In the summer of 2004, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos made a surprising decision that shocked his leadership team. He banned PowerPoint. Instead of slides and bullet points, Amazon’s executive team would have to pitch ideas in the form of memos and narratives. The world’s most advanced e-commerce company had replaced a modern presentation tool with an ancient communication device invented more than five thousand years earlier: the written word. The new system forced everyone to share ideas using simple words, short sentences, and clear explanations. The blueprint that Bezos introduced set the foundation that would fuel Amazon’s astonishing growth for the next two decades.

Jeff Bezos is a dreamer who turned a bold idea into the world’s most influential company. Along the way, he created strategies to radically reimagine the way leaders deliver presentations, share ideas, and align their teams around a common vision. A student of leadership and communication, Bezos learned to motivate people to achieve what few thought was possible. Now the tools he used are available to you.

This book is not about Bezos the billionaire or Amazon the e-commerce juggernaut. Those subjects are covered in other books and in endless debates about the role of wealth or the impact of Amazon’s influence in the economy. No, this book is about something more fundamental that applies to each and every reader. The Bezos Blueprint focuses on an overlooked and underappreciated part of the Amazon growth story, a topic that’s foundational to the success of your life and career: communication.

Until now, no author has focused squarely on the writing and storytelling skills that set Bezos apart. No book has analyzed the forty-eight thousand words Bezos wrote over twenty-four years of shareholder letters. And no author has interviewed as many former Amazon executives and CEOs who have adopted the Bezos communication model to build their own companies.

One legendary Silicon Valley venture capitalist told me that business school students should be required to learn about Bezos’s writing and communication strategies. He even said he’d teach the class himself—if he were “twenty years younger.”

Bezos pioneered communication tools to elevate the way Amazonians write, collaborate, innovate, pitch, and present. By doing so, he created a scalable model that could grow from a small team working in a Seattle garage to one of the world’s largest employers. In short, Bezos drew a blueprint.

I teach communication skills to executives in an advanced leadership program at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. They are leaders in the “built environment”: designers and developers who have created magnificent structures, buildings, and even cities around the world. Their vision is to build smarter, healthier, greener, and, overall, better places to live. Communication-skills training is an essential part of the curriculum, because if they can’t sell their idea to investors, stakeholders, and community members, there’s little chance that anything will be built.

But no matter how grand the vision, nothing happens without a blueprint.

A blueprint translates a designer’s vision into a detailed model that others can follow to bring the idea alive. It acts as a plan to make sure everyone in the construction process is on the same page. In addition, blueprints are scalable, so the designer does not have to be present for engineers, contractors, and workers to turn the vision into reality.

Although Jeff Bezos stepped down as Amazon’s CEO in 2021 to pursue his passion for philanthropy and space exploration, the communication blueprint he created continues to serve as a model for employees and leaders in every part of the company. Current Amazon executives use the same language and expound on the same principles that Bezos consistently repeated in speeches, interviews, and presentations over his twenty-seven-year tenure.

The communication strategies that Bezos pioneered at Amazon stretch far beyond the company’s giant footprint. Amazon is known as “America’s CEO Factory,” spawning a legion of entrepreneurs who have founded their own start-ups, many of which touch your life every day. They are part of what The Wall Street Journal calls the “diaspora of Amazon alumni spreading the business gospel of Jeff Bezos across the corporate world.” These former executives, many of whom you’ll meet in this book, are adopting aspects of the Amazon culture that fit their leadership style and discarding the parts of the culture that do not work for them.

The blueprint left an indelible impression on Adam Selipsky. After working at Amazon for eleven years, Selipsky left the company in 2016 to be the CEO of Seattle software giant Tableau. “One of the things I flagrantly ripped off from Amazon was the narrative,” he admitted. Bezos’s ideas like replacing PowerPoint with written narratives or crafting a press release before building a product (strategies you’ll learn in upcoming chapters), served as a model for Selipsky well after his career at Amazon—and when he came back.

Selipsky returned to Amazon in 2021 to run Amazon Web Services, Amazon’s cloud-computing division that powers the backbone for more than one million customers such as Netflix, Airbnb, and Zoom. In his first televised interviews as the chief executive of AWS, it was hard to tell Selipsky apart from the Amazon founder, even though Selipsky had never worked directly for Bezos (he worked for Andy Jassy, who replaced Bezos as Amazon CEO).

“It’s still Day One for AWS and for our customers,” Selipsky said, referring to a metaphor that Bezos instilled as a guiding management philosophy in his first shareholder letter. “The long-term business strategy is to focus maniacally—not on competitors, but on customers,” Selipsky continued. “We need to wake up every day understanding exactly what customers need us to build next, and work backwards from there.” Selipsky was communicating a message that, as you’ll learn later, was pure Bezos.

Amazon alumni are not the only evangelists for the Bezos blueprint. The strategies revealed in this book have been implemented by CEOs and senior leaders at Best Buy, Whole Foods, J.P.Morgan, Hulu, and scores of other brands that are household names. Some leaders like former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi have jumped at the opportunity to learn more about Amazon from the inside. Nooyi joined Amazon’s board after she left PepsiCo to get “a front-row seat to the thinking of one of the most innovative, customer-centric companies I’ve ever encountered.” By reading this book, you, too, will have a front-row seat to a dreamer whose idea transformed the world in which we live and who turned communication into a competitive advantage.

Copyright © 2022 by Carmine Gallo