Last night in NYC, @eugenewei talked about how companies think.
â2003 to 2004 was my last year at Amazon.
I joined a skunkworks project inside the company. It was a small team & we were working on something new, not related to retail.
It was a pet project for Jeff BezosâŠ
Jeff came to us and said, âWe're trying out something different now.
This is how we're going to work every week.
Youâre going to write a memo. Youâre going to write down an essay for me. Then you're going to print it out for me.
Then youâre going to come to me, and I'm going to sit there and read it and mark it up.
Every week I wrote memos and essays. Then Jeff tore me apart face-to-face.
When I wasn't stressing over the revisions, I was thinking about why Jeff wanted to us to write memos & essays.
I was always fascinated by Jeff as a CEO.
Of all the CEOs I've worked for, he thought most about how Amazon runs, independent of the business it is in.
He was focused on how Amazon operated as an organization. How could everyone make it operate better?
Jeff was a stickler for how the company made decisions and how everyone communicated with each other
I was familiar with the power of the written word
It wasn't that I didn't appreciate writing. But Jeff was treating writing as the highest form of thinking and decision making
The Greek etymology of the word technology is âtechniqueâ and âlogos.â
At the time, technique meant the art and skill of making something. Logos is discourse.
Technology is a discourse about art and skill and how things are made.
Here I was, writing memos about a product or service we would make in the future.
This is a pure form of writing.
We had an idea that our discourse would lead to something better than if we did it another way.
When I left Amazon, I didnât know if our project would ever launch.
But it did launch. It's what we know today as Amazon Web Services.
Ever since then, Iâve thought about the power of writing. At its deepest level, writing is a technology that can profoundly affect our lives.
Humankind is old, but writing is very young.
Some people estimate Homo sapiens are 300,000 years old.
Writing was invented around 3500 BCE, so it's only been around for 5000 to 6000 years, a fraction of the time that humans have been around.
It's a drop in the ocean.
Because weâve all grown up in a literate, writing-driven society, we often assume everythingâs always been this way.
But in the early days, writing was a specialized craft for few people.
With the invention of the Greek alphabet, for those first 300 years, if you wanted something written, youâd find a writer and commission them to write for you.
But youâd have no idea what they were doing.
It would be the same as if you went to a contractor and had them build your house or renovate your bathroom
Most people don't have an expectation today you can build your own house
Back then writing was the same way
There was no expectation you could write anything on your own
Every new medium imitates the previous medium. Human history was an oral culture up until writing, and the first writing retained a lot of elements of orality.
When writing started to get democratized, around the time of Plato, Plato's dialogues were structured as a conversation
In books like the The Canterbury Tales, there's often a person inside the story, telling the story, or the narrator is often the character inside the story, because humans were used to words and speech being something that only existed between two people.
Walter Ongâs âOrality and Literacyâ is a classic text on the transition from oral culture to writing culture.
Walter calls writing, âThe greatest technology mankind has ever invented.â
With the benefit of hindsight, we now see how writing shifted everything.
It led to the rise of interiority: the ability to get inside people's heads.
Prior to writing, characters in orally recited poems were often known for one quality or feature.
In The Iliad, Achilles is described by the same set of adjectives. He was furious. In The Odyssey, Odysseus is crafty.
Without writing, people had to memorize long lists.
They needed mnemonics. Sometimes the sun is a radiant orb. Other times a glowing ball.
Unlike the spoken word, writing supports three levels of embedded thought.
The reason it's able to do this is because it allows the reader to back scan. You don't have to remember in the moment. You scan back if you forget something.
This expands your mental cache.
For certain types of books and authors, it's hard to listen to the audiobook version.
For some writers, itâs hard to hold all of it in your head.
The degree to which we can back scan text is a huge part of what allowed humankind to scale.
Jeff pushed toward a written culture at Amazon because writing is suited for abstract and analytical thought.
Without writing, we would not have today's systems of law, math, science & philosophy.
Writing was a hugely important invention in the history of how we as a species think, perceive the world, and perceive each other.
Recall is better when people handwrite notes because handwriting is slow.
Handwriting is 1/10th the speed of talking. When you are taking notes, youâre processing.
Youâre compressing language so you can keep up with the stream.
This compression process is a part of recall.
Writing had a profound effect on the TV industry. After I left Amazon, I went into filmmaking and film school. I spent time in Writers Rooms seeing how creative things were made.
The TV industry is an industrial process.
In TV, there are rounded characters. Characters in earlier eras were defined by one feature.
If you compare Achilles to Oedipus, you see a profound shift. Oedipus is fleshed out with an inner life.
The idea of Oedipal Syndrome speaks to something interior.
Once we can put our thoughts onto paper, our interior life becomes exists outside of ourselves. The birth of television was driven by the idea of a rounded character. Narratives also came from writing.
In the early days of oral culture, when people recited epic poems, they jumped around from one episode to the next.
Many people know the term in media res. Starting in the middle of a story.
Star Wars started in Episode IV.
They were already chased by the Empire. In epic poem days, when someone recited a poem, they started in the middle because there was no idea of a long linear story.
Early television was like this.
If you watch TV shows from the 1950s and 1960s, and even up through the 80s and 90s, many shows were episodic.
Theyâd jump around. One week's episode had nothing to do with the previous episode. TV was shown weekly, and no one could record it.
It's as if a bard were reciting each episode in a pub.
People couldnât be demanded to remember the characters from a previous week.
Then we got recorded media. VCRs. DVRs. DVDs. VHS tapes. The internet. This changed the nature of shows. You can't start The Sopranos or Game of Thrones on Season 4, Episode Five and have any idea who the people are and whatâs happened since the beginning.
Most shows get the most viewers in their first episode.
Breaking Bad had few viewers in the first season. Then it came out on DVD. Then it was syndicated on Netflix.
The number of people who watched it grew over time.
Recording allows the complexity of stories to scale. Thatâs what writing allowed humans to do with thinking.
And this led to a feedback loop:
Once we had more complex stories, people demanded more shows to binge.
But how does Hollywood produce binge-worthy shows at scale? In the early days of television, show episodes were written by one person, and that obviously doesn't scale.
But producing television shows is an industrial process.
In the 1950s, Hollywood invented the âWriters Room.â They needed five people to write shows because the episodes were scattered. They had to keep track of mythology and multiple thread lines.
All Writers Rooms are trying to solve the same thing: how to make the story seem like it came from one person.
We don't tend to think of creative work as an industrial process, but itâs no less an assembly line process than building an automobile.
At Amazon, Jeff was thinking about the same thing. He said, âWe need to think at a higher level as a company.â
How people think and talk to each other inside a company determines what the company can do.
Jeff wanted what writing did for mankind to happen within Amazon.
Jeff would sometimes say, âI just did an all-hands meeting. I told everyone what we have to do this year.
Then he'd ask people in an elevator, âWhat do you think is important?â
And they didnât remember.â
Jeff would be in a meeting with his direct reports and VPs.
Heâd say, âAlright, we've made this decision. I want you to go tell all your teams what we decided.â
The leader of that team would come back and present and people wouldnât get the message.
Jeff believed something was broken in the process of running companies through meetings.
Writing has fidelity of information. It has permanence oral culture and meetings donât.
In a writing culture, CEOs donât have to count on direct reports to interpret their words for others.
Writing also has efficiency of distribution.
At Amazon, Jeff realized the company was bottlenecked by his availability. He couldnât be everywhere all the time. Writing allowed him the scale the company.
He didnât have to be anywhere. He could write notes.
âThe problem with PowerPoint culture,â Jeff said, âis people make decisions based on the charisma of the speaker, not on the quality of analytic thought.â
He knew he was guilty of the same thing himself.
In a non-written culture, the memory of the company is stored in the brains of people communicating verbally.
Companies like that rely on Old Man and Old Woman Syndrome: the people who were around when a decision was made.
The Old Man and Old Woman have to be in the room.
That leads to a conservative company.
The old person will say, âWe already tried that, and it didn't work.â
Innovative companies favor people who are thereâŠinnovating.
Amazon is not a perfect company.
One reason is writing as a technology has strengths and weaknesses.
Product people and business leaders need to match the medium to the problem, and writing has problems as a medium.
Writing was great for Amazon Web Services because memos served as documentation for services.
But thereâs another model at a different successful company that happens to be good at integrated hardware and software.
In Creative Selection, Ken Kocienda writes about presenting a slide deck to Steve Jobs about electronic keyboards.
Steve said, âI donât not want to see this presentation. Go make me a prototype. I want to play with it and I'll tell you if the keyboard is ready.â
Apple is a prototype-driven culture. They think in prototypes.
In oral culture, hearing is believing.
In writing culture, seeing is believing.
At Apple, user testing is believing.
Think about every company in tech: the way they think and make decisions, and how it influences what they're good at as a company and what they're bad at as a company.
The gap between writing and the experience of using something is so severe that Amazon is always constrained.
No one thinks about Amazon as a great visual design or industrial design company.
Amazon thinks and decides in writing. Apple thinks in prototypes.
Maybe Google thinks in software. Maybe other companies think in spreadsheets. Maybe companies think in graphs.
Spotify uses the Socratic method.
They impose a process on oral culture to make it more efficient and make the right decisions.
This is the lesson I want to impress on you:
when you think about a problem, think about what's the medium thatâs going to close the gap.
How do you get to the point where you have the information to make the right decision?
At work and in your personal life, writing helps you prototype your ideas.
When you put things on paper. you can spin your ideas around and look at them from different angles.
That makes you a better thinker, and it makes companies stronger.
Thinking about writing as a technology helps you incorporate it more into your life.
When you put your thoughts on paper, you can examine them as independent things outside of yourself.
You get them out of your head and then they have a life of their own.
Eugene delivered this talk at the Thesis Festival in NYC
The festival featured many wonderful thinkers & writers, and it was organized by @danshipper, @TheAnnaGat, and the @every and @interintellect_ teams.
Huge thanks to all involved! đ
cc: @shl @anthilemoon @itsurboyevan