Unleashed: The Unapologetic Leader's Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You

by Frances Frei

Pick any mode(s) of communication you want and certainly play to your strengths. Every year Jeff Bezos writes a long letter to his shareholders in which he reinforces the pillars of Amazon’s strategy. It’s addressed to investors who own a piece of the company but clearly written for every stakeholder in his orbit. Bezos is a clear, persuasive writer, and these annual letters are a great example of “deeply/simply” communication. In his 2017 shareholder letter, Bezos reminded everyone of his internal ban on slide presentations in favor of long-form, six-page, double-sided memos that Amazon executives draft to pitch new ideas to each other. Memos are drafted collaboratively and circulated without the authors’ names, to minimize politics. Strategy meetings at Amazon start with everyone reading every word of a “six-pager” and then engaging with the ideas in what one Amazon alumnus recalled as “the most efficient and exciting meetings I had ever attended for any company.”24 When was the last time you described a meeting that way? Efficient? Exciting? Bezos has called this practice as the smartest thing he ever did, since the discipline of crafting sentences and paragraphs forces deeper thinking.25 We tend to think of writing as a tool for influencing others, but writing is also the greatest tool for sorting out our own thoughts that human beings have invented.26 If you want to create a better strategy, we advise writing about it early and often. Start with a blank page and give ...