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I learned about this interesting and yet, funny thing from one of my friends on memo writing. He works for a multi-national company. Even in the modern era of information and computing technology, his company is still regulating memo writing in accordance to the size of an A4 paper. Strange but it’s true.

They are required to prepare reports in only a single page. Hence, it’s appropriately named “One Page Memo”. The aim is to make the author prepare a simple and precise memo for easy reading and not waste time of upper management.

The memo is supposed to consist of three sections. Section one is a short introduction of about 3 – 4 sentences. Section two is the deliberation section where the author is supposed to present his facts and findings. This is where authors take the opportunity to sell their contributions to make management notice them. Section three is a list of future action steps to be taken to accomplish the goals.

However, some of the authors are beginning to feel the constraint when they have too many success stories to tell. They started to be creative. In order to cramp everything that they want to report to the management, they started to change the font type, reduce the font side and finally, reduce the margins.

The final output is a report that may require a microscope to read :p