how do you achieve time where you can focus and truly think through problems I do little thinking Retreats so for this is not the only I I can do that all day long I'm very good at focusing I'm very good at um you know I'm I don't keep to a strict schedule like my meetings often go longer than I plan for them to because I believe in wandering I my perfect meeting starts with a crisp document so 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 and so the meeting is about like asking questions that nobody knows the answer to and and and and trying to like wander your way to a solution and um uh because like and that is if when that happens just right it makes all the other meetings worth while it feels good it has has a kind of beauty to it it has an aesthetic Beauty to it and and you get real breakthroughs in meetings like that can you actually describe the the crisp document like this is one of the legendary
aspects of Amazon uh of the way you approach meetings is this the six-page memo maybe first describe the process of running a meeting with memos and meetings at Amazon and blue origin are unusual when we when we get new when new people come in like a new executive joins and they're a little taken aback sometimes because the typical meeting will start with a six-page narratively structured memo and we do study hall for 30 minutes we sit there silently together in the meeting and read take notes in the margins and then we then we discuss and
the Reason by the way we do study you could say I would like everybody to read these memos in advance but 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 at all and they're trying to catch up and they're also bluffing like they were in college having pretended to do the reading yeah exactly it's better just to carve out the time for people so now we're all on the same page we've all read the memo and now we
can have a really elevated discussion and this is so much better from having a slideshow presentation you know a PowerPoint presentation of some kind where there that has so many difficulties but one of the problems is Powerpoint is really designed to persuade it's kind of a sales tool and internally the last thing you want to do is sell you want to again you're truth seeking you're trying to find truth and the other problem with PowerPoint is it's easy for the author and hard for the audience and a memo is the opposite it's hard to write
a six-page memo a good six-page memo might take two weeks to write you have to write it you have to rewrite it you have to edit it you have to talk to people about it they have to poke holes in it for you you write it again it may take two weeks so the author it's really a very difficult job but for the audience it's much better so you can read a half hour and you know there are little problems with PowerPoint presentations too you know senior Executives interrupt with questions halfway through the presentation that
question is going to be answered on the next slide but you never got there where if you read the whole memo in advance you you know I often write lots of questions that I have in the margins of these memos and then I go across them all out because by the time I get to the end of the memo they've been answered that's why I save all that time you also get you know the person who's preparing the memo we talked earlier about um you know group think and you know the fact that I go
last in meetings and that you don't want you know to your ideas to kind of pollute the meeting prematurely um you know the author of the memo is has has kind of got to be very vulnerable they got to put all their thoughts out there and they've got to go first but that's great because it makes them really good and so and you get to see their real ideas and you're not trumpling on them accidentally in a big you know PowerPoint presentation what's that feel like when you've authored a thing and then you're sitting there
and everybody's reading your thing you're like I think it's mostly terrifying yeah like maybe in a good way I think it's a purifying I think it's terrifying in a in a productive way yeah um but I think it's emotionally a very nerve-wracking experience is there a art science to the writing of the six-page memo or just writing in general too the I mean it's really got to be a real memo so it means you know paragraphs have topic sentences that it's verbs and nouns you can't that's the other problem with PowerPoint ver there often just
bullet points and you can you can hide a lot of sloppy thinking behind bullet points when you have to write in complete sentences with narrative structure it's really hard to hide sloppy thinking so it does it it forces the author to be at their best and so you're getting somebody's they're getting somebody's really their best thinking and then you don't have to spend a lot of time trying to tease that thinking out of the person and you've got it from the very beginning so it really saves you time in the long run uh so that
part is crisp and then the rest is messy crisp documents yes and you don't want you don't want to pretend that the discussion should be crisp yeah there's you know most meetings you're trying to solve a really hard problem there's a different kind of meeting which we call weekly business reviews or business reviews they may be weekly or monthly or daily whatever they are but these business review meetings that's usually for incremental Improvement and you're look looking at a series of metrics every time it's the same metrics those me need can be very efficient they
can start on time and end on time
