A case for the Amazon 6-pager

7 pages on the 6-pager

Typically, Big Tech companies are known for product innovation, not for innovation in management. Google and Microsoft don't seem to have spent much time worrying about the right organizational structure or management routines till they got too big and unwieldy.

Jeff Bezos was an exception to this rule. He brought the same thoughtful approach to his management routines that he did to his product development. That is why I read Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon with interest. The book describes six “mechanisms” that constitute “Being Amazonian”.

These mechanisms seem to involve a lot of writing. Amazon, more than most other companies, seems to expect clear writing and patient reading from its employees. By my count, three out of the six mechanisms require it. The Bar Raiser hiring process expects the interviewers to provide detailed feedback, including near-verbatim reporting of interview questions and answers. The Working Backwards mechanism describes the famous PR/FAQ approach to product development.

The 6-pager

Then of course there is the Amazon 6-pager. The 6-pager approach to meetings has fascinated me ever since I learnt of it. Here is how it works: Bezos has banned the use of PowerPoint, indeed slide decks of any kind at his companies. Amazonians are to eschew bullet points in favour of complete sentences. What would have been condensed into a PPT is now to be expanded and written in narrative form. To ensure that it is read, the first 20 minutes of a hour-long meeting are devoted to silently reading the document. The remaining time is spent in asking questions that they have noted down while reading. The six page limit comes from the fact that humans can comfortably read a page in three minutes, which makes 20 minutes sufficient for the study hall portion of the meeting. For 30 minute meetings, the book helpfully informs us, we should cut the document down to three pages.

Most people outside Amazon find this approach to meetings weird. It also sounds time-consuming. The 6-pager goes through multiple reviews and is rewritten several times before the meeting. This may be required for important meetings and feasible for those involving the senior leadership, but wouldn’t it take a lot of effort to do so for every meeting? Wouldn’t you just end up having more meetings to create the 6-pager?

But when I ask insiders at Amazon, they do confirm that this 6-pager approach is followed for all meetings regardless of level. I was therefore curious to understand the argument that the book puts forward. It does a reasonable job of it. To ensure that I understand it well, I’ll make a case for it in my own words.

The two attacks on PowerPoint

Criticisms of the typical corporate slide deck come from two opposing directions. The first one comes from people who write books on delivering great presentations. These are usually people whose job involves giving talks of some kind - doing sales pitches, motivational speaking or TED talks.

If you follow their advice, you will have almost no content on your PPTs. You'll have pictures and the occasional word. The slides are meant to serve as visual aids to emphasise the message that is being delivered by your talk. Putting content on the slides distracts your audience from your speech. Reading directly from the slide is a terrible sin. If you need to give out reading material, the advice is to distribute handouts after the talk.

All this is excellent advice if you are preparing to go on stage and deliver a talk. But that is not the typical use case for the corporate user when he fires up PowerPoint. He is creating a 4-blocker for a project status update, preparing for a design review or presenting a product roadmap. There is no point telling him to keep the content on the slide to a minimum and show only images. The purpose of the meeting is to review the content he is to project on screen, not for the audience to listen to his captivating talk. His talk is to explain the deck. His slides are not visual aids for his speech.

However, the slide deck is designed as if he is trying to follow the traditional advice. But of course he can't, as he has to put actual content on the deck. His deck will be dinged by PowerPoint gurus for being too busy and by Edward Tufte for not being busy enough.

According to Tufte’s essay “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint”, the PPT is a poor way to communicate complex information. It has too little density of information. A PowerPoint deck is relentlessly linear and is a poor tool to capture the complex inter-relationships among ideas.

The economist Tim Harford is a defender of PowerPoint. But he inadvertently got to the heart of the problem when he attempted to answer Tufte’s criticism. His response was on the lines of “Tufte is right that a presentation is relentlessly linear. But so is speaking. If his problem is with oratory, then he should say so!”

Tufte may not have said so, but Amazon did. They figured out that delivering a verbal presentation was a poor way to communicate information. The slide deck does not make it better. Even the busy slides contain crisp bullet points that are incomprehensible unless accompanied by a verbal explanation. The presenter spends a lot of time on the design of the slides. Ideally, the slides should be organized so that each covers one coherent topic, but what is to be done if one slide becomes too busy and one too sparse?

The slides win. The layout is rearranged so that they look well-balanced, neither looking too busy nor containing too many empty spaces, never mind the flow of the presentation.

Then he prepares to deliver the talk. The nuance that was excised from the slides is now partially credited back to the speaking notes.

When done well, the presentation is effective. But even when done well, the speech is ephemeral. The slide deck from which all complete sentences have been stripped out is permanent. It is the slide deck that is sent out by mail.

Too often though, the presentation is not done well. This may be because he has spent too much time on the slide deck and too little in structuring his talk. Or it may be because most people aren’t naturally good at speaking. It could also be because people aren’t good at listening and following along. The slide deck makes it worse by being busy enough to distract the audience from hearing what is being said, but not content-rich enough to be read independently. Even if it is content rich, the noise from the presenter is not a conducive environment to reading.

The traditional advice is to not make the slide too busy, as it will distract the audience from hearing the speaker. Amazon’s insight is that this can be solved by doing away with the speaking altogether, put the content from your slide deck and the speaking notes into a document with complete sentences.

Objections

This essay is titled “A case for the Amazon 6-pager”, which should give you a clue as to my views. Even if it weren't, you'd expect a newsletter writer to favour writing over speaking as a way to organize and convey complex thoughts. You, my readers, may have self-selected yourselves into a group that agrees with me, for the same reason. Nonetheless, let me anticipate and answer some objections.

It takes too long to write and edit a 6-pager

Why should it? To deliver a presentation well requires a slide deck, preparing speaking notes, and for very important ones, rehearsals. Preparing a slide deck includes wasteful and counterproductive activities such as cutting down sentences into bullet points, rearranging the boxes etc. Compared to this, a 6-pager should take less time and be more effective. It will, of course take longer than the typical badly prepared and delivered presentation, but it should save time in questions and follow up meetings, and result in higher quality outcomes.

People don't read

This is true. We all have the experience of sending a well-written document to our boss, only to hear “Can you walk me through this?” The reason we hear this is that recipients have the bitter experience of plodding through too many poorly written documents. Asking for a verbal summary is a time-saver. But most documents are poorly written because writing well is an acquired skill that no one bothers to acquire, because no one will read what we write anyway.

Breaking this vicious cycle requires cultural change. A lone warrior who decides to write 6-pagers instead of preparing slide decks will probably fail. Amazon too faced this problem. The reason Bezos introduced the 20 minute reading time during the meeting is that when he asked participants to read the material before the meeting, they failed to do so and tried to bluff their way through. Through a top-down mandate, Amazon was able to introduce a culture of writing clearly and a culture of reading what is written together. That this may not be possible unless you are Amazon is a valid point against the 6-pager.

People don’t read, take 2

I believe that writing well and reading carefully are skills that can be acquired as easily as speaking and listening. Naturally, I may be biased and this may not be true. Amazon’s success at this may be due to very careful hiring and selecting for such people. If this is really unique to Amazon, it may not be possible to replicate this generally.

Brainstorming is a good thing. It is the back and forth of meetings that produces good results, not the presentation!

Please go ahead and have the back and forth, as Amazon does, after everyone reads the 6-pager. Or if you want to have a pure brainstorming meeting without a presentation, go ahead and have it too. Produce a 6-pager as the output of your meeting. Either way, writing complete sentences will add value.

It’ll take many meetings to prepare the 6-pager!

Perhaps, but those will be productive meetings with a tangible output, and you should end up saving time overall.

A 6-pager is better than a slide deck when you have sufficient time, but worse when you don’t

This is a subtle point, and may be valid. It took me two hours to write this essay, spread over multiple days. If I have done a good job of this, those two hours are better spent than preparing a slide deck and speaking notes on the same topic. If I had 1.5 hours, my writing would be of worse quality, but it would probably still be better than the same 1.5 hours spent preparing a slide deck.

What if I only had 30 minutes? The 6-pager I prepare would be terrible. In fact, I don’t think I would be able to fit it to six pages. It takes longer to write concisely. But the quick slide deck and notes that I would hurriedly put together, while it would be worse than ideal, would be better than an essay that I put together in 30 minutes. Combined with some decent speaking skills, I would be able to salvage the presentation. With a poorly written 6-pager, everyone is confused after the 20 minute reading time and the meeting is a disaster.

I got ChatGPT to draw this for me

Revisiting The Cognitive Style

I read the “The Cognitive Style…” long back and was unconvinced by it. The essay was too polemical; had come to bury PowerPoint rather than give it a fair trial. The centrepiece of the essay is his analysis of the NASA Columbia space shuttle disaster slides. My belief was that these slides were prepared and presented to senior management at NASA by the team who analysed whether the insulating foam that had come off during launched warranted further investigation and action. Their conclusion was not a matter of concern proved a tragic error in hindsight. But my view was that these were a group who had the expertise and had done the required analysis in depth and had come to a conclusion. Their report, in whichever format it was presented, would have led the management to the same conclusion. Even in a written report, they would have emphasised the points in favour of their preferred conclusion and hidden the dissenting points in plain sight in footnotes.

The other PPT it analysed was a parody. Someone had created a corporate deck for the Gettysburg address to make fun of the slide deck, and predictably, it was funny. But surely, one can create suitably inspiring PowerPoint slides for an inspiring speech?

In retrospect, I was wrong about Tufte’s Columbia analysis. The emphasis should not have been on “PowerPoint”, but on “The Cognitive Style”. It is true that if you need to verbally present some conclusions to management, you can’t avoid the ills of PowerPoint and a written report won’t make it better, but the problem here is verbal presentation in the first place. The related problem is that it is PPTs all the way down. The cognitive style where bullet points are used all over the place instead of complete sentences does indeed lead to poor analysis and decision-making at all levels.

But Tufte is still wrong about the Gettysburg address. A skilled user of PowerPoint can indeed develop an awesome presentation to accompany the speech. Tufte’s essay is a missed opportunity and a good example of how poor writing and poor thinking go hand-in-hand. If he had dispassionately analysed when slide decks should and should not be used, it would have had much greater impact. The takeaway should have been that good PPTs can be very effective when the information flow is primarily one way - in speeches, trainings, infographics, etc. When you need to have a deep-dive, analytical kind of meeting where a lot of information is reviewed and debated over, writing and reading complete sentences is better than speaking and hearing bullet points.

The same message comes through from his example of cancer survival rates. If I was asked to analyse it and present some conclusions, I would have been able to present them in a nice slide deck with some charts that would be better looking than the parodies Tufte comes up with. But they would still hide what I didn’t want to show, and miss what I missed. A detailed written report would make it easier for me and for my reviewers to catch errors in my thinking and tougher for me to hide what I wanted to hide, but only if the reader was willing to put in effort to do the thorough reading required.

Bullet point conclusions

• Writing is hard, but so is thinking

• Good writing leads to and flows from clear thinking

• I should make it a habit to write more

• Introducing writing in organizations will be harder because of the cultural shift to reading that is required

• PowerPoint is best used in one-way communication

• Bullet points can summarise key messages

• Like the ones here