If you play with ChatGPT at work, you might lose your job.
That’s what this Wall Street Journal article recently warned. Companies like JP Morgan and Verizon are banning its use at the office. Their leaders are worried about everything from exposing trade secrets to insulting customers. But so far, the warnings and bans have not stopped the knowledge workers of the world from testing it out. According to a survey of 12,000 people, “more than 40% said they use ChatGPT or other AI tools at work.”
I’m not surprised. Who hasn’t dreamed of a bot that answers your email, writes a memo, or drafts an annual performance review? And this technology is just getting started.
But the real, unrecognized career risk is that writing improves your thinking, and thinking is the one reason you’ll be able to keep your job in the years ahead. Call me old fashioned, but I believe we will only stay ahead of the A.I. overlords by practicing leadership on paper. It’s a lesson I learned long ago that’s still practiced at the world’s most valuable companies today.
“Don’t hate me when you read my feedback”
Let’s flash back to May 1998. I’ve finished my first year at business school and left my wife back at our mouse-infested apartment in New York City to start a marketing internship at Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati, Ohio.
It’s my first day of work, and my brand manager for the summer, Ann, is taking me through her expectations for the next twelve weeks. She’s friendly and positive but clearly wants me to understand that she has high expectations. She was just promoted, and I’m her first-ever direct report.
Ann knows the stakes, and she has been in my shoes before. The opportunity, I know well, is ending the summer with a juicy job offer at one of the top companies in the world. I could go back to my apartment—where my wife literally hears mice chewing paper under the bed at night—with a guaranteed position. I could spend my second year of school on cruise control, and we could start paying off the crazy amount of debt I’d accumulated.
But Ann stokes my fear. She warns me that I won’t get an offer unless I successfully complete four projects over the twelve weeks. I get that same feeling I always did on the first day of college classes when the professor hands out a syllabus with 4 tests, 3 group projects, and 6 term papers. How the hell am I going to get all of this done?
She explains that each of my projects should begin with a standard document summarizing the strategy and key steps. So, this is the famous “One Page Memo” that I had heard P&G is crazy about.
What could be so hard about that? In my job before business school, I spent three years writing memos for my bank’s board of directors, making millions of dollars in loan recommendations. And I wrote papers each week at business school and was riding a 4.0 GPA. One pager? No problem.
Ann gives me a handful of examples of past memos for similar projects to use as a reference. Aside from being limited to one page, they seem pretty basic to me. But she makes a point to warn: “I need you to give me your draft before you route it to the team. And don’t hate me when you read my feedback.”
It takes me a day or two to draft my first project memo. In the morning, I go into Ann’s office and drop the document on her seat since she’s away at the moment. I add a sticky note with the words, “Ready for feedback!”
A few hours later and I return to my cube and see my memo returned. Ann reviewed the document, and at first, I assume she had a papercut—because there’s red everywhere.
But the red is just her choice of pen color, and she’s marked up my document a LOT. It takes me the rest of the day to make edits. I drop off version 2, and she returns it hours later with a little less red. We do this dance another couple of times, and Ann finally signs it so I can route it to the rest of the team and get started on the projects that are critical to getting my internship offer.
That night, my wife calls to tell me the stores around our apartment are sold out of mousetraps. She really wants me to get this job offer. I tell her about how I finally got my memos approved and that Ann’s feedback was really helpful. By improving my writing, she helped improve my thinking. Eleven weeks later I return from my internship with a full-time offer.
Good Writing is Good Thinking
One of the many things I learned at P&G was the power of “Leadership on Paper.” The idea is that a clear, concise, well-written document—using a standard format that is common across a large organization—can produce better thinking and decision-making.
First, the act of writing itself helps you craft smart ideas. Paul Graham captures this well in his recent essay:
A good writer doesn't just think, and then write down what he thought, as a sort of transcript. A good writer will almost always discover new things in the process of writing. And there is, as far as I know, no substitute for this kind of discovery.
I still write like this every day, even at our small startup. I’ll get an idea about a new product or solution to a problem and immediately open up a blank page. An outline begins to take shape with specific sections like Objectives, Recommendations, Watch Outs, and Next Steps. Within minutes I’ve fleshed a few random thoughts into a plan of action.
And now, I have something that I can share with my team. This is the second benefit of strong writing—it is a set of thoughts that can effectively go into others’ brains and lead them to improve and act on it.
The best, most long-lived organizations in the world share a consistent way of clearly communicating through writing. Procter & Gamble has its 1-page memo, which countless other companies have copied. Amazon uses an “Internal Press Release” format for major decisions.
These and similar models force leaders to think better through the writing process and give readers—their team members—something useful to react to. It’s like a common language that everyone shares, and it brings several benefits:
Move faster and more efficiently - These documents are sent before a meeting or read at the start so people are prepared to engage and align quickly. That means fewer, shorter meetings, better discussion, and quicker approvals.
Fewer biases and less bullshit - Strong writing gets the facts and figures down in black and white. It’s not about who is buddies with who, and it doesn’t favor the smiling extrovert presenter or the person who is better at Powerpoint.
Allows institutional memory - These documents capture key decisions for future reference. When working on the Tide brand, I could go back through decades of 1-page memos and see the shift in strategy over time and the thinking behind it. It’s also fun to see what the CEO wrote when he was in your shoes 30 years before.
Writing Well Helps Your Personal Life, Too
We do a lot of thinking and planning outside of our work, and I’ve found that writing helps me reduce my stress and make better decisions. I’ve been writing in my journal pretty much every day since 2007 and found it to be a game-changer. Getting your thoughts from the day on paper helps you better reflect, put things in perspective, and even plan for the future.
Communicating is a powerful key to understanding, whether it’s by oral expression or written. The mind naturally aligns itself into a more coherent state when it seeks to transmit knowledge than when it is merely processing it for its own needs. - Jed McKenna
You’re going to think I’m nuts, but two years ago, I surprised my wife at dinner with a recommendation to sell our home in the suburbs and downsize to a smaller place in the city. We got over her memories of mice in the last city living experience, and she signed off on my recommendation. It was one of the easiest and best decisions we’ve ever made.
As for reading, I recommend a media diet rich in thoughtful writing that is worth your precious attention. Don’t allow yourself to be swayed by clickbait or 280 characters. It’s usually just mental junk food.
A few months ago, I got off Twitter because I was tired of the constant thoughtless hot takes and annoying threads. Most tweets are written in a lazy, provocative style meant to generate a knee-jerk response. In addition to books, I mainly read Medium and Substack posts from consistently thoughtful writers. I want my mind influenced by people who make full, reasonable, balanced arguments—and not those who trigger my lizard brain to hit a Like button. You can see some of my favorite writers here.
It’s going to be more and more tempting for us to test out the latest A.I. tools in our work. Part of our human programming is to avoid work and thinking. But instead of going to A.I. to write an email or performance review, perhaps it’s worth rethinking if these chores are worth doing in the first place. That’s the real knowledge work that humans will always be best at.
Bob Gilbreath is a 2x-exit entrepreneur and co-founder of Hearty, a curated matchmaking service that combines top software developers with early-stage, venture-backed startups.