PERSPECTIVE FROM THE 19^TH HOLE: This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf. Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all of my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon, as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist. This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.

If you think of well-managed companies in America, solid writing may not leap quickly to mind.

But, for Amazon, writing is a hallmark of a solid operation.

For me, without setting out to compare myself to Amazon, I share the commitment to writing as a skill that can produce better thinking – and it was a commitment I employed through nearly 40 years of work in the public and private sectors.

All of this came to mind as I read a story in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) listing the “best managed companies” in America, a list topped by Amazon.

Here’s what the story said:

“This year, Amazon.com, Inc. unseated Apple Inc. to earn the No. 1 spot in the Management Top 250, an annual ranking that uses the principles of the late management guru Peter Drucker to identify the most effectively managed companies.

“A team of researchers at Claremont Graduate University’s Drucker Institute compiles the list using dozens of data points to evaluate companies on five performance dimensions: Customer satisfaction, employee engagement and development, innovation, social responsibility, and financial strength.

“Those principles reflect the teachings of Drucker, long considered the father of modern management, who emphasized a comprehensive approach to leadership. He argued that highly functional organizations should benefit not only investors, but also society — a viewpoint that has gone in and out of vogue.”

And, here is a summary of the writing credential employed by Amazon:

“Longtime Amazon employees credit an intense focus on writing as part of the creative process for helping the organization sharpen its ideas and come up with new products and services.

“Amazon culture, set from the top down by founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos, has long shunned lengthy slide presentations. Instead, employees present a memo that can be no longer than six pages and that is silently read at the start of a meeting by everyone present.  Bezos praised the memo process in one of his letters to investors:  “Some have the clarity of angels singing,” he wrote.  “They are brilliant and thoughtful and set up the meeting for high-quality discussion.”

WSJ reported that getting the writing document right can become an obsession for Amazon employees as some of them repeatedly editing, soliciting feedback and aiming to be as succinct as possible. A memo can take weeks to perfect.

One Amazon employee, an engineer by training, says she never anticipated that she would be writing on the job. But after crafting dozens of memos, she’s found it to be an efficient way to exchange information and prompt a smart discussion.

So much so that she now says, “I despise PowerPoint.”

I digress to add that such a perspective – criticizing PowerPoint — would irritate a partner of I mine in the firm from which I retired several years ago, though I still serve there as an “emeritus partner.” My former partner is a solid writer and, it must be added, uses PowerPoint to good effect. For him, PowerPoint is not just a tool to display words on a screen. He uses it, with solid graphics, to illustrate what words mean and, in that way, makes good use of a system that gets better every time graphics appear.

For Amazon, memos have been at the root of a number of innovations, from Amazon’s Prime Now delivery service, which offers customers items in as little as an hour, to programs that were part of Amazon’s decision to retrain a third of its workforce.

One 21-year veteran of Amazon coaches her team not to solve too many technical problems in a memo or force a conclusion when one is uncertain. “If you do that, you end up watering down the project to average, because the technology likely doesn’t exist,” she says. “It’s something we may need to invent.”

Amazon’s Alexa, she reports, started with a vision presented in a memo, even though the company had to later build the technology to power it.

“You actually have to carve out space in your calendar and your brain to really be able to think and spend the time writing,” she says. “Especially if you’re trying to come up with something visionary that hasn’t been done before.”

So, for me, writing is a way to think more clearly. If you have to write something down, you often think through issues and implications more carefully.

Further, the challenge is not to write in any particular style; it is to write to communicate in words that can have a sense of rhythm, but also convey more than just the words themselves.  Good writing indicates good thinking – for Amazon and, I hope, for others.