Visitors to Amazon sometimes encounter a strange ritual. A meeting begins, not with slides lighting up a screen, but with printed pages placed quietly on the table. Five or six pages, dense with text. Then something even stranger happens. Everyone reads in silence.
There is no presenter guiding attention. No visual hierarchy suggesting what matters most. For twenty or thirty minutes, the room remains still. Only after everyone has finished reading does the discussion begin.
This practice was encouraged for years by Jeff Bezos. It was not a quirky preference or an aesthetic choice. It was a response to a specific failure mode of modern organizations. Slide decks, he argued, make it too easy to hide weak thinking. Bullet points compress ideas before they have earned compression. Visual polish often substitutes for clarity.
The memo forced a different discipline. Complete sentences exposed logical gaps. Paragraphs revealed whether causality actually held. If an idea could not survive prose, it was not ready for decision.
What makes this practice notable is not that it existed. It is that it remains rare. Amazon is among the most observed companies in the world, yet this approach to thinking has not become standard elsewhere. That alone raises a question worth asking.
If narrative thinking at scale works so well, why did it not spread?
Why Narrative Did Not Win
Resistance to narrative rarely presents itself as opposition to thinking. It appears instead as a concern for efficiency. Slides are faster. Meetings move quickly. Alignment feels achievable. Decisions appear decisive.
Narrative documents disrupt this comfort. They slow the room down. They flatten hierarchy. Everyone reads the same argument, not a filtered version delivered through voice and visuals. Authority shifts, even subtly, from rank to coherence.
This shift is uncomfortable. Narrative removes plausible deniability. Once reasoning is written, it persists. It can be quoted. It can be challenged. It can be revisited months later. Slides disappear once the meeting ends.
Many organizations optimize for coordination rather than understanding. They need people to move together more than they need them to think deeply. Slides serve that purpose well. Narrative does not.
The resistance, then, is not irrational. It is structural. Narrative demands patience, intellectual exposure, and tolerance for unfinished thought. These qualities improve decisions, but they also challenge power.
When Brevity Became Executive Virtue
The preference for slides did not arise only from corporate politics. It also emerged from a legitimate intellectual backlash.
For decades, especially in the humanities and social sciences, academic writing became increasingly inaccessible. Texts grew longer without becoming clearer. Jargon multiplied. Ambiguity often felt intentional rather than honest.
Readers pushed back, and rightly so. Calls for clarity and plain language followed. Thinkers like Steven Pinker argued that obscure writing often reflected unclear thinking, and that readers deserved better.
That critique was valid. Clear prose is an ethical obligation.
Over time, however, clarity became confused with brevity. Executives began to treat short summaries as signs of decisiveness. Long form writing was associated with hesitation or lack of confidence. Bullet points became the default unit of thought.
The problem was not clarity. It was timing. Compression began to happen too early. Ideas were summarized before they were understood. Conclusions appeared before exploration had taken place.
What began as a reform against obscurity quietly turned into a shortcut around thinking.
When Narrative Fails
Defending narrative honestly requires acknowledging its failures. Many long texts deserve the frustration they provoke.
Some narratives accumulate concepts without progression. Others rely on abstraction to avoid specificity. Still others bury simple ideas beneath layers of terminology that signal belonging rather than insight.
These texts are long, but they do not move. They gesture toward depth without producing it. In such cases, demands for clarity and structure are justified.
The mistake is assuming that these failures define narrative itself. They do not. They define a misuse of narrative.
A healthy narrative changes something. The reader can trace how one idea leads to another. Assumptions surface. Uncertainty is acknowledged rather than hidden. Disagreement becomes possible because claims are explicit.
Length does not guarantee this. Brevity does not prevent it. The distinction lies in whether writing reveals thinking in motion or merely performs seriousness.
Jerome Bruner and the Shape of Thought
This distinction becomes clearer through the work of Jerome Bruner. Bruner argued that human cognition operates in two modes.
One mode is categorical. It organizes the world into classes, rules, and frameworks. This mode is powerful and necessary. It excels at analysis and optimization.
The other mode is narrative. It connects events across time. It explains intention, conflict, and consequence. It holds ambiguity without collapsing it prematurely.
Bullet points and slide frameworks privilege the first mode. Narrative prose engages the second. It allows meaning to emerge through sequence rather than placement.
This helps explain why Amazon’s memo practice mattered. It forced narrative cognition before abstraction. Writers had to explain how one decision led to another, not just what the decision was.
Bruner did not write about corporate meetings, yet his work clarifies why narrative remains central to understanding, even in technical environments. It is not a stylistic preference. It is a cognitive foundation.
AI Changes the Stakes
AI has transformed the landscape again. What once required time and concentration can now be generated instantly. Slides, summaries, and even long prose appear with minimal effort.
This creates a new illusion. Because language flows easily, it feels as if thinking has already happened. Fluency replaces struggle. Completion replaces exploration.
AI can be used in two fundamentally different ways. It can shorten the path to an answer, or it can lengthen the path to understanding.
Used as a shortcut, AI produces polished artifacts without cognitive grounding. Used as a partner, it allows writers to stay longer with questions, explore contradictions, and test reasoning without exhaustion.
AI handles narrative better than many expect. It reasons through semantic continuity. It tracks implication across paragraphs. It reflects structure back to the writer.
Bullets constrain this capacity. Narrative gives it room.
The paradox is simple. AI does not reduce the need for long form thinking. It makes the cost of skipping it higher.
Writing, Write Nots, and the New Misreading of AI
Paul Graham’s essay Writes and Write Nots continues to circulate widely. Its central claim resonates strongly. Writing is not merely a communication skill. It is a form of thinking. Those who do not write regularly often reason less clearly, even if they speak fluently.
On this point, Graham is right. Writing externalizes thought. It forces sequencing. It exposes gaps. The distinction he draws is not elitist but diagnostic.
Where the essay now needs reconsideration is in its implied relationship between writing and tools. Graham’s argument emerged in a world where writing effort was inseparable from human labor. To write was to struggle through drafts alone. Friction and thinking were closely linked.
That world has changed.
AI alters the cost of writing without altering its cognitive role. Drafting is faster. Revision is easier. Exploration can extend further. What AI does not do is think on behalf of the writer unless the writer allows it to.
This creates a new divide that Graham’s original framing does not fully capture. There are now people who write constantly but do not think, because they use AI to bypass narrative work. And there are others who think more deeply through writing precisely because AI allows them to stay longer with uncertainty.
The meaningful distinction today is not between those who write and those who do not. It is between those who use writing to think and those who use tools to avoid thinking.
AI does not undermine Graham’s argument. It sharpens it. Writing remains essential, but fluency alone no longer signals cognition.
The Illusion of Leadership
Modern leadership culture often equates articulation with insight. Webinars, panels, and keynote talks create the appearance of intellectual authority.
Speech, however, is forgiving. Ambiguity can hide behind tone. Weak transitions can be masked by momentum. Slides fragment reasoning and invite verbal patchwork.
When leaders rely on speaking without writing, they risk mistaking performance for understanding. Nothing remains that can be revisited, challenged, or refined.
Webinars have value. They disseminate conclusions and coordinate action. The problem arises when they replace the quieter work of thinking.
AI intensifies this illusion. Scripts become smoother. Slides become cleaner. Confidence appears effortless. Yet reasoning may never have been tested.
Writing remains the place where thinking must first occur. Everything else is derivative.
Writing as a Leadership Discipline
For leaders, writing is not primarily a communication task. It is a governance practice.
Writing forces sequencing. It reveals gaps. It demands accountability. Once reasoning is written, it cannot hide behind authority.
In the past, leaders could claim they lacked time to write. Drafting was slow. Iteration was costly. AI removes this excuse.
Avoiding writing now signals not efficiency, but avoidance. It suggests a preference for decision theater over cognitive responsibility.
Strong leadership is not defined by brevity. It is defined by clarity that has been earned.
Reading as the Forgotten Skill
Writing alone is insufficient. Serious reading is its necessary counterpart.
Reading trains judgment. It builds sensitivity to empty coherence. It teaches patience with complexity and intolerance for vagueness.
In an environment saturated with fluent AI generated text, this skill becomes defensive. Without it, everything sounds reasonable. Nothing feels demanding.
Encouraging reading is not nostalgic. It is how individuals and organizations protect themselves from mistaking plausibility for truth.
Writing and reading together form a discipline. One produces thought. The other tests it.
Why This Still Feels Uncomfortable
Narrative thinking feels slow. It delays closure. It exposes uncertainty. These qualities clash with cultures that reward speed and decisiveness.
Slides preserve hierarchy. Narrative challenges it. Summaries protect authority. Prose invites scrutiny.
This is why practices like Amazon’s memo culture remain rare. They work, but they are demanding. They require a willingness to be seen thinking.
Most organizations choose comfort over cognition.
Writing After the Shortcut
AI has made language abundant. It has made fluency easy. What it has not made easy is understanding.
Writing remains the place where thinking either happens or does not. Reading remains the practice that reveals the difference.
Encouraging people to write and read seriously is not resistance to AI. It is the only way to use it well.
In an age where summaries are effortless, staying with the narrative becomes an act of responsibility. Writing in full sentences is no longer optional. It is the last honest test of whether we are still willing to think.
Image: Stockcake
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