All great stories have a structure. Skilled storytellers like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos follow the structure to keep their audiences engaged.
On Wednesday, Bezos joined other tech CEOs (Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg) at a congressional hearing to answer very tough questions challenging their business practices.
Bezos opened his remarks with a personal story that one Twitter commentator labeled “sticky.” What, exactly, made it sticky—or memorable? Structure and scenes.
At its most basic level, an origin story can be divided into a three-act structure. It’s the formula nearly all successful Hollywood movies follow:
Act 1. Setup
Act 2. Rising Action
Act 3. Resolution
Within the acts, vivid scenes and plot points keep the action moving. Here’s how Bezos followed the structure and used details to paint vivid scenes that are hard to forget.
Act 1. Setup
In this act, characters are introduced, scenes are established, and an ‘inciting incident’ propels the hero into the second act. Bezos opened his first act with an immediate introduction of two principal characters: Jackie and Miguel.
Bezos explained how his mom was allowed to stay in school but not allowed to walk across the stage to receive her diploma. He said his mom took night classes to keep up with her education and adding just enough detail to leave the listener with a vivid picture of the scene.
“She would show up with two duffel bags—one full of textbooks, and one packed with diapers, bottles, and anything that would keep me interested and quiet for a few minutes.”
Another character, Miguel, soon enters the picture.
“My dad’s name is Miguel. He adopted me when I was four years old. He was 16 when he came to the United States from Cuba, shortly after Castro took over.”
Once again, Bezos chooses one vivid scene to describe Miguel’s back story.
“My dad arrived in America alone. His parents felt he’d be safer here. His mom imagined America would be cold, so she made him a jacket sewn entirely out of cleaning cloths, the only material they had on hand. We still have that jacket; it hangs in my parents’ dining room.”
The end of Act I typically involves an ‘inciting incident,’ an event or idea that triggers the adventure. For Bezos, it was the idea for Amazon. He left a full-time job at an investment bank in New York City and took off for Seattle to turn his idea into reality.
Act 2. Rising action
This is where the adventure takes off, while the protagonist must overcome a series of obstacles. There’s at least one scene where the crisis reaches a level where the hero’s adventure seems doomed to fail. Bezos’s story had each of these scenes.
“Amazon’s success was anything but preordained,” Bezos said to kick off Act II.
“Investing in Amazon early on was a very risky proposition. From our founding through the end of 2001, our business had cumulative losses of nearly $3 billion, and we did not have a profitable quarter until the fourth quarter of that year. Smart analysts…branded us Amazon.toast.”
Here comes the scene where all seems lost for the story’s main character.
“At the pinnacle of the internet bubble, our stock price peaked at $116, and then after the bubble burst our stock went down to $6. Experts and pundits thought we were going out of business.”
Act 3. Resolution
In Act 3, the hero’s goal is achieved, and, most importantly, achieving the goal transforms the characters or the world in which the characters live.
“Fortunately, our approach is working,” says Bezos to open Act III.
“Eighty percent of Americans have a favorable impression of Amazon overall,” he says, adding that Americans only trust doctors and the military more than the company.
Bezos then presents a list of data points to demonstrate the transformation his company has made on customers and the world. The numbers include:
-Amazon directly employs a million people.
-Amazon’s investments have created more than 700,000 indirect jobs.
-More than 1.7 million small businesses sell products in Amazon’s stores.
-Amazon has pledged $2 billion to fight climate change.
In the final scene, Bezos uses the Amazon origin story as a metaphor for entrepreneurship in America.
“It’s not a coincidence that Amazon was born in this country. More than any other place on Earth, new companies can start, grow, and thrive here,” Bezos said.
“Our country embraces resourcefulness and self-reliance, and it embraces builders who start from scratch. And even in the face of today’s humbling challenges, I have never been more optimistic about our future.”
Bezos has famously banned PowerPoint at executive meetings, favoring memos structure as narratives. He believes that all entrepreneurs, CEOs, and leaders should learn to tell a story.
Just remember, there’s a difference between an average story and a great story. Great stories follow a structure and leave vivid scenes in the minds of their listeners.