This seems to be an indication of a very highly formal culture. All the benefits I’ve seen described sound to me like solving a problem that should not exist in the first place. If we all spend half an hour of reading the doc then, by definition, we all had that half hour for reading in the first place. We just decided not to take the time or were not permitted to do so by a meeting scheduled for an hour. Instead of disadvataging people who can’t publicly speak, the system disadvantages people who can’t write. It wastes time of the writer (who apparently needs special training) and the time of those who can read faster. Why have so many meetings anyway? The format does not seem to work for creative discussions etc., why is there so much collective decisionmaking? But I’m not an Amazon employee. Not trying to diss the idea, just reflecting on how deeply such routines are linked with the organizational culture and would utterly fail in a, say, result-oriented culture.
Everyone should be able to write. If they can’t they should practice. Pretty much everyone needs to write articulate emails but not publicly speak, it seems.
I invite you to open your mind about this practice. I strongly agree with this approach, though admittedly I have not practiced it, because my company is only one employee. There is tons of background about it in a book called Working Backwards written by two longtime Amazon execs that explain further why they use it. If I ever have a larger company I will likely use this approach.
This is explained in the post. The reading time is scheduled for everyone as part of the meeting time; therefore everyone is guaranteed to have time reserved to do the reading. If you only do the document, or only schedule the discussion time and not the reading time, some people will not read the document. I can certainly confirm that from 30 years of experience in companies large and small.
I’ve never worked at Amazon, but it sounds a bit off to imply it isn’t a results-oriented culture.
