Jeff Bezos Interview on Six Pager Memo
Lex Fridman podcast: “Can you describe the crisp document”
The conversation between both of them on the Six Pager Memo starts at ~2 hours towards the end of the podcast.
Jeff Bezos: My perfect meeting starts with a crisp document. The document should be written with such clarity that it's like angels singing from on high. I like a crisp document and a messy meeting. The meeting is about asking questions that nobody knows the answer to and trying to wander your way to a solution. When that happens, it makes all the other meetings worthwhile. It feels good. It has a beauty to it, an aesthetic beauty, and you get real breakthroughs in meetings like that.
Lex Fridman: Can you actually describe the crisp document?
Jeff Bezos: Those meetings at Amazon and Blue Origin are unusual. When a new executive joins, they're sometimes taken aback because a typical meeting starts with a six-page, narratively structured memo. We do a study hall for 30 minutes, sitting silently together in the meeting to read. I love this. We take notes in the margins, and then we discuss. The reason we do this is that people often don't have time to read the memos in advance. They come to the meeting having only skimmed the memo or not read it at all, trying to catch up and bluffing like in college. It's better to carve out time for people to read. Now we've all read the memo, and we can have a really elevated discussion. This is so much better than having a Slideshow or PowerPoint presentation, which can be very persuasive but has many difficulties.
Jeff Bezos: PowerPoint is a sales tool. Internally, the last thing you want to do is sell. You're truth-seeking. PowerPoint is easy for the author but hard for the audience. A memo is the opposite. Writing a good six-page memo might take two weeks. You have to write, rewrite, edit, talk to people about it, and have them poke holes in it. For the audience, it's much better. Senior executives often interrupt PowerPoint presentations with questions that would be answered later. If you read the whole memo in advance, you find that many questions get answered by the end of the memo.
Jeff Bezos: That's why it saves time. The author of the memo has to be very vulnerable, putting all their thoughts out there first. But that's great because it makes them really good, and you get to see their real ideas without accidentally trampling on them in a PowerPoint presentation.
Lex Fridman: What does it feel like when you've authored a thing and then you're sitting there, and everybody's reading your thing?
Jeff Bezos: I think it's mostly terrifying.
Lex Fridman: Yeah, like maybe in a good way.
Jeff Bezos: It's like a purifying terror, terrifying in a productive way. But it's emotionally a very nerve-wracking experience.
Lex Fridman: Is there art or science to the writing of the six-page memo, or just writing in general to you?
Jeff Bezos: It's got to be a real memo. That means paragraphs with topic sentences, verb, the noun. You can hide a lot of sloppy thinking behind bullet points in PowerPoint. When you have to write in complete sentences with narrative structure, it's hard to hide sloppy thinking. It forces the author to be at their best. You're getting their best thinking. Then you don't have to spend a lot of time trying to tease that thinking out of the person.
Lex Friedman: That part is crisp, and then the rest is messy.
Jeff Bezos: You don't want to pretend the discussion should be crisp. Most meetings are about solving a really hard problem. There are different meetings, like weekly business reviews, that are for incremental improvement. You're looking at the same metrics each time. Those meetings can be very efficient, starting and ending on time.
