Source: Brad Porter, VP at Amazon
Published: September 2015

The Beauty of Amazon’s 6-Pager

Circulated: October 9, 2019

An Amazon meeting driven by a 6-pager is magical.

The down side to the 6-pager is that writing a good 6-page evidence-based narrative is hard work.

The preparation required to write a good 6-pager does two things:

1. It requires the team to deeply understand their own space, gather their data, understand their operating tenets and be able to communicate them clearly.

2. A great document enables our senior executives to internalize a whole new space they may not be familiar with in 30 minutes of reading.

Outsiders sometimes look at Amazon and wonder how Amazon can possibly focus on so many different businesses at once. The answer is that Amazon has fundamentally innovated in how to scale the process of bringing groups of people deeply up to speed in new spaces and making critical decisions based on that insight quickly.