What You Do Is Who You Are: An expert guide to building your company’s culture

by Ben Horowitz

If you have to talk about something complicated, you want to load the data into people’s brains as quickly as possible so you can have an intelligent, facts-based conversation about the business decision you’re trying to make. So, say you’re meeting to figure out pricing for a new product, you’ve got to talk about the cost structure, how much is fixed, how much is variable, and then there might be three different pricing models, each with pros and cons. That’s a lot of information. Now, you can sit and listen to someone pitch all of this information, but most people don’t have the patience to pay attention long enough to be effective in absorbing all of this data and it typically takes too much time. There’s been a lot of research done on this that shows that most people’s brains can absorb new information several times faster and more effectively by reading information versus listening to it. Also, asking people to present their plans in written format forces them to express their ideas with a deeper level of detail.