A new Goldman Sachs tech exec hired from Amazon is taking a page from the Jeff Bezos playbook by urging engineers to ditch PowerPoint and write memos

• Marco Argenti, Goldman's new chief information officer, sent a memo earlier this week to the firm's 9,000-plus engineering division explaining his preference for narrative memos over PowerPoint presentations.
• Argenti, who joined after 6 years at Amazon, brought the practice over from the retailing giant.
• Jeff Bezos, Amazon's founder, famously banned presentations in favor of such memos back in 2004 - and that has become one of the legends surrounding the retailer's corporate culture and huge success.
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Goldman Sachs made a splash earlier this year when it announced the hiring of a top executive from Amazon Web Services, the online retailers' cloud service. Marco Argenti joined Oct. 21 and hasn't wasted any time bringing over one of his ex-employer's most storied quirks.

Earlier this week, Argenti, Goldman's new co-chief information officer, sent an 800-word memo to the more than 9,000 engineers at the Wall Street bank. Titled "Narrative Memos," it went into detail about how Argenti prefers written memos over PowerPoint presentations.

The memo is one of the first tangible signs of how Argenti and new Chief Technology Officer Atte Lahtiranta, who worked together at Nokia and consider themselves friends, plan to shake up Goldman's engineering division and model its culture more along the lines of Big Tech. Argenti shares the CIO role with George Lee, a longtime Goldman banker to Silicon Valley firms.

The memo was sent as a follow up to an engineering division Town Hall held this week, where outgoing CIO Elisha Wiesel sang self-written songs and played guitar, according to the memo viewed by Business Insider.

The idea of writing narrative memos isn't a new one. Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos famously banned PowerPoint in 2004 and asked for memos instead. The idea, as Bezos explained it at the time, was that crafting a well-written memo requires a clarity of thought that presentations don't. And it's that thought process that's so important for proper decision-making.

Argenti, who was initially skeptical of the idea when he first encountered it Amazon, where he worked for six years, said in the memo that he quickly became a convert.

"The power of the narrative doc is that it takes charisma and presentation flair out of the equation when making decisions," he wrote this week. "It forces the author to think through all facets of a problem and explain them clearly to a group of smart and naturally curious stakeholders, and gives you the opportunity to tell your story without being interrupted."

Meetings structured around a narrative memo include time for reading it at the meeting's start. It's a way to give every participant the same set of facts before beginning the discussion.

One benefit is questions can be answered early, avoiding the problem of people interrupting presentations to ask questions that would be answered later in the deck, Argenti wrote.

The Goldman exec said in the memo that he will soon publish some guidelines and samples. For now, he shared a few suggestions.

First, start with the customer in mind and then work backwards. In doing that, the memo writer must consider five questions: who is the customer, what's the customer's problem or opportunity, what's the most important customer benefit, how do you know what customers want, and what does the customer experience look like.

Second, in writing the memo, it's important to be as "crisp and precise" as possible, and use simple, concrete language instead of hazy constructions, he wrote.

Third and last, the writer should be "objective, factual and humble," he wrote. "Do not be afraid to talk about your failures in addition to your successes. Ask yourself the hardest questions, and answer them objectively without bias."

Argenti said his intention was not to "force the adoption" of memos over presentations. That's different than Bezos' mandated switch.

Thinking more like Big Tech

While both Argenti and Lahtiranta speak in respectful terms about Goldman's 150-year history, they have joined the bank with a mandate to change the engineering division into something that looks more like the Big Tech firms where the two executives spent their early careers.

That may mean looking for ways of making life easier for Goldman engineers, such as getting away from an email-based culture or spurring small changes to improve engineers' ability to be creative.

Argenti, for example, asked employees interested in learning more to reach him via email but also Symphony, Goldman's internal chat function.

Lahtiranta told Business Insider in a recent interview he plans to elevate how third-party developers are treated by Goldman so that they feel like "most valued customers."

Doing so would, in theory, make it more enjoyable for outside developers to use the bank's services, such as its application programming interfaces, or APIs, because they are easier and more elegant than competitors.

To get there will mean executing on an ambitious strategy and making important decisions along the way.

To that end, Argenti has already earned a reputation as someone who prefers memos over presentations.

Wiesel has already ribbed his replacement, coming up with a Top Ten list to describe him, Argenti wrote. The topic? What Argenti is really thinking when he's reading your memo.