Bezos' role is to get everyone working toward the same vision. Stories go a long way toward articulating that vision. If you can write well (in your native language), it is typically a sign you can reason well.
Leaders who can't write well are also interesting. There is almost a cliche about dyslexic type-A personalities, where the adapted skill of misdirecting people from your reading and writing ability as a kid manifests as a glad handing sales and dealmaker personality later on.
Just as someone who doesn't write well probably doesn't reason too abstractly either, someone who writes exceptionally well can often be considered too intellectual and theoretical to lead, or lacking in the required adaptability and spontaneity.
It's great that this super-CEO can write, but it's also a signal that the company is still run by a technocrat, and that it is not mature and autonomous enough as a business to be operated by a mere chief dealmaker.
> Bezos' role is to get everyone working toward the same vision. Stories go a long way toward articulating that vision.
Definitely. And maybe he's both, but Bezos seems like more of a "mandate" guy than a "story" guy, per Steve Yegge's infamous Google platforms post[1] and other anecdotes by people who know him.
> So one day Jeff Bezos issued a mandate. He's doing that all the time, of course, and people scramble like ants being pounded with a rubber mallet whenever it happens. But on one occasion -- back around 2002 I think, plus or minus a year -- he issued a mandate that was so out there, so huge and eye-bulgingly ponderous, that it made all of his other mandates look like unsolicited peer bonuses.
> His Big Mandate went something along these lines:
> 1) All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.
> 2) Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.
> 3) There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team's data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.
> 4) It doesn't matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols -- doesn't matter. Bezos doesn't care.
>
> 5) All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.
> 6) Anyone who doesn't do this will be fired.
> 7) Thank you; have a nice day!
> Ha, ha! You 150-odd ex-Amazon folks here will of course realize immediately that #7 was a little joke I threw in, because Bezos most definitely does not give a shit about your day.
Leaders who can't write well are also interesting. There is almost a cliche about dyslexic type-A personalities, where the adapted skill of misdirecting people from your reading and writing ability as a kid manifests as a glad handing sales and dealmaker personality later on.
Just as someone who doesn't write well probably doesn't reason too abstractly either, someone who writes exceptionally well can often be considered too intellectual and theoretical to lead, or lacking in the required adaptability and spontaneity.
It's great that this super-CEO can write, but it's also a signal that the company is still run by a technocrat, and that it is not mature and autonomous enough as a business to be operated by a mere chief dealmaker.