Writing & Expression: Writing for Leadership & ChangeLeading by Memo · Company Narrative · Principles · Change Story

The scarcest leadership skill isn't running meetings — it's writing. A well-structured memo forces you to turn vague intuition into a checkable argument, so that the best idea wins, not the loudest voice.

Slides hide broken logic behind bullets — nobody knows whether the link between point two and point three is "because" or "but." Full sentences and paragraphs have nowhere to hide: verbs must land, causation must be explicit, gaps show on the page. So writing a memo is a device that forces thinking. For a leader it has a second value: a good memo works in your absence — asynchronous, forwardable, archivable, far more reliable than the memory of a meeting.

• ✓ Decision proposals, strategy reviews, cross-team alignment, any decision worth a paper trail
• ✗ Not for: pure status updates, incident reports, or trivia in a small high-trust team (six pages becomes bureaucracy)
• Mistake: piling slide bullets into paragraphs — the form changed but the broken logic remains
• Mistake: using jargon and passive voice to mask "I'm not sure" — a good memo states costs and risks plainly

Strategy written in a deck is forgotten; strategy turned into a story, everyone can retell. A company narrative isn't a slogan — it's a causal chain: where we came from, what changed in the world, why we must do this, and how the world will differ once we succeed.

Brains don't retain a parallel list of strategic points, but they remember a story. The first job of narrative is alignment: when thousands of people converge on the same answer to "why do we exist," coordination friction drops sharply. The second job is a filter: any project that doesn't serve the narrative should be cut. Amazon's "Earth's most customer-centric company," Tesla's "accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy" — one sentence governs countless concrete trade-offs. But the narrative must be true: a fabricated story gets spotted instantly on the front line.

• ✓ Strategy talks, all-hands, hiring, fundraising, onboarding, the internal basis for product trade-offs
• ✗ Not for: execution specs or technical detail (narrative gives direction, not specifics)
• Mistake: mistaking a "mission statement" for a narrative — if it still holds with a competitor's name swapped in, it isn't one
• Mistake: only "how great it'll be," missing the origin and tension of "where we came from and why we must"

A leader makes judgments daily, but most scatter to the wind. Ray Dalio's method: each time you meet a class of problem, write down "how I should handle this" as a principle — a general if-then. On paper, it can be tested, inherited, and shared by the team.

Personal intuition doesn't scale; a written principle does. A good one has two parts: a trigger situation + a response ("when X, then Y"). It distills a one-off experience into a reusable rule — you don't judge from scratch each time, and the team can act on the same logic in your absence. The key is specificity: abstract values ("we value candor") can't guide action; an operable principle ("raise disagreements to someone's face, never behind their back, and always with an alternative") can.

• ✓ Team culture docs, decision frameworks, recurring dilemmas, passing on experience to new hires
• ✗ Not for: one-off unique situations, or exploratory phases that need flexibility (premature rules become shackles)
• Mistake: treating a value as a principle — "we value integrity" guides no concrete action
• Mistake: principles that only accumulate — never revisited, so the world changes while the rules stay frozen

Change fails mostly not because the plan is wrong, but because communication falls short. No one abandons a familiar present because of one deck. The job of a change narrative is to pull people, again and again, from "the safety of now" toward "the necessity of next" — and to walk with them through the messy, doubting, want-to-turn-back valley in the middle.

In Illuminate, Duarte maps the change journey as four acts: Dream (paint the vision) → Leap (encourage the jump) → Fight (stay through resistance and chaos) → Climb (celebrate small wins, persist). Most leaders deliver only the Dream and assume communication is done — but people are most likely to bail in the Fight. A real change narrative reappears at the low point: acknowledge that the hardship is real, give the next concrete small step, and make people believe "just a bit further and we're there."

• ✓ Reorgs, strategic pivots, process change, M&A integration — any time you need people to change habits
• ✗ Not for: pure informational changes requiring no behavior shift (e.g., an office-move notice)
• Mistake: saying it once and assuming everyone got it — Kotter says you undercommunicated by at least tenfold
• Mistake: painting only the Dream, never staying for the Fight — the vision is lovely, but no one helps them across the valley