The Bezos Blueprint, page 2
Bezos shares traits with Isaacson’s other subjects: a passionate curiosity, a fervent imagination, and a childlike sense of wonder. According to Isaacson, Bezos also has a “personal passion” for writing, narrative, and storytelling. Bezos connects a deep interest in communication and a love of the humanities to his enthusiasm for technology and instinct for business. “That trifecta—humanities, technology, business—is what has made him one of our era’s most successful and influential innovators.”9
I agree with Isaacson because I’m often asked a similar question: Who’s the world’s best business communicator?
In my book The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs, I called the Apple cofounder the world’s best corporate storyteller. In Talk Like TED, I featured TED Talks as a platform to celebrate the world’s best public speakers. But when I’m asked to name the world’s best business communicator, one name stands out above all others: Jeff Bezos.
48,062 Words
Bezos is a masterful communicator, according to former Amazon executives I’ve interviewed. These leaders—many of whom have started their own successful companies—often cite the annual Amazon shareholder letters as models of business writing and communication. Some have suggested that the Bezos letters should be taught at business schools because the lessons they offer apply to leaders in any field.
Bezos personally wrote twenty-four letters from 1997 to 2020. The letters contain 48,062 words. I analyzed and scrutinized every one. I dissected and inspected every sentence. I grokked and grasped every paragraph. Few business leaders use metaphor as skillfully as Bezos. He built flywheels to power Amazon’s growth. He planted seeds that grew into massive business enterprises. He created two-pizza teams, explained why failure and invention are inseparable twins, and hired missionaries over mercenaries. And those metaphors are just the tip of the iceberg.
Jeff Bezos isn’t Ernest Hemingway, but his mission is not to write the next great American novel. Both writers, however, share something in common: Although their topics are complex, their writing is simple and accessible to most readers. Simplicity matters. According to a study in the Harvard Business Review, “Simplicity increases what scientists call the brain’s processing fluency. Short sentences, familiar words, and clean syntax ensure that the reader doesn’t have to exert too much brainpower to understand your meaning.”10
One of the most remarkable lessons you’ll learn from the shareholder letters is that writing is a skill anyone can learn and sharpen over time. As Amazon grew larger with each year, Bezos grew as a writer with each letter. Most of the letters that rank lowest in quality and clarity came in the first few years after Amazon’s IPO, while the highest-quality writing appears throughout Amazon’s second decade of being a public company. The last letter that Bezos wrote, in 2020, ranks higher in nearly every objective measure of quality than his first letter in 1997. Did I mention that writing is a skill you can sharpen over time?
Day One isn’t a strategy; it’s a mindset. In his first shareholder letter in 1997, Bezos wrote that today is “Day 1” for the internet and Amazon.com. For the next two decades, he used the catchphrase as a metaphor for creating and sustaining a culture of innovation no matter how large a company becomes. Amazon started with a big idea and a small team. As Amazon grew into a massive enterprise of more than 1.5 million employees, Bezos made sure it kept the heart and spirit of a start-up. Always learning. Always improving.
The Day One mindset isn’t about the skills you failed to learn yesterday; it’s about learning new skills to avoid failing in the future. Day One will set you up to succeed for what promises to be the most transformative decade in human history.
This book is divided into three parts. In part 1, you’ll set the foundation, learning to write with the “clarity of angels singing.” You’ll learn how to harness the power of persuasion by understanding the persuasive power of the written word. You’ll find out why strong writing skills are more essential than ever. You’ll discover that the road to the top is paved with the fewest words. You’ll find out why Bezos and other innovative leaders use simple words to explain complex things. And you’ll find out how a deliberately chosen metaphor fueled Amazon’s innovation and helped it survive the dot-com crash. You will also learn:
Why persuasive writing and engaging presentations start with the big idea.
How the active voice energizes your message.
Why 1066 was a pivotal year in the history of the English language and what it means for today’s business leaders.
Why leaders who simplify ideas aren’t dumbing down their content; they’re outsmarting the competition.
How to use metaphors and analogies to educate your audience and explain your ideas.
What great presentations have in common with song hooks that get stuck in your head.
In part 2, we’ll examine the elements of building a story structure to move your readers and listeners to action. Once you know exactly why Bezos banned Powerpoint, what inspired him to do it, and what he replaced it with, you’ll be empowered to think differently about crafting your own story. And rest easy—you can still use PowerPoint. The difference is you will no longer rely on presentation slides to tell your story. Instead, you’ll use presentations to complement the story you tell.
You’ll also hear from former Amazon executives who worked closely with Bezos to introduce new and effective communication tactics that Amazonians follow to this day. You’ll see how one of those changes—written narratives—fueled Amazon’s growth and sparked many products and services that directly impact your life. In addition, you’ll learn:
How a simple, time-tested storytelling structure holds the secret to creating indelible presentations and irresistible pitches.
How to adopt Amazon’s “working backwards” strategy to pitch bold ideas.
Why you need to identify an origin story and learn to tell it.
Why Bezos and other creative leaders read far more books than their followers, and how their reading habits make them extraordinary public speakers.
Part 3 is about sharing your plans and delivering the message. You’ll learn how Bezos played the role of repeater in chief to build a team of inspired missionaries. You’ll discover the tactic that Bezos and other new persuaders use to make data and statistics memorable, understandable, and actionable. I’ll explain why great communicators are made, not born. In addition, you’ll find out:
How you can develop your communication delivery by focusing on three variables.
How to articulate a short, bold vision that aligns and inspires teams.
How a simple brain hack will unleash creative ideas.
Why three is the most persuasive number in communication.
In this part, you will also find communication tools and templates like the Gallo Method that I’ve introduced to CEOs and leaders at the world’s most admired brands—including senior executives at AWS, Amazon’s giant cloud division that allows businesses to rent computing, storage, and networking capabilities. The method will teach you to build a visual display of your story on one page, a message that you can share in fifteen minutes or as little as fifteen seconds.
WIN OVER HEARTS AND MINDS
When I was writing this book, I had a unique opportunity to speak to the U.S. Army Special Forces (the Green Berets) at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The Green Berets are globally recognized as an elite fighting force: brave, smart, and superbly trained. Their motto is to “free the oppressed” by prioritizing humans over hardware. That means the Green Berets are well armed, but as warrior-diplomats, persuasion is their weapon of choice. Their mission is to win over hearts and minds.
These unique warriors are always looking for new and innovative ways of thinking. I learned that soldiers with an entrepreneur’s mindset are ideal candidates for the Special Forces. A successful mission requires small teams of creative thinkers and problem solvers who can quickly gain the trust of people who live in different countries, quickly adapt to different cultures, and speak in different languages.
The tactics you’ll learn in this book resonate with elite military professionals because written and oral communication skills are essential to leadership. Team leaders must excel at skills such as delivering clear and concise presentations, applying the rule of three, writing in the active voice, telling engaging stories, and identifying the one thing the commander needs to know.
Communication and leadership skills are more critical today than at any time in human history for three reasons. First, your manager, customers, peers, and everyone else you need to influence are bombarded daily by an explosion of data and information. They need strong communicators to cut through the noise, set priorities, translate complexity into actionable advice, and to clarify and condense important content.
Second, as I mentioned earlier, the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the trend toward remote work and virtual meetings. The pandemic triggered “the Great Resignation,” when the U.S. economy saw an unprecedented number of people quitting their jobs. As I was writing this book, a Microsoft study found that 41 percent of workers were considering quitting or changing professions. Changing your job or starting a company requires exceptional communication skills to stand out or attract partners. Remote collaboration is more effective when written communication and virtual presentations are clear, concise, and specific.
Third, while you might enjoy the flexibility of remote work, it increases the competition for coveted jobs. Job seekers are no longer competing with candidates who live near the company. Hiring managers can choose talent from anywhere in the world. Those who can speak, write, and present effectively will stand out and get ahead.
Here’s the good news. Although the tools we use to communicate have changed, the human brain has not. Once you understand how your listeners and readers consume information in person or in a remote setting, your ability to engage them will soar—and so will your career.
If Day One is a metaphor for having a beginner’s mind, always looking for opportunities to learn and grow, what does Day Two look like? According to Bezos, Day Two is “stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death.”11
Few people can afford to be complacent when it comes to improving their skills. We all want to avoid that slow, painful decline that Bezos imagines. “And that is why it’s always Day One,” Bezos adds with emphasis. Learn the tactics in this book and you won’t decline. You’ll rise.
One of Amazon’s Leadership Principles is to Think Big. Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy, says Bezos. Day One leaders dream big and have mastered communication skills to inspire others. By picking up this book, you’ve committed to joining those leaders. By adopting the strategies in this book, you’ll unlock your ideas and unleash your potential.
With every chapter, you will grow in confidence. With every chapter, you will acquire the necessary skills to step into a bigger, bolder, stronger future. Today is Day One on the road to building that future. But as Bezos reminds us:
It’s always Day One.
Part I
SET THE FOUNDATION
1
SIMPLE IS THE NEW SUPERPOWER
Anytime you make something simpler and lower friction, you get more of it.
—Jeff Bezos, 2007 letter to Amazon shareholders
Jeff Bezos majored in theoretical physics at Princeton. He felt confident about his ability to handle the major’s demanding coursework. After all, he’d been the valedictorian of his high school class. For two years, he cruised along, receiving A-pluses in most of his classes.
At that point, Bezos was proud of the fact that, out of one hundred students who had entered the program, only thirty remained. The number was about to shrink again, only this time, Bezos would be among those leaving. A roadblock appeared in his junior year, one that would change the direction of his life and the future of the internet.
Bezos and his roommate, Joe, were enrolled in a quantum mechanics class. They were stumped as they tried to solve a partial differential equation, or PDE. A PDE, by definition, is “an equation which imposes relations between the various partial derivatives of a multivariable function.” Bezos was good at math, but the problem left him perplexed.
After three hours of getting nowhere, Bezos and Joe had a better idea.
“Let’s ask Yasantha, the smartest guy at Princeton,”1 Bezos suggested.
They walked to Yasantha’s room and asked him to take a stab at it. Yasantha thought about it for a short time and calmly said, “Cosine.”
“What do you mean?” Bezos asked.
“That’s the answer. Let me show you.”
Yasantha wrote three pages of detailed algebra to demonstrate how he had arrived at the answer.
“Did you just do that in your head?” Bezos asked incredulously.
“No. That would be impossible,” said Yasantha. “Three years ago, I solved a very similar problem, and I was able to map this problem onto that problem, and then it was immediately obvious that the answer was cosine.”
It would be a turning point in Bezos’s life. “That was the very moment when I realized I was never going to be a great theoretical physicist,” Bezos recalls. “I saw the writing on the wall, and I changed my major very quickly to electrical engineering and computer science.”
Years later, Yasantha was thrilled to learn that the richest person in the world had called him the smartest guy at Princeton. Yasantha posted a tweet that read: “You would not have Amazon if it weren’t for me, since Jeff Bezos would have gone on to do physics, and the world would be a different place.” Bezos wasn’t the only one in that Princeton dorm room to change history. If you have an iPhone or Samsung phone, you’re using a chip or technology that Yasantha helped build. Footnotes are replete with stories.
The decision to switch majors worked out well for Bezos. In 1986, he graduated with the highest academic honors in computer science and electrical engineering. Nearly a quarter century later, Bezos was invited to deliver the commencement address at his alma mater. The students graduating in the Princeton class of 2010 were among the brightest in the country. Four years earlier, Princeton had received a record number of applications, granting admission to just 10 percent of the students who applied.
On May 30, 2010, Bezos, a supersmart billionaire, gave a commencement speech to supersmart Ivy League graduates, speaking to them in words fit for a seventh grader. Bezos delivered a profound message in simple language, making the speech an instant hit. National Public Radio called it “one of the best commencement speeches, ever.”
In the rest of this chapter, you’ll learn how Bezos and other successful leaders simplify complex information, why they consider the ability to simplify a competitive advantage, and what steps you can take now to make simple your superpower.
YOU’RE NOT DUMBING DOWN THE CONTENT, YOU’RE OUTSMARTING THE COMPETITION
Bezos told the 2010 Princeton class, “What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift; kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy—they’re given after all. Choices can be hard. In the end, we are our choices.”2
Six years after his speech at Princeton, Bezos revisited the theme of taking pride in your choices, not your gifts. “This is something that’s super-important for young people to understand, and for parents to preach to young people. It’s really easy for a talented young person to take pride in their gifts: ‘I’m really athletic,’ or ‘I’m really smart,’ or ‘I’m really good at math.’ That’s fine. You should celebrate your gifts. You should be happy. But you can’t be proud of them. What you can be proud of is your choices.”3
Did you work hard? That’s a choice.
Did you study hard? That’s a choice.
Did you practice? That’s a choice.
“The people who excel combine gifts and hard work, and the hard work part is a choice,” Bezos said.
Bezos’s commencement speech consisted of 1,353 words, 88 sentences, and registered a “readability score” of grade 7. Readability is a measure of writing quality. The score tells you how hard it is for the average reader to understand a piece of text. In this case, the score concludes that Bezos’s Princeton commencement speech is likely to be understood by a reader who has at least a seventh-grade education (age twelve).
The readability score was originally created in the 1940s by Dr. Rudolf Flesch, a scholar and evangelist for simple, uncomplicated prose. Flesch isolated the elements that make a passage hard or easy to read. His test was based on the average length of sentences and words, among other variables. “Reading ease” is measured on a scale of 1 to 100. The higher the score, the easier it is for readers to understand your writing. For example, a score of 30 is “very difficult” to read. A score of 70 is “easy,” and a score of 90 or above is “very easy.” Newspapers and publishers who adopted the system after its introduction in the late 1940s saw their readership rise by 60 percent.
J. Peter Kincaid, a scientist and educator, worked with Flesch in the 1970s to make the formula even easier to interpret. Together, they converted readability scores into grade levels. The Flesch-Kincaid test examines the number of words in a sentence, the number of syllables per word, and the number of sentences written in the active versus passive voice, an important writing concept we’ll examine in chapter 3.
If you’re writing for a broad audience of adults, what grade level should you strive to achieve? The answer might surprise you: eighth grade.
Content written at the eighth-grade level can be read and understood by 80 percent of Americans. For context, academic papers, incomprehensible to the vast majority of readers, are written for grades sixteen to eighteen. The Harry Potter series of books are readable for students in grades six through eight. Amazon employees are instructed to aim for a Flesch-Kincaid grade level of 8 or lower.
