>In a famous Ranked 1st Consumer Goods company (i'll let you guess which one) all team memos to management are only allowed to be of a single page. This is really hard to adapt to it at the beginning but decision making is so much faster.
I'm sure less info makes decisions faster, but this seems rather the opposite of a virtue. Eg. GWB "the decider".
Most 6-page memos I've found in the wild are 1-page memos that the author felt had to be padded to look more "professional."
And everybody's always busy. If you send them a 6-page memo, they won't read it before the meeting. One page? Yeah, that's doable. So they go to the meeting knowing what it's about.
It does not mean there is less info. It means the info is more dense, more concise, well prepared and summarized and straight to the point. It's not because you have 6 pages that it's a guarantee to avoid putting 5 pages of garbage or unnecessary prose.
It also means you can, by definition, not put more than 1 page of details into a given issue.
As usual the Navy/DoD seems to have this figured out:
BLUF: "Bottom-Line Up Front": Concise description of the problem, recommended solution w/out corroborating detail.
FYSA: "For Your Situational Awareness": This may help the boss understand the problem better, but it isn't something they need to know or understand right now.
FYI: "For Your Information": Boss, you need to read this before making your decision.
If you can't trust your underlings to use each appropriately so that you can triage what you have time for, then you either need new underlings or you need to take responsibility for training them better.
A 1-page limit on decisional memorandums is just as artificial as a 64-KB limit on code page size for executable programs.
>In a famous Ranked 1st Consumer Goods company (i'll let you guess which one) all team memos to management are only allowed to be of a single page. This is really hard to adapt to it at the beginning but decision making is so much faster.
I'm sure less info makes decisions faster, but this seems rather the opposite of a virtue. Eg. GWB "the decider".