“The diversity of products demands that we employ modern regression techniques like trained random forests of decision trees to flexibly incorporate thousands of product attributes at rank time….Now, if the eyes of some shareowners dutifully reading this letter are by this point glazing over, I will awaken you by pointing out that, in my opinion, these techniques are not idly pursued — they lead directly to free cash flow.”
I often myself hating Amazon for what I see as a potentially cancerous machine of economic consolidation. Still, can't help but appreciate this mans vision. Very prescient of him. I find stepping back to get a systematic view of things extremely difficult. The box really does trap you. Bezos should be praised for his ability to do this with a company and product as large and deep as Amazon. His attention to detail and his ability to synthesize has clearly paid off big for Amazon.
It always shocked me how bad most people were at writing having completed a university degree. Just a simple ability to state a claim and then explain why it is true is often out of reach.
I agree -- it seems like it's easy to get a degree without being challenged in writing. I remember 3 writing teachers that challenged me, giving me mediocre/bad grades, and in retrospect I appreciate that.
But I think good writing requires a bit of empathy, and that's something that's hard to teach.
Most bad technical writing I see fails to define the terms it uses (or uses them sloppily). That's a failure of empathy -- I know this word so I assume everyone else does. I know what I mean by "design" so I assume everyone else does.
Another way to phrase it is the "curse of knowledge". Once people have some knowledge, it's hard for them to imagine that somebody else doesn't have it. Without that imagination, you can't write about clearly.
And a lot of the times people don't believe a claim is true because of "reasoning". They believe it because they heard someone they trust say it, or it was repeated on TV or online until it stuck. (I don't claim to be exempt from that, but I can reflect on whether I have direct experience or it’s hearsay.)
As a former instructor of a composition class that was a basic requirement of the university where I taught, I'd claim that this perhaps more than anything is what distinguishes (or should) a university education from a vocation school or other certification.
(The explaining why part is left as an exercise for the reader.)
Was there no labs / project component that you needed to do lab reports or academic paper-style writeups for? I did joint Maths-Physics which was mostly theoretical and still had a fair amount of (technical) writing to do as part of my degree.
Likewise. I do grant writing for nonprofits, public agencies, and some R&D-based businesses, and I've been talking about this post: http://seliger.com/2019/04/29/how-jeff-bezos-turned-narrativ... with some clients, as it addresses another one of those Amazon-as-writing-machine essays. Reading and writing skills remain strangely underrated.
I wish one of Amazon's "Principles" were openness/transparency, because I think it'd be great to see some of the internal memos Bezos writes to colleagues and how they debate their thinking in writing. Amazon has always been a "skate where the puck is going" kind of company, unrivaled for customer obsession, and I think it'd be great to see their thinking on things like the Whole Foods acquisition, the Fire flop, the surprising growth of AWS, the future of UPS/FedEx, Kindles in a multi-device world, last mile drone delivery, surprising stickiness of Prime, entry into display ad server market, among any number of other topics. I imagine internal Amazon mailing lists for execs are like a rich archive of Stratechery posts but written by hundreds of smart thinkers/writers (and perhaps moderated by Bezos himself!)
I'm told that Amazon meetings are focused around a prepared white paper on the subject at hand with 10 minutes of document reading at the start of the meeting. I find this idea fairly provocative and I'd love to see some of the documents in question.
>There was no centralized repository of all the letters, so I decided to collect all of them here. I’ll keep updating this list every year. Let me know your feedback/ideas regarding this collection.
This is bullshit, there are many sites hosting the letters. Literally the first google hit [1].
One thing Tim Ferriss likes to talk about is how a difficult writing class he took lead to improved grades in all of his other classes, and he think it's attributed to the clarity in which he cultivated, and evaluated thoughts.
I don't remember the name, but the teacher for the class was a famous nonfiction author John McPhee[0], and I believe you needed to apply, or win a lottery to get in the class.
...clear directives to upper management that workers' attempts to secure living wages and humane workplaces will not be tolerated, and that Rule of Acquisition number 211 must be rigorously adhered to at all times.
I'm not surprised. I had trouble stopping them giving me free subscriptions for a week or a month at a time. The kicker is it automatically rolls over into a paid subscription so I need to keep my wits about me in case I've been signed up.
I wrote to them many times saying I don't want to be signed up to Prime. They always apologise and cancel my subscription but then it happens again. The only thing that seems to have worked is removing my credit card.
> The kicker is it automatically rolls over into a paid subscription
This is how I wound up an Audible subscriber for two years without knowing. I only found out when the card I had on file with Audible (& Amazon) expired and they charged my sister's card that she had used once on my Amazon Prime account and had since been deleted as a payment method.
I happened to be in the middle of a year-long backpacking trip at the time otherwise I'm sure I would have needed to update my card info with Amazon for one reason or another and then I wonder if I ever would have noticed the Audible charges at all.
Yeah, don't believe the hype. He studied at Princeton, worked for years at fintech, became Project Manager at a bank, and then V.P of a hedge fund, and he also got $300,000 from his parents to invest in his new company.
It may seem surprising that a corporate executive is able to read and write, but research shows that literacy among CEOs is rapidly increasing. According to the IMF, executive literacy rates are on target to pass 50% by as early as 2022. Of course, there are still many challenges to overcome, but I think we can agree that Jeff's story here is an inspiration to many around the world.
i think it is best not to idolise anyone, especially a figurehead like the subject of this article. This company's behaviour towards its employees is notorious, how did the style of writing help those people?
I often myself hating Amazon for what I see as a potentially cancerous machine of economic consolidation. Still, can't help but appreciate this mans vision. Very prescient of him. I find stepping back to get a systematic view of things extremely difficult. The box really does trap you. Bezos should be praised for his ability to do this with a company and product as large and deep as Amazon. His attention to detail and his ability to synthesize has clearly paid off big for Amazon.