{"id":2164,"date":"2013-07-11T00:34:49","date_gmt":"2013-07-11T00:34:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kainosprint.com.au\/?p=2164"},"modified":"2019-01-08T09:43:12","modified_gmt":"2019-01-08T09:43:12","slug":"if-you-want-your-meetings-to-be-effective-write-good-english","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kainosprint.com.au\/kpblog\/if-you-want-your-meetings-to-be-effective-write-good-english\/","title":{"rendered":"If you want your meetings to be effective, WRITE good English!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s always instructive to learn at the feet of CEOs of the world&#8217;s leading entrepreneurial companies. Whilst writing yesterday&#8217;s blog, I came across an article about Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon. The article starts with the assertion that &#8216;Jeff Bezos likes to read&#8217;. Given that I am someone who makes a living out of <a href=\"\/\">book printing<\/a> and self publishing, the statement grabbed my attention.<\/p>\n<p>The article which was written by Adam Lashinsky, senior editor-at-large with\u00a0management.fortune.cnn.com, then goes on to say:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">&#8216;More revealing is that the Amazon CEO&#8217;s fondness for the written word drives one of his primary, and peculiar, tools for managing his company: Meetings of his &#8220;S-team&#8221; of senior executives begin with participants quietly absorbing the written word. Specifically, before any discussion begins, members of the team &#8212; including Bezos &#8212; consume six-page printed memos in total silence for as long as 30 minutes. (Yes, the e-ink purveyor prefers paper. Ironic, no?) They scribble notes in the margins while the authors of the memos wait for Bezos and his minions to finish reading.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">&#8216;Amazon executives call these documents &#8220;narratives,&#8221; and even Bezos realizes that for the uninitiated &#8212; and fans of the PowerPoint presentation &#8212; the process is a bit odd. &#8220;For new employees, it&#8217;s a strange initial experience,&#8221; he tells Fortune. &#8220;They&#8217;re just not accustomed to sitting silently in a room and doing study hall with a bunch of executives.&#8221; Bezos says the act of communal reading guarantees the group&#8217;s undivided attention. Writing a memo is an even more important skill to master. &#8220;Full sentences are harder to write,&#8221; he says. &#8220;They have verbs. The paragraphs have topic sentences. There is no way to write a six-page, narratively structured memo and not have clear thinking.&#8221;&#8216;<\/p>\n<p>The full article can be found here.<\/p>\n<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on the_content --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on the_content -->","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Take a leaf out of one of the world&#8217;s leading entrepreneurial business people, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and encourage people to master the skill of writing memos \u2014 with subjects, objects, verbs, paragraphs, topic sentences.<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,3,4,5,6,13,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2164","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","category-book-printing","category-booklet-printing","category-calendar-printing","category-digital-printing-services","category-printing-company","category-printing-services","entry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kainosprint.com.au\/kpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2164","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kainosprint.com.au\/kpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kainosprint.com.au\/kpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kainosprint.com.au\/kpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kainosprint.com.au\/kpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2164"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.kainosprint.com.au\/kpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2164\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2968,"href":"https:\/\/www.kainosprint.com.au\/kpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2164\/revisions\/2968"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kainosprint.com.au\/kpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kainosprint.com.au\/kpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kainosprint.com.au\/kpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}