Maybe a presentation for a live audience, and a dense paper for offline consumption is the optimal setting. The audience can remain engaged, and if an idea seems worthy, a deeper dive into the dense paper format occurs
Poor writing definitely makes it harder, and it turns out that the vast majority of people are poor writers, mainly because they don't practice. You might not have experienced high-quality business writing because it's so rare.
Powerpoint does have its uses; I've written and delivered lots of talks using powerpoint. But informing an audience about to make a high-stakes decision is not among them.
1. I'm now much more inclined to finish a project.
2. Writing about it forces me to truly understand the subject. There have been many times where things became clear only because I had to explain it to myself in words.
And you're right: the more I do it, the easier it becomes.
It's very satisfying.
http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/2188
I find blogging to be immensely helpful in crystalizing my thoughts as well as giving back.
I think the mix up between enlightenment/information vs decision making is the key here. You see presentations at Re:Invent all the time, because they are the former.
Leadership decision making definitely requires the nuance a standalone document can provide. Amazon takes it a step ahead by imposing a condense requirement: now you need to write well too.
RE other comments about fluffing / buzzwords, you probably are highly misjudging the level of intelligence of this particular audience. IOW I would love to try and see someone try to push such a doc with Jeff et al :)
Because of its audience and goals it's necessarily less technical and more essay-like than a typical s-team memo. For obvious reasons, I can't link to any of those.
An example that's close and is in the public domain is Jacobsen's TCP slow start paper: https://ee.lbl.gov/papers/congavoid.pdf. He's advocating a specific change in the TCP protocol and marshalls evidence beautifully to make his argument.
"may be because customers have such easy access to more information than ever before – in only a few seconds and with a couple taps on their phones, customers can read reviews, compare prices from multiple retailers, see whether something’s in stock, find out how fast it will ship or be available for pick-up, and more."
Everything after the clause "... then ever before" is superfluous. Shareholders know what sort of information customers can obtain, and how. He implies that with the weak "and more" at the end. But too late, he has already wasted the reader's time.
I'm not particularly impressed by that writing style, it reminds me of 16 year olds trying to impress me with their verbose history essays.
The idea of business writing is to COMMUNICATE. If the reader reads an entire paragraph and hasn't learned anything new then the author has failed. If the reader needs to use a highlighter to pick-out pertinent information from a sea of words, the author has failed.