Jeff Bezos Replaced PPT Slides With Six-Page Memo
Under Jeff Bezos’ leadership, Amazon built a famously rigorous “reading culture” centered around drafting six-page memos, according to Business Insider. These densely packed documents became a signature of how business decisions, new ideas, and major product strategies were communicated at one of the world’s most influential companies, as per the report.
Steve Huynh, a former principal engineer at Amazon, shared that, “I spent on the order of like 1-4 hours every day reading while I was a principal engineer,” and added, “What an amazing culture that I think that almost every other company should replicate if they could,” as quoted by Business Insider.
He shared that, “I got really really good at just reading these documents to get up to speed,” and explained that reading enough six-page memos taught him to express himself in the same format, according to the report.
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Amazon’s Internal Communication Built on Memo Culture
Huynh joined Amazon in 2006, back when the company had only recently turned a profit and Bezos was still CEO, according to the report. Huynh highlighted that the e-commerce giant’s approach of writing and reading the 6-page memos was part of its “secret sauce” and revealed that Amazon employees’ writing was often constrained to the format during his tenure at the company, whether it was a business strategy, system design, or press release, as reported by Business Insider.Bezos had started this culture of memo-writing from the top down, and the Amazon founder insisted on dense, direct memos in 10-point font, as reported by Business Insider. In Bezos’ 2017 letter to shareholders, he had written that “we don’t do PowerPoint,” instead opting for these six-pagers, and added, “Not surprisingly, the quality of these memos varies widely,” as quoted in the report.While speaking on the Lex Fridman Podcast in 2023, Bezos shared that Amazon employees read these memos together before meetings and also explained why he didn’t ask employees to read the memos in advance, according to Business Insider.
He said, “The problem is people don’t have time to do that, and they end up coming to the meeting having only skimmed the memo, or maybe not read it at all,” and added that, “They’re also bluffing like they’re in college, having pretended to do the reading,” as quoted in the report.
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Andy Jassy Pitched AWS with 30 Drafts of Six-Page Memo
During a 2017 talk at the University of Washington, his successor and Amazon’s current CEO, Andy Jassy, who has worked at the firm since 1997, described writing his own memo when first pitching what would become Amazon Web Services, as reported by Business Insider.
Jassy recalled, “I remember this six-page narrative, we called it a vision doc. We asked for 57 people, which felt so ballsy at the time. I was so nervous, I wrote 30 drafts of this paper, and Jeff didn’t blink,” as quoted in the report.
Memo Culture Lives On
Even under his own leadership, Jassy has continued the culture of memo-writing, reported Business Insider. In his 2024 letter to shareholders, he had revealed that only a six-page allotment made the memos “much easier for the audience to engage with and ask the right ‘why’ questions,” as quoted in the Business Insider report.
FAQs
Who created Amazon’s memo culture?
Jeff Bezos started it, and Andy Jassy has continued it as CEO, as per the Business Insider report.
Can other companies copy this culture?
Huynh says it’s possible, but it requires top-down discipline and consistency.
