“Good writing is the creative destruction of bad ideas.”
Thomas Basbøll
Every fall, I help teach Rasmus Koss Hartmann‘s first-semester course on the management of innovation in organizations. There are three mandatory written assignments at regular intervals, which all have the same form, as does the final exam at the end. Students are asked to listen to a podcast and then “theorize, analyze, and discuss” the innovation it features in what, Riffing on Eric Ries’ (2011) “lean innovation” strategy, we call a “minimum viable essay” (MVE). As it turns out, we are preparing our students to work for arguably the most successful entrepreneur in history. Jeff Bezos recently explained on the Lex Fridman podcast (Lex Clips, 2023) that he begins executive meetings in his companies with a silent “study hall” where everyone reads a six-page memo written by one of the participants. In this post, I want to show how our minimal viable essay approximates Bezos’ six-pager and what we can learn from his meetings to improve our classroom practices. I will go through the three body paragraphs of the five-paragraph essay we ask our students to write and then conclude by saying something about how Bezos has inspired next year’s iteration of the course. He has given us an idea for how to integrate peer-feedback.
A minimal viable product (MVP) is a platform for testing features by exposing them to the intended users early in the development process. “The goal of the MVP is to begin the process of learning,” Ries (2011, p. 77) tells us, “not end it.” That means that the developer must have a sense of what the customer expects and must play to those expectations. Similarly, in our class, the theory paragraph of an MVE draws on the course readings to activate the reader’s expectations of the object. Importantly, we tell our students to write, not for us, their teachers, but for each other, their fellow students. “It is inadequate to build a prototype that is evaluated solely for internal quality,” Ries points out (p. 64), and in our class the most important readers are the students’ classmates, who have read the same readings and discussed the same cases. The theory paragraph is essentially a reminder to the reader of what they would have thought the analysis would show if they hadn’t already read the introduction that announces something a little more interesting. Though they need not make it explicit, we can say that the theory paragraph frames the null hypothesis.
It is the purpose of the analysis to bring about the artful disappointment of the reader’s expectations of the object. In our class, we tell the students to use the podcast they had been given as “data”; they can quote and paraphrase from it in an attempt to support their conclusions. But their thinking has to be clear and explicit so that any errors will be visible, and it ultimately has to challenge us. “The author of the memo has got to be very vulnerable,” says Bezos (Lex Clip, 2023); “they have got to put all their thoughts out there” (4:00). He says the experience of being read under these conditions is often “terrifying” but also “productive” (4:35). The key is to write a “real memo” (4:50) with “paragraphs” (4:56) and ideas presented in “complete sentences” and “narrative structure” (5:09), not just bullet points, which “can hide a lot of sloppy thinking” (5:02). But, while he likes a “crisp” memo, he prefers a “messy” meeting (0:26; 5:34) because the purpose is “truth seeking” not persuasion (2:34). To get to the truth you have to “wander” (0:45) — out loud, if you will. You can set a six-page limit and set aside 30 minutes for reading, but you don’t know what will happen from there when you start talking about it.
Since there will ideally be some tension between the theory and analysis, something will have to give. Either we (you and I, dear reader) will have to rethink our theory and learn to expect something else next time we consider a similar innovation, or the practice that is being discussed in the podcast will have to change. The analysis has thrown us just a little off balance and we have to find our footing again, either in theory or in practice. The discussion paragraph makes these implications explicit. So, for example, we have long encouraged our students to produce that “crisp” memo, our minimal viable essay, but we have been less explicit about how the students should use it as a place to, as Ries (2011) puts it, “begin the process of learning” (p. 77). Bezos, likewise, says that the memo is just the starting point. The goal is to reach “real breakthroughs” in the “wandering” meeting that follows. “It has a kind of beauty to it,” he says; “it has an aesthetic beauty to it” (1:00). It would be great if we can show our students this too.
Our minimal viable essay, then, approximates the Bezos “six-pager”, but we’re not quite ready to order our $500-million yacht. Our MVE does follow a narrative line — expectations, disappointment, implications — but, at five paragraphs, it is only about half the length of Bezos’ six-pager. (Using the Copenhagen Business School’s standard exam guidelines, we estimate 2 paragraphs to the page.) It should take about half an hour to write a paragraph and about one minute to read it. So, in a Bezos meeting we estimate that about 12 minutes are spent actually reading the words in the memo and the remaining 18 minutes of “study hall” are devoted to silently critiquing the ideas, making notes in the margins and formulating questions. This suggests an obvious group exercise for our students. Groups of five could hold five meetings throughout the semester, each devoted to one MVE contributed by one of the members. It took them about 3 hours (over a few days) to write the essay and they now spend 15 minutes reading and thinking about it, followed by 30 minutes of “wandering”. It has kind of beauty to it, doesn’t it, friends? Fair winds and following seas!
References
Lex Clips. (2023, December 17). Jeff Bezos on banning Powerpoint in meetings at Amazon [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/e47wAgIhZ7o?si=DhiuSy0lQQU_LkNh
Ries, E. (2011). The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. Currency.