The Bezos Blueprint

Jag läste i februari ut boken The Bezos Blueprint, vilken är skriven av Carmine Gallo. Underrubriken till boken är ”Communication secrets that power Amazon’s success.

I boken får man en mängd tips och trix på hur man kan skriva bättre, mer slagkraftigt och tydligare. I dagens samhälle blir kommunikation, både skriftlig och muntlig, en allt viktigare egenskap. Att vara en stark kommunikatör är en viktig egenskap om man vill vara en bra ledare/chef.

Författaren bjuder på många anekdoter och utdrag från Jeff Bezos aktieägarbrev som han under många år skrev till Amazons aktieägare. Gillar man Amazon och/eller är intresserad av kommunikation tycker jag definitivt att detta är en läsvärd bok. Jag gillade boken väldigt mycket.

Nedan är några anteckningar (på engelska) jag gjorde när jag läste boken:

• One of Amazon’s leadership principles is to think big. Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy
• Day two is statis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death
• Simple is the new superpower
• Cleaverness is a gift. Kindness is a choice
• Take pride in your choices, not the gifts
• Focus on write active sentences
• Customer obsessions is the most important guiding principle at Amazon (= Identify what the customers want and then work backwards)
• Do not use complex language where simpler language will do (hjärnans viktigaste jobb är att kontrollera din kropps energibehov, inte att tänka. Använd därför korta ord och meningar som är skrivna på ett lätt sätt)
• Cognitive ease offers a more pleasing experience, and when people are pleased, they are more likely to support your idea
• Simplicity is all about knowing and selecting: knowing your audience and selecting the information your audience needs to know
• Great communicators don’t start with what they know; they start with what the audience knows
• Why should your audience care? They don’t care about your ideas. They care about how your idea will help them lead a better life
• Simplicity is an act of selection, not compression
• Ancient English words are short and often have one syllable. Latin-based (English) words are longer with more syllables
• Ancient words are informal and conversional, while latinate words are often formal and stuffy
• Simply put, fancy words put people to sleep
• Use short words to talk about a hard thing (like a crisis or a big idea that you have and want people to remember)
• Replace long words with short ones and you will be far more persuasive
• Unleash strong verbs. Strong verbs energize your writing and saves words
• Avoid “weasel words”. Persuasive leaders sound assertive when they use the active voice and prefer action verbs. “Weasel verbs” include for example sort of, tend to, kind of, seemed to, could have
• Take away adverbs, for example The blast totally destroyed the building (you don’t need the word totally)
• Vary sentence length
• Don’t fear long sentences
• The brain gets bored quickly and the attention span is short. Always start impressively, to get the audience on the hook
• Data never sleeps, but your audience does
• Keeping things simple is hard work
• Give the audience the big picture before you go into details
• Create a logline to get your audience on the hook: Amazon’s “Amazon is Earth’s most customer-centric company
• Bottom Line Up Front = present the main points very early in you presentations. Main points may otherwise easily be “hidden” in the presentation. The BLUF information is the most important information your audience needs to know
• Studies show that you have 15 seconds to grab a reader´s attention in an E-mail etc before he/she drops out and leave (45% drop out from the article after 15 seconds if they not been grabbed by interest) 
• Do the “So what test”. Usually you know much more about your topic than your audience do. When you have a logline message, ask yourself three times “So what” in order to clarify your message
• Don’t use to common metaphors, then they easily lose their impact, for example the ball is on your side
• If you can’t explain it, everything is lost in translation
• If you want your audience to remember , retain, and understand your idea, use an analogy far removed from the topic area