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Fran Soto's avatar

An organization is a group of people and disorder is the natural state.

Aligning into a common vocabulary is what I see best at Amazon.

Just dropping terms of Amazon culture I think everyone would benefit from googling and learning:

- Optimizing for the short-term is a Day-2 culture. Optimizing for the long-term is a Day-1 culture.

- Slow down on 1-way door decisions. Move fast in 2-way door decisions.

- Everyone is encouraged to challenge when something doesn't benefit the customer. Either you help pivot the idea or you get an end-to-end understanding of how it contributes to the customer.

- Jeff set the culture of Amazon to be the most customer-obsessed company. And Blue Origin to be the most decisive company. Both are reflected in the culture.

- Make data-driven decisions

- Create flywheels, virtuous cycles that reinforce themselves

- Set mechanisms and not good intentions

- Define tenets, "unless you know better ones"

- Everybody has to exercise the leadership principles in their role and scope

- Right to left planning. Work backward, always from the customer.

- Culture of writing. Prohibit slides. After writing a well-structured 6-pager, there's no way your understanding is not polished.

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Engineer's Codex's avatar

Have you guys listened to the Founders Podcast by David Senra? He does a deep dive on these letters along with a bunch more on not just Bezos, but great founders/figures in general (like MJ and Kobe). I think you guys would really enjoy it!!

great article btw!! I re-read some of bezos’s most famous letters often, they’re timeless

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