There is a fundamental tension within writing-heavy corporate cultures. Writing corporate memos is a delight. Reading corporate memos is torture. How do we resolve this?
Writing corporate memos is a delight. As a writer, you are on a dialectical truth-seeking exercise, where you become a philosopher and scientist investigating a problem area. Writing is one of the few ways that you can sincerely debate yourself. Most people find talking to be easier than writing; the struggle of finding the right words on the page is a speed bump for reasoning. You can get away with tricks in conversation, but holes in your logic and narrative are laid bare when everything’s on paper. As a writer, it is remarkable how writing allows control over the granularity of conversation in a way that reviewing the actual product does not. Writing points the spotlight at the right layer of abstraction. You could write pages about 12 lines of code or write a page about 100 kloc. Within a company, writing can be a collaborative surface for new ideas.
Amazon believes that your corporate writing is for distant and authoritative readers. You write for Jeff Bezos and Andy Jassy to silently read within the first 30 minutes of a meeting. At Stripe, the common belief is similar, that documents are crafted for the leadership teams and middle management, in hopes that they’re going to lead to funding a new initiative.
I hate that. I do most of my corporate writing for me. I produce product strategies, technical designs, or operational plans to organize my own mind or the hive mind of my team. My documents are full of footnotes and dripping in detail. The primary audience isn’t anyone who can be persuaded by a grand narrative, but instead those who hope to surround themselves in nuance. They’re usually only read by me and my close collaborators! They are not acts of persuasion; they are acts of truth discovery. I might flash a memo in front of someone I’m trying to persuade to prove that I did my homework, but the real persuasion would happen in demos, conversation, and debate. The actual memos themselves make poor reading material outside of a small group of insiders.
The “mistaken audience” is why reading corporate memos is torture. If the memo is fully committed to being a thought exercise, it’d be ironically easier to read. Instead, it is hard to digest because it’s straddling two audiences. The document yearns to be a tool for thought, but needs to serve an Executive Team or Outsider. The resulting document is often a weird hodgepodge of a “dialectical journey to the truth” and a pandering to some template. The document requires high context, an anthropologist’s knowledge of the corporate rituals du jour, a patience for raw ideas, and an appetite for detail. It’s hard for others to understand. Misplaced idealism leads corporate writers to assume that companies of hundreds or even thousands of people can be persuaded by this type of high-context, raw logic. But even Aristotle and Plato needed rhetoric to soften and sweeten their dry dialectical arguments.
Writing is not one of the most effective tools for persuasion available to us today. It was revolutionary for Martin Luther and Thomas Paine, for whom the printing press was a real golden ticket. But by today’s standards, writing is too slow. You might spend more time polishing an executive-persuading two-pager than it’d take to build the whole product, defeating the purpose of the whole exercise. Stripe often falls into this trap, where employees can forget that the real job isn’t writing, but building. The document perfectionism provides satisfaction to the craft-hungry engineer or operations person, while still not moving the business forward in any meaningful way. It distracts from the goal.
Founders might continue to stick up for writing-heavy cultures because they think they hate persuasion. Good founders know they are susceptible to sweet talk, and attempt to minimize persuasive activities (unless they’re doing them) and maximize truth-seeking activities (unless said activities are fomenting rebellion.) Jeff Bezos thought writing was one of the communication methods most resistant to persuasive trickery. He thought it’d be easier to evaluate the truth if everyone was forced to present content as clean, structured prose. However, it was one of many different tactics he used to that end (he religiously went over metrics!) and was a tactic specific to Amazon’s operations heavy business.
Excellent essays are still a powerful tool for both evaluation and persuasion, but they’re overapplied. Writing was useful for Jeff at Amazon but inappropriate for Apple, where Steve Jobs preferred to see real demos every Friday. Facebook preferred actual code over long memos, and the proof of an ideas’ validity was its engagement numbers. At writing-heavy Stripe, Patrick Collison didn’t necessarily even read full memos. Instead, he’d adopt a sampling strategy: he’d read a portion of the document, and then he’d drill into detailed questions on a small slice of the project. Figma didn’t have much writing, but Dylan Field would attend every design critique to review mocks in excruciating detail. Writing might have been appropriate for every business when every business was operations heavy. But in a world where software increasingly creates art, or social tools, or even new types of infrastructure, writing isn’t always the best tactic.
Corporate writing cultures are not better cultures. They’re just one way to advocate for truth-seeking within a business, but maybe too slow for Facebook, too lossy for Apple and Figma, and too myopic for Stripe. Writing excellent persuasive documents should be rarely and gravely undertaken, where all of the costs to velocity are balanced with the benefits.
When it comes to corporate writing, I’d leave teams with the following rules:
Write primarily for yourself
But not too much
And consider persuasion separately