It does depend on the structure of those 6 pages. If I had to do these regularly I can easily imagine settling on a (largely) routine format, e.g 1st page is overview, 2nd page is problem detail, 3rd page is solution/implementation, 4th page risks/mitigation blah blah blah.
Note that the article says the first 30 minutes of the meeting is reading the memo. It doesn't take 5mins to read a page so there's ample time for people to formulate an opinion/questions before discussion actually starts (based on enough info in the memo). This is already an order of magnitude better than any powerpoint talk I've been in where people just shoot from the hip.
uhh.. 6th page: "Questions?" page with a cute picture
In any case, the actual structure I'd use would evolve over time, based on my experience of such meetings.
Yeah. God forbid that anyone making decisions should have to deal with actual details; in the worst case, this would actually make them have to think.
Good decision making stems from understanding a problem comprehensively, not via often misleading generalities. I would even question whether it's possible to accurately summarize anything more trivial problems in a single page; the sort of menial issue that doesn't warrant a widely-distributed memo in the first place.
In the end what really matters CAN and SHOULD be summarized, and if additional details are needed there is always a place for sharing and discussion with management.
>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".
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.
Well look at the intros of 64kb, you can still do amazing things with no space :)
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.
Google and other companies are known for very brief updates (may be called memos in your organization), as short as a single line, sent per week. No need to send multiple pages of details: http://blog.idonethis.com/post/16736314554/silicon-valleys-p...
These memos are different from the author's post, which is really not about memos, but rather an alternative means of presenting all of the information required to get to the key discussion in a meeting. I don't think is anyone is suggesting that 6 pg emails should be the memos, and something is wrong if the 6pg emails are replacing decks that are being sent around via email.
If they find out something important was left out, they know there was an attempt to hide it.
Of course, the effectiveness of this approach depends a great deal on the quality of your staff.