot points and slides keep things vague.

Bezos finds it hard to put his finger on what makes a good memo, but everyone knows one when they read it. People make the mistake of thinking a good memo can be put together in a few hours. In fact, the great memos may take weeks, and are the result of sharing with colleagues and multiple edits.

Shawn Callahan, a business storytelling consultant, sees the Amazon 6-page memo as a prediction tool: “the memo draws out the causes and effects of what’s going on, the forces at play, and what other players might do – all so the decision-makers can predict what happens next and choose a course of action.”

Whether you are a giant like Amazon or a small business, you have to stay attuned to societal and business trends while driving technological innovation. You must imagine and create the future while drawing on current resources and capabilities. The in-depth memo is the perfect starting point for this.