Dominant cultures write

The invention of the press proved it by enabling the western world to prevail for centuries.

And yet, many companies opt for an oral culture, mistaking their laziness for time-efficiency.

Here’s why they’re wrong and writing (almost) always wins.

It’s not an arbitrary choice

Written culture > Oral culture sounds arbitrary. Isn't just a matter of personal taste?

Not really.

Ultimately, healthy companies try to optimise their profits and a company's culture is yet another tool to do so. In that context, I believe writing to be more effective.

Compared to speaking, writing:

1. Enables long-term time-efficiency

2. Unlocks talent access/retention

3. Increases capital

Time-efficiency

The argument of the short-sighted

Usually, when pinpointing an unhealthy speaking habit, people will hide behind a seemingly reasonable argument: "it's faster".

In the short term, that might be true.

In the long term? Definitely not.

Why writing is less time-consuming in the long run

1. Write once, read a thousand.

In the long run, it's easy to see the compounding returns of writing:

• Onboarding new recruits

• Getting people up to speed on a project

• Sharing knowledge across a multi-headed organisation

2. Words fly away, writings remain.

Past a certain point, it gets hard to remember everything said over the phone. You might (you will) forget and end-up repeating yourself.

3. Train of thought historicisation

It's not only about remembering the conclusion, but also what got you to that conclusion.

If you don't write, you risk redoing the same meeting over and over again.

Best case scenario: you always reach the same conclusion.

Worst case (and more realistic) scenario: you don’t.

4. No rambling.

Tech maters can be hard to decipher. If you choose to discuss them out loud anyway, either of two things will happen:

1. You'll 3x the time to make sense of that technical topic

2. You'll start rambling to make up for your ignorance

5. Writing ⇒ asynchronous work ⇒ deep work ⇒ productivity

Context switching cripples productivity.

But in a company driven by its written culture, you can let notifications pile up (in Notion, Slack, ...) until there's enough on the same topic to justify a context switch.

6. Writing is thinking.

Malformed ideas stand less of chance written down than spoken out.

Lack of clarity shows more in the written word.

Talent access and retention

Then, writing unlocks talent access.

1. First, because if moving the needle means hopping on a call, it'll be difficult to juggle with different time zones. Your recruitments would be stranded in a smaller geographic area.

2. Then, because you don't get 10x engineers to stay in an organisation with 10 meetings/week.

Increasing capital

Finally, writing is capital building. It's wealth waiting to be leveraged.

Since I started writing, I began to feel the (small) returns of my work.

What I've done as a freelancer can be extended to regular companies.

1. Portfolio

I document everything I do with my clients. It's helpful for all the reasons cited above.

But also because then, the incremental effort to turn these resources into case studies is minimal.

Any company could do the same and post its case studies on socials.

2. Guides & Demand Gen

When I've studied a topic and taken notes doing so, the incremental effort is once again quite small to turn my learnings into high value content offers (atop a demand gen funnel?).

Same goes for companies and research conducted by their employees.

3. Build in public

Building in public is more often than not a viable marketing paradigm. Hence, all of the above becomes all the more relevant.

In this context, a writing culture will make the incremental marketing effort a breeze.

Long term vs Short term

In the end, it all boils down to prioritising the long term over the short term.

Most companies are here to stay, so they'd better focus on the long term.

That loudly echoes my mantra: growth engineering > growth hacking.

"Hacking" is short term. "Engineering" is long term.