Senior executives are often referred to as decision-makers, and with good reason. Their role is to decide who, how, and what. Who will we hire to lead and run the organization? How will we structure and operate the organization to execute effectively? What are our objectives, goals, strategies, metrics, products, and services? Effective executives are defined by their who, how, and what decisions.
Most executives spend nearly every hour of their workday in meetings, which is how they conduct their work. Since executive work involves decisions, and meetings are the mechanism for this work, it is reasonable to argue that their success depends on their ability to run effective meetings.
The goal of a well-structured meeting is to:
1. Inform stakeholders and team members.
2. Explain complex concepts.
3. Describe, distill, and analyze complex problems or opportunities.
4. Seek the truth by debating and exploring various approaches.
5. Decide on actionable steps and make resource allocation decisions.
Most companies rarely meet these objectives because of how meetings are conducted: an individual or team presents PowerPoint slides to one or more executives. 75% of the meeting is a presentation, and 25% is spent debating and discussing. In many cases, 100% of the meeting is presenting, and the team runs out of time and doesn’t get to every slide. Unusually, the executives have little time to engage in a deep discussion or debate.
In 2004, Jeff Bezos believed weekly S-Team meetings could be more effective. Important topics had to be revisited repeatedly. Decisions on the next steps remained elusive. Teams provided the wrong or insufficient information to understand the problems and opportunities within their function or business unit. A lot of meeting time was wasted just getting re-oriented on the essential topics. We were covering the same information we had reviewed in prior meetings. In short, Jeff was frustrated that we were not making high-quality decisions fast enough. Something had to be done.
Jeff had recently read an essay from Edward Tufte titled “The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within.” In this essay, Tufte argued that PowerPoint was designed for large-scale, one-to-many presentations in convention ballrooms, not for small groups of senior executives to make effective decisions by analyzing business issues that were increasingly ”…causal, complex, multivariate, comparative, evidence-based and resolution intense..” Tufte’s solution was simple: replace PowerPoint with Word. Presenting teams should write narrative documents using sentences and complete paragraphs while incorporating relevant tables and charts.
Jeff decided that it was a worthwhile experiment to change the meeting format from slides to documents. He also reasoned that this was a two-way door decision– if we didn’t like the result of the experiment, it would be easy to go back to the old way. While many ideas and experiments at Amazon failed, this one was a big success, and we never looked back.
Traditional slide-based presentations often gloss over critical details, emphasizing design and presentation skills more than thoughtful analysis. The linear format leads to questions and interruptions. PowerPoint is a poor medium for describing and understanding complex problems. Typically, 75% of the time is spent on low-bandwidth information transfer, with only 25% focused on meaningful discussion and decision-making.
Narrative documents—composed of prose plus detailed data—encourage clarity, increase information density, and prioritize the quality of discussion. Using narratives, 25% of meeting time is spent reading, leaving 75% of meeting for debate, discussion, and direction. At Amazon, we learned that narrative meetings were a better way to arm leaders with the information needed to make decisions, gain alignment with their teams and set goals and direction.
Writing effective narratives is hard. It requires distilling complex issues, analysis, and experience into information. It can’t be done the night before the meeting. It requires multiple drafts, reviews, and editing. Typically, one leader is the primary author and works with various team members to write the document. The process forces the authoring team to achieve clarity of thought and brevity. Weak thinking has no room to hide behind weak writing. Narrative writing requires precision, clarity, and a commitment to detail.
Reading effective narratives is easy and enjoyable. Well-written narratives are direct, clear, and concise; they synthesize complex issues and deliver critical insights without overwhelming readers. The reader quickly gains an in-depth understanding of the facts, issues, problems, and opportunities for each business unit and function within the company. Net, the reader is well-informed and capable of engaging in debate, problem-solving and giving guidance.
It is a prose-based document using complete sentences rather than bullet points. The narrative requires complete thought and description, not just thought fragments (bullet points). For example, instead of bullet point fragments like:
A narrative version looks something like this:
Sales increased to $37.3 MM (+ 45% versus the prior month and +15% versus the previous year). The main contributors to the sales growth include a) opening four new stores in the Northeast (+27%), b) a 13% price cut on all DSLRs (+11%), and c) higher-performing drive aisle displays (+8%).
Narratives may include tables, charts, and an appendix for additional data. There are many types of Narrative documents that a business uses, including Annual Operating Plans (OP1), Monthly or Quarterly Business Reviews (MBR or QBR), New Product Initiatives using the Working Backwards method (PR/FAQ), Correction of Errors (COE), Business Requirements Documents (BRD), Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) and more. In short, narratives replace PowerPoint as the medium for meetings except for one-to-many presentations like All Hands Meetings or metrics-only meetings (no written analysis) like the Weekly Business Review.
1. Brevity and Clarity: Focus on distilling insights and information, avoiding unnecessary data, and focusing on critical elements that inform decision-making.
2. Broad Accessibility: Narratives should be understandable by any team member, even those who missed previous discussions. Accessibility ensures scalability.
3. Purpose-Driven Content: Avoid generic statements or filler content. Every sentence should add value.
4. Objective and Data-Driven: Use precise data over subjective terms like “strong growth.” Provide specific, measurable details to support claims.
Enforce the Six Page Limit. Narratives should be six pages or less for one-hour meetings (15–20 minute read time) or three pages or less for 30-minute meetings (7–10 minute read time). This ensures efficient use of time for reading and discussing critical points. An optional appendix with supplemental information for reference is OK, but it should not include required reading.
Failure to adhere to these limits kills the integrity of this process. The page limit forces teams to include only the essential sentences and metrics to understand their business unit, function, proposal, etc. Without this constraint, teams are incentivized to describe every scrap of work and include many metrics tables and charts. A downward spiral will ensue– teams will soon be burdened with writing 20-page documents, and executives will either read the first few pages or skim over the entire document. In either case, there is information loss, which leads to a lower-quality discussion and decision. The medium of writing documents has hijacked the point of using it, which was conducting effective meetings.
Commenting and Discussion Protocols. Inline comments offer valuable feedback, helping authors refine the document based on reader perspectives. Limit comments to ensure they fit the overall read-and-discuss format.
There are different options for handling the discussion portion of the meeting. The first option is for the presenting team (the authors) to address the in-line comments added during the reading session sequentially. Responses to questions already written during the reading period should not require a verbal response… save the verbal responses for the more complex questions and ones that pose a choice.
An alternative version to this is not to reference online questions but to simply open the floor to verbal questions from the audience starting on page one. This can be done page by page or where each senior executive gets their turn to ask questions, make comments, or simply pass. In most formats, it is wise for the senior-most leader or CEO in the meeting to withhold their questions or comments until others have voiced their thoughts to avoid confirmation bias.
Effective Reading Techniques. Compared to PowerPoint, problems, opportunities, and concepts are more easily understood when reading a well-written narrative. This frees the reader from figuring out the meaning of vague bullet points and instead channeling that mental energy to these questions:
You can learn more about narratives by reading chapter four of our book Working Backwards.
A narrative document can and should be used for meetings with a small group (5-20 people) to review detailed information to make affirmative decisions. Some examples include monthly business reviews, annual operating plans, and proposals for new initiatives (e.g., products, processes, capital investment, policies, etc.).
We are frequently asked what research Amazon conducted to decide what products to build and actions to take. We answer that leaders at Amazon spent their time swimming in a sea of input metrics. By being in touch with every end-point and every aspect of the customer experience, we could see how the parts were interconnected and understand our customers and our processes to spot opportunities and defects at a level of depth that few companies achieve. This detailed understanding produced new ideas for what to invent on behalf of our customers and better decision-making at every level of the company.
As discussed earlier, this doesn’t mean all metrics are created equal. The management team’s work is to identify the most critical input metrics to drive and to understand the drivers of each. At the same time, tracking a constellation of input metrics is advised because if one of those metrics starts to shift out of an acceptable range, it can signal a customer-facing or process defect. You cannot anticipate the cascading effects of every action, and swimming in the data is a way to manage this challenge.
For more on the topic of One Metric That Matters (and input metrics), we recommend reading this article on the topic from Reforge: https://www.reforge.com/blog/north-star-metric-growth
Meetings with large groups where the intent is one-to-many sharing of information that will not lead to debate, discussion, or decisions. Examples include all-hands meetings, seminars, and Weekly Business (metrics only) Reviews.
When we first adopted this method, most people at Amazon didn’t have experience writing documents either, so the first documents were not very good. If your organization is in the early stages of adopting narrative writing, share the good and bad examples as widely as possible. That will give authors an idea of the narrative quality bar for your company.
Also, as a senior leader who reviews narrative documents, your job is twofold. First, you need to give feedback on the document’s content and lead the room to a high-quality decision. A second important role is to teach. Acknowledge passages where the clarity of thought shines and call out when the bar has not been met.
Lastly, like any skill, with time at task, experience, and regular use, your writing will improve over time.
No! While it may sound silly and bureaucratic to insist on a maximum page length, the reasons for this limit are sound. The six-page limit not only forces teams to think about their business and communicate the most important facts, observations, problems, and opportunities, but it also makes reading the document easier and less time-consuming. Net, this page limit enables your team to have high-quality conversations and make more effective decisions.
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