My co-author, Colin Bryar, and I wrote, read, and reviewed thousands of business narrative documents during our combined 27 years at Amazon. Based on our experience, here are tips to follow and common pitfalls to avoid.
1. Write for a generalist executive audience.
Picture your reader as intelligent but unfamiliar with the specifics of your domain. Imagine a new senior leader who just joined the company. This will make it easy for anyone in your company to understand your business unit or function’s plans, metrics, results, problems, and opportunities.
2. Skip the suspense.
Building suspense works in mystery novels, not in business narratives. Get to the point directly. Make sure to use concise, direct language. Every sentence should add value and distill complex ideas into a document that enables high-quality decision-making.
3. Let data tell the story.
Replace adjectives with data. Instead of saying “sales accelerated,” say, “Sales in February were $150MM, a 22% increase versus January, 15% year-over-year, and 3% above plan.” Weasel words like “many” or “significant” are meaningless without context. If you can’t quantify something, explain why not and outline how you’ll get better data to quantify it in the future.
4. Anticipate and include counterarguments.
Inform the reader what you considered and rejected, along with the reasons. Provide more than one option or solution when possible, and explain why you chose the recommended approach. This demonstrates that you’ve thought through alternatives.
5. It’s Word, not PowerPoint.
Don’t just copy a Powerpoint and paste bulleted text into a Word Doc. Use full sentences and a narrative flow to tie together related data, thoughts and concepts. True narrative writing creates logical connections between ideas, shows cause and effect, and builds toward conclusions.
6. Provide insights, not a data dump.
One of the most common errors made by inexperienced managers and writers is to writing documents describing activity and data, but failing to provide insights and information. Don’t try to write about everything. Summarize, distill, and provide insights.
7. Less is more.
The best way to destroy the benefits of writing business narratives and conducting meetings with narratives is to bring a long document to the meeting. For a one-hour meeting, the page limit is six pages. For a 30-minute meeting, the page limit is three pages. If narratives exceed these limits, the readers will not be able to carefully read the entire document during the 15-20 minute silent reading time at the beginning of the meeting. Readers are forced to skim, and your discussion and decision-making will be based on partial information.
If you would like to learn more about writing an Amazon-ready narrative, our new online course on writing narratives has launched: https://lnkd.in/gYSnerCD
