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In most of corporate America, you write the press release when your creation is finished. But at Amazon, you write it before you’ve even begun.

“If you were pitching something to Jeff Bezos or other senior managers below Jeff, the first thing you did was write a press release for it — as if it were a product that you were putting out into the world,” says Chris Brown, who spent more than three years at the company and remembers joining at least two pitch meetings with Bezos, the company’s founder and CEO.