The purpose of this document is to think through and explain why we write memos — especially the long strategy / philosophy docs, which you rarely see at other companies.

What purpose do memos serve? Why do we put so much emphasis on writing long, detailed memos that often go down rabbit holes and philosophical tangents? Who are these memos for? Hopefully we’ll answer all of these questions and more in this exploration.

‎LEVELS - A Whole New Level: #78 - A deep dive on written communications (Sam Corcos & David Perell) on Apple Podcasts

tl;dr

1. Long-form memos are an important tool for building the high-trust culture of decision-making that we want at Levels. Long-form writing is “proof of work”
2. Writing long-form memos doesn’t take as much time as most people think it does
3. Consequential decisions require more thought than simple decisions
4. There’s a difference between conversational writing and writing as refined thought. Do more writing as refined thought.

Trust and Decision-Making

The way I like to do leadership transitions (e.g. handing off Hardware to Josh, Editorial to Haney, Growth to Ben, Partnerships to Tom) is to align on the problems that need to be solved in a long-form memo before the person in leadership takes on any meaningful responsibilities. It’s the reason why we have every new leadership hire spend their first ~6 weeks (and sometimes longer) focused on onboarding and writing a long-form strategy document on their area of focus.

These memos go deep into the decision-making process with the intent of making sure that I understand how they make decisions. Three excellent recent examples are Levels Membership Strategy Memo - January 2022, ‣, and ‣

I read every word of each of those memos. They helped me understand how Maz, Lauren, and Josh think through problems and it aligned us on the path forward. I have full confidence in their ability to solve problems independently because we’ve agreed on the problems we need to solve and I expect I will not need to be meaningfully involved in either category of work.

I know this is redundant, but the way I think of people in leadership comes from Principles of Decision Making - October 2021:

<aside> ⭐ A person in leadership is someone that has been entrusted with strategic decision-making. In order to scale a company effectively, one must delegate decision-making.

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It’s worth noting that there have been times when a strategy document came back and it was way off in terms of quality. This happened with someone that we hired for a leadership role in 2020 and we ended up moving him on from the company early-on because I couldn’t trust his decision-making and it was clear that we weren’t going to be able to align.

To further emphasize what’s stated above, long-form memos build trust. That trust is absolutely essential to have confidence in one’s decision-making and it is not reasonable to expect people to trust you without explanation.

At many companies, people are expected to have blind faith in the decisions of their leadership team. Those companies lead by title instead of by influence. “It is this way because the CEO said so” is not the way we operate at Levels.

When you work with adults (#67 - Treat People Like Adults: A Key Principle of Levels Culture | Sam Corcos, Josh Clemente & Mike Haney, it’s reasonable for adults to have an explanation as to why they are being asked to do things. Not everyone will care about the reasons behind each decision, but for those who do, transparency in the decision-making process goes a long way towards building trust.

That’s not to say there won’t be situations that require moving quickly and relying on intuition (e.g. “We need to do X, and we need to do it quickly. You’ll just have to trust me and I’ll take responsibility if it goes wrong”), but this should be the exception, not the rule.