On writing well
IN his letter to shareholders in 2018, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, shared a business practice that reconsidered the competitive advantage of his company. It’s not technological innovation nor the vast global infrastructure. It’s writing well.
In the last two decades, Bezos has been Amazon’s chief writing evangelist, advocating the art of long-form writing as a motivational tool and idea-generation technique. Before a meeting, business leaders at Amazon are asked to submit a six-page, dense, narratively structured memos. Bezos and the rest of the leaders then often hold a silent meeting, where everyone at the table reads these memos, prior to starting a discussion. This is how the company generates new ideas, how it distributes and shares them, and how it gets support for them from the wider audience.
Despite this glaring example, writing as a skill in the workplace remains underrated. In our world where organizations put a premium on extroverts, and where short video clips attract the attention of consumers, writing well has been associated with journalists and authors. That’s why we see a lot of poorly written emails, advertising copies and corporate communications materials because many organizations and its employees fail to recognize the importance of writing well.
But from the example of Amazon, writing well as a skill should be one of those that organizations should develop among its employees. The value and its advantages are in abundance.
For one, writing organizes your thoughts and helps you think clearly. At Amazon, writing memos forces Bezos’ team to think through their ideas in greater detail which ensures that group discussions are based on the critical review of the relevant ideas, not on mere hypotheses.
This leads to more innovative and coherent ideas as writing removes logical inconsistencies that people put out there. By compelling his leaders to use standardized and rigorous templates where they can write their ideas, Bezos elevates the quality of his team’s thinking and idea generation.
I can attest to this as I use writing in the same manner to organize my thoughts and put them in a coherent framework. Writing regularly in a business column forces me to think through ideas, evaluate them into a framework and get feedback from the readers. It is also a practice in my company to write our thoughts in an email before any meeting so as to have a productive discussion.
Apart from these, writing well allows for efficient communication in an organization. How often do you receive long emails from colleagues or external parties that are incoherent and miss the point? They waste your time, not only in reading through it, but also in making sense of what the message is.
Having well-honed writing skills can help you clearly and efficiently communicate project status, ideas or other important reports to colleagues without spending additional time for clarifications.
To develop your writing skill, take extra time to read and learn from well-written articles and pick up the best practices. You also have to be deliberate in writing down ideas and organizing them before even presenting it to other people. You can also ask for feedback from others to see which areas you can improve on.
A lot of people will probably raise this issue — why do I need to learn to write when there is already ChatGPT available now? It’s true this AI (artificial intelligence) can write for you. But what’s lacking in ChatGPT’s output is context. As of now, only a human writer can put the context of the writing as he or she wants it to be, and in a manner that there’s a “human touch.”
Knowing the principles and practices of writing well in the age of AI will equip anyone with the skill to solidly, and rigorously hone and refine their ideas.
The author is CEO of Hungry Workhorse Consulting, a digital and culture transformation consulting firm. He is fellow at the US-based Institute for Digital Transformation. He teaches strategic management and digital transformation in the MBA Program of De La Salle University. The author may be emailed at rey.lugtu@ hungryworkhorse.com.