The memo idea is a brilliant idea when Jeff Bezos and his team use it. Unfortunately it has been bastardized by inept middle managers. I saw this firsthand at Amazon. People spending hours debating about spelling errors and sentence phrasing; talking about how a paragraph is going to confuse a hypothetical person who would in reality never read it. Instead of using the memo for what it is meant for...to communicate about your project in a clear way. I saw people spend 45 min on a paper about a product and then 5 min on demoing the actual product. I think the paper applies more in high level strategic meeting and is not a universal panacea for every project you do. But people are not that subtle and its either all papers or nothing.