Elliott Botterill explains Amazon's six-page memo requirement for new ideas. Writing forces executives to flesh out thinking and expose weak proposals before they waste time in meetings. Better-developed ideas get approved faster and execute more successfully.
The trillion-dollar memo system, which is from Jeff Bezos and Amazon, where all their executive team, before they present any new idea in any meeting, they create a memo. And the memo is just a 6-page document that covers 6 things, and it clearly outlines, uh, the person's thinking around an idea. And this works well for several reasons, none more so than the act of writing a memo will make you realize if your idea is good or not. And so a lot of people, you start to flesh this out and do the thinking and immediately realize, actually, that's silly, that's not going to work, it's done, it's dead. But once you complete the memo, you now have got much more fleshed out thinking that's been stress tested, and therefore your idea is going to be much more likely to be, A, well received by your team, but also succeed if you decide to follow through with it.
