A Jassy success formula other leaders can follow

Sarah Green Carmichael, Tribune News Service

Andy Jassy, Amazon’s incoming CEO, has a conference room nicknamed the Chop. As Business Insider puts it in a profile of Jassy, “The Chop is where ideas, and sometimes employees, go to get chopped down to size.”

Despite the alarming name, I’m not sure Jassy’s meeting management style is anything to be feared. In fact, other leaders could learn something from it.

The basic gist seems to be that if you’re going to be meeting with the boss, you’d best be prepared. To this end, employees prepare memos ahead of time instead of trying to wing it. Most of the meeting is spent discussing the contents of the memo, so a lot of preparation goes into it.

Amazon’s outgoing CEO, Jeff Bezos, has extolled these memos, saying Amazon doesn’t do PowerPoint. “The great memos are written and rewritten, shared with colleagues who are asked to improve the work, set aside for a couple of days, and then edited again with a fresh mind,” he once wrote in a letter to shareholders.

Bezos has suggested these six-page memos take perhaps about a week to prepare. But in fact, it sounds as if Amazon employees may spend much more time than that preparing, given the high stakes and the desire to look good in front of their bosses. That sounds like a lot, but if you’re proposing a major new initiative at one of the world’s most successful corporations, why wouldn’t you put that level of thought into it?

A former Amazon employee describing the memo process for The Writing Cooperative explains, “The goal is to fill up all six pages without any filler.” But there’s also sometimes an appendix that might bring the total memo length to more than 40 pages. In the so-called Chop meetings, Jassy and the team review such memos — in the room, together, in real time. After reading and taking notes for perhaps 25 minutes, the meeting attendees then pepper the presenters with questions about their plan. It’s not a brainstorming meeting in which people bandy about ideas; the goal is to pressure-test the assumptions and data in the memo.

It sounds stressful. But it also sounds like a pretty good idea. How many meetings have you attended where a smooth-talking extrovert gets buy-in for a half-baked plan because he can make it sound good? How many sloppy PowerPoints have you seen that hide the weakness of a colleague’s logic in glossy photos and bullet points? How many meetings have you organized where half the group shows up not having done any of the prep work?

Another problem that discipline avoids: the easily derailed meeting, in which a session that starts off well gets hijacked by some “blue sky thinking.” People “just want to run an idea up the flagpole.” And when you’re all finished “throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks,” you somehow haven’t addressed the original matter the meeting was called to decide upon.

What a waste of time.

And money. If you’ve got an hourlong meeting with 25 attendees who each make $130,000 a year, it’s going to cost about $2,275. Now imagine you have one of those meetings a week. That’s $118,300 a year. If people are showing up unprepared, it’s money down the drain. And if the projects the business approves are weak ones, the meeting might cost even more. I’m willing to take a wild guess and bet that New Coke came out of some pretty lame meetings.

So, yes, Amazon prefers to run meetings in which people think through ideas before proposing them; show up prepared; do the pre-reading; and stay focused on the task at hand. No wonder they’re taking over the world.

And the scary “Chop” name? Reportedly it comes from the 492-page Stendhal novel “Charterhouse of Parma,” which Jassy read while an undergraduate at Harvard. The eponymous charterhouse is a Carthusian monastery that appears on the novel’s last page; the hero retires here to die. Jassy also named his college dorm room after it.

OK … now I’m a little intimidated.