(2017-08-17) Wei Compress To Impress

Eugene Wei: Compress to impress. Even with modern communication infrastructure, however, any modern CEO deals with amplification and distortion issues with any message.... I hadn't read Jeff Bezos' most recent letter to shareholders until today, but it was just what I'd expect of it given something I observed in my seven years there, which are now more than a decade in the rear view mirror. In fact, one of reasons I hadn't read it yet was that I suspected it would be very familiar, and it was. The other thing I suspected was that it would be really concise and memorable, and again, it was.

This problem is made more vexing by not just the telephone game issue but by the human inability to carry around a whole lot of directives in their minds

Despite learning this lesson early on, most people in leadership positions still underestimate just how pervasive this problem is. This is why any manager or executive is familiar with how much time they spend on communicating the same things to different groups in the organization.

At scale, maintaining strategic alignment feels like an organizational design problem, but much of the impact of organizational design is centered around how it impacts information flow. (strategic context)

Thankfully, humans have developed ways to ensure the integrity of messages persists across time

One of these is to encode you message in a very distinctive format

Perhaps supreme among these rhetorical forms is verse

I never chatted with Bezos about this, so I don't know if it was an explicit strategy on his part, but one of his great strengths as a communicator was the ability to encode the most important strategies for Amazon in very concise and memorable forms. (mantra)

Take one example "Day 1." I don't know when he first said this to the company, but it was repeated endlessly all my years at Amazon. It's still Day 1.

He then jumps into some of the strategies to fend off Day 2. The first is also familiar to everyone at Amazon, and many outside Amazon: customer obsession. Plenty of companies say they are customer focused, but Jeff articulates why he chose it from among the many possibilities he could have chosen for the company, giving it a level of oppositional definition that would otherwise be lacking.

Jeff doesn't even bother explaining what Day 1 is at the start of his letter to shareholders, so familiar is it to all followers of the company. Instead, he just jumps straight into talking about how to fend off Day 2

The second strategy to ward off stagnation is a newer codification (at least to me) of a principle he hammered home in other ways when I was there: resist proxies.

Here's a good test of how strategically aligned a company is. Walk up to anyone in the company in the hallway and ask them if they know what their current top priority or mission is. Can they recite it from memory?

It was so important to him that we even had company-wide contests to come up with the most memorable ways to name our annual themes

What's particularly impressive is that Jeff is so brilliant that it would be easy for him to state his thinking in complex ways that us mere mortals wouldn't grok. But true genius is stating the complex simply.

Ironically, Jeff employs the reverse of this for his own information inflows. It's well known that he banned Powerpoint at Amazon because he was increasingly frustrated at the lossy nature that medium.

Rhetoric can get a bad name because some lump it in with other language tricks like those used in clickbait titles.

Most everyone in tech is familiar with Marc Andreessen's "software is eating the world" and Stewart Brand's "information wants to be free."

As a hyper intelligent person, Jeff didn't want lossy compression or lazy thinking, he wanted the raw feed in a structured form, and so we all shifted to writing our arguments out as essays that he'd read silently in meetings. (Amazon Meeting Memo)

These themes were concise and memorable ways to help everyone remember the most important goal of the company that year.

Go back even further, and there are dozens of examples of Bezos codifying key ideas for maximum recall. For example, every year I was at Amazon had a theme

The next principle is the one that needs the most work: embrace external trends.

The last principle I also remember from my Amazon days: high-velocity decision making.