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.
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
I was not familiar with it, thanks for the recommendtation! Any particular episode you suggest to start with, asides from Bezos? A Bryant episode sounds interesting!
I found the experimenting mindset extremely helpful in business and sales.
"You never know what’s going to come up."
I compiled some sales tips and sent them out a few minutes ago, and this is one of them. You won't make every trade and get answers to your perfectly crafted and well-researched cold outreach messages. But you can't do anything other than accept that, move on, and send the next one.
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.
For me, taking a concept (being customer obsessed) and actually integrating it into every part of the company, is the most impressive feat of Bezos.
Thanks for sharing!
I agree Anton.
The hard part is not Jeff having this mindset, but putting systems in place that make this the mindset of the rest
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
I was not familiar with it, thanks for the recommendtation! Any particular episode you suggest to start with, asides from Bezos? A Bryant episode sounds interesting!
I found the experimenting mindset extremely helpful in business and sales.
"You never know what’s going to come up."
I compiled some sales tips and sent them out a few minutes ago, and this is one of them. You won't make every trade and get answers to your perfectly crafted and well-researched cold outreach messages. But you can't do anything other than accept that, move on, and send the next one.
Completely agree, and this is a mind shift that is hard to make.
It's hard to accept failure and rejection, especially when you go a long(mental) distance to initiate something like a cold call.
But that's the only way to gain experience and improve!