#81: Colin Bryar, Co-Author of "Working Backwards;" former Chief of Staff to Jeff Bezos — How Ama...

There was pushback. It was an unpopular decision. But again, Jeff said, we are going to try this. Like, we're all in on this decision. So we're not going to litigate it or relitigate it. And so, you know, Jeff had the credibility. But it does take more time to write a narrative than a slide together. But the thing that people often get confused is the difference between speed and velocity. You can throw something together and for an hour meeting very quickly with slides and have that meeting. But you may make the wrong decision, which takes you off path. And so by slowing down, making sure, okay, do we really understand what we're about to decide? And maybe we need to go through another meeting and, you know, do we have all the issues measured from the time it takes from that point to creating a scalable product that's out there delivering value for customers? We found that was the quickest way to get from point A to point B. A lot of times when people talk about, oh, it's a lot more work or it's going to slow us down, they're not measuring the correct starting and ending point. They're measuring an intermediate ending point. And yeah, you can zip there quickly, but you may never get to where you wanna end up.

Welcome back. This is "From Startups to Grownup." My name is Alisa Cohn, and today I'm thrilled to welcome Colin Bryar to the podcast. Colin joined Amazon in 1998, and he was Jeff Bezos' chief of staff for about a year, which means he shadowed him in every meeting. He is the co-author of "Working Backwards," Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon. I love this book. This book is filled with deep insights and clear tactics about how Amazon built its distinctive management approach and culture. We discussed all of that and about how Amazon evolved its way into some of its well-known practices like the 6-page memo and the single-threaded leader. We also talked about what it really means to be customer obsessed and how Jeff's goal was to create an invention machine. This discussion is so rich and Colin and I unpack a lot of insights as well as give you tactics that you can implement. So please enjoy this amazing conversation with Colin Breyer. Colin, welcome to the show. I'm so excited to have you here.

Oh, well, thank you for having me here.

I'm so excited. Um, you know, I, before I, I have to say, before we started recording, I was fangirling. So I'm gonna tell everybody what I told you, which is that I've read your book twice called Working Backwards. I've read it twice. And actually I signed it to a number of clients and, and some of them had book, had book clubs about your book Working Backwards. And it's about the Amazon way, everybody. So we're gonna get tons of amazing, you know, insights today from Colin. And Colin, you're the expert because you joined Amazon in 1998 when the company was 4 years old and you were on, on Amazon's senior leadership team and you were the chief of staff-ish. That's what I think they called it, something different, but the chief of staff to Jeff. And you wrote this book called Working Backwards, and I just loved it. And I guess I wanna start by asking you, in the beginning of the book, you talk about being Amazonian. Like, what does that mean to you? Can you tell us what being Amazonian means?

Yeah, so being Amazonian, you know, someone asked Jeff a couple years ago what was Amazon's culture. So if I had to encapsulate it into 4 things, it would be, you know, customer obsession, not competitor obsession, Second is long-term thinking, with a longer-term time horizon than most of its competitors. The third one would be invention. And if you claim to be an inventive person, you also have to be willing to fail. You know, it's— Jeff would often say it's not an experiment if you know it's going to work beforehand. And then the last one was really pride in operational excellence, which by that it means getting the little details right, even though no one's looking over your shoulder because most of the work you do it's not gonna be audited. No one's gonna be, you know, looking over your shoulder. So that really has to come from within. So I think being Amazonian, really, it would be an expression of those four principles.

That's so clear. Was that like Jeff, like the day he started Amazon and that came from him? Or would you say that like that those four principles sort of evolved over time? Or how did, how do you view that?

The first three have been around ever since I got to Amazon and, you know, Being good operators was something that we all had to learn at, at Amazon. You know, I wouldn't say we were particularly good at it when we first started, but had a lot of people coming in from companies like GE, studied a lot of companies like Toyota, Motorola, and learned how to become good operators. And we realized that it was a critical element of being a low-cost retailer. You know, if you wanna ship a $20 book across the country and the margins are pretty small, you actually have to be very efficient in order to do that profitably. So, That last one was a skill that we had acquired over the years. But the other 3, you know, that just, just part of who Jeff was, you know, he's hardwired that way.

Yeah, that makes sense. You know, Colin, when you joined Amazon, did you think like, this is a rocket ship, get me on this ship? Or were you like, okay, I'll try it?

Well, you know, we'd started working with Amazon. We had a software and services firm and knew that it was something special was going on. You know, I wouldn't say it was a done deal that it was going to be a success. That, you know, it has become. And be, you know, there was a lot of risk to it. And when, when we joined the company, you know, their charts were going up into the right, but there were also pundits, finance, you know, financial analysts saying, hey, Amazon's gonna, you know, Amazon toast, Amazon bomb. We went through the, you know, the dot-com bust. So we knew something was special going on, but didn't know what would turn out to be what, what it turned out to, you know, today to be.

So, yeah, I guess it's hard to really see that in advance. Yeah. Now, you— we talked a little bit about this already. Customer obsession. Can you riff on that? Like, like, I think it's so— it's both very simple but also kind of profound. And also anyone can say customer obsession all day, every day, but you have to really act like it. Otherwise you make different choices. So I'm just like curious to hear how that showed up in Amazon day to day.

Yeah. So it, the, it showed up with the very first day I started at Amazon. It, it was the why I'd met Jeff and he came in the room and said, we wanna be Earth's most customer-centric company. And I thought, okay, yeah, everyone says that. And, uh, but yeah, really got to understand how Amazon actually has lived up to it and, and really exceeded it. Um, one thing is it just, you have to weave it into your everyday processes, make sure that, you know, customer obsession is part of who you are and what you do. So it's not just enough to read it and understand it. You have to act it out every day. And, you know, a couple examples of, of where I think Amazon acts it out in, in different ways than most companies I've seen since leaving Amazon. One is just what metrics Amazon looks at. If you were to flip through its weekly business review deck, about 75% of the metrics would directly measure one aspect of the customer experience or another. So just by looking at that deck, you get a great idea of what did our customers experience last week. You also know what the revenue was and, you know, profit and things like that. But, but those are two different ways of measuring the same thing. You can't have a big viable business unless you have a consistent, great customer experience. So one is just what you look at and measure and the importance you place on those metrics. And another simple example would be how Amazon takes an idea and decides whether to greenlight it or build up a product. It's through the project process called working backwards. And, you know, what was invented or developed in early 2000s, we realized that we weren't keeping the customer in mind enough, and we wanted to make sure that the customer was with us from the very seed of the idea all the way through the journey of launching it. And, you know, so it's a customer-obsessed process where you write a press release. You know, you, we have to express your idea in a press release as if you're talking to the customer in terms the customer can understand. So those are two concrete ways on which Amazon has weaved customer obsession into how it does, you know, everyday things.

Yeah. And did, did, when you were there, did it, did, was there like a, I think there was like an empty chair at the table or something. Was there like a ritual of an empty chair at the table? You know, like, eh, not really.

We talked about that and I personally never saw it. There were some empty chairs, but it never, no one ever said it. Customer said, say, yeah, this is for the customer. There were other ways that we made sure that the customer was there. You know, like I talked about those, you know, two forms. But I'm not saying it never happened. I just personally had never, I saw someone set a chair and say, hey, this is the customer. It's just sitting here.

I love how we're separating out myth from reality. That's excellent. I appreciate that. Now, um, Jeff wanted to create an invention machine and specifically he talked about inventing on behalf of the customer. And I definitely wanna get into like the processes and principles that you get into in Working Backwards, but like maybe could you just sort of say big picture why you need principles and processes to create an invention machine?

Yes. One is that it's not enough just to talk about who you want to be and/or try harder. You know, I think most people have good intentions and are trying pretty hard already at their job. So, you know, to say we're going to try to do this better, you're not asking for any change in behavior, so you should not expect any change in outcome. And so what we needed to do was we needed to have principles and processes that reinforce those things on, on an everyday basis. And yeah, they didn't come all at once. It wasn't like we decided we had this theoretical construct of the Amazon operating system on how it works. We, we're facing real problems and real scaling challenges, and we tried different solutions. Some of them didn't work, and when that happened, we would throw them out and try something else. Until we settled in on something that really worked, worked for Amazon. So, um, that's why you need the, the principles and, and processes, because you can't just ask people to try harder. Um, and, and so, uh, and it was a lot of trial and error. You know, the things we described in the book are— those are the fully formed final version of those processes, but there was a lot of, uh, a lot of steps and mistakes that we made to, you know, to, to, to get to that point.

Yeah, a lot of tinkering. I definitely wanna get into those. But like, even if you talk about processes and, and I know you guys talk about mechanisms and practices and principles, I'm just gonna play devil's advocate. Doesn't that slow everything down? Don't you think processes slow everything down? Like how, how can you make the case that those are the ones, those are the things that create an invention machine? Especially because it's like, shouldn't invention be, eureka, let's do this.

Yeah. The, the, there aren't too many, um, eureka type inventions that we observed at Amazon, first of all. So, you know, to create that invention machine, you need to have a factory that, and, or the primordial soup that actually is the raw ingredients for an invention. So, and you only want as much process as you need and no more. So it's not as if we created these processes because we wanted to slow ourselves down and be crushed by bureaucracy. It was in fact just the opposite. We had tried a lot of the tools and techniques and processes at other companies that just weren't working for us. In a lot of cases, we were operating beyond the bounds of the, you know, tolerances of software or solutions that we're using. So we had to, you know, invent our, and build our own at sometimes. And then, you know, other times we would look at companies and say, we would bring in, for instance, a GE, a planning process from GE, Tried it for a couple years, it didn't really work for us. And so we settled in on, you know, processes that were lightweight, that were scalable and repeatable, and that were teachable. Like a good example is you can have, you know, there are always people at some companies who are great at spotting talent and you ask them to interview everyone, but they get burned out. They're not doing their regular job. So we wanted to come up with a scalable, repeatable, but teachable process for how do you hire people so you don't always rely on those, you know, 2 or 3 experts who they don't even know how they spot talent. Like, yeah, I just thought this would be a good hire. I can't really explain my process. So we needed to encode a process, you know, some of that thinking into a process that you could then teach to other people. So those are the reasons. And then the last thing I'll say about the process is you really have to be careful when you adopt it that you don't let the process control you. You use the process to, um, to further, you know, enhance your chances of hitting your outcomes. And so whenever you see that, hey, the, the process— I'm doing this just to check a box— that's when you want to question, is this process really helping us, or is it slowing us down? So yeah, we're not process and control freaks at Amazon, but We wanted only as much as we needed so we could grow 10x, you know, and 10x again. Because small companies don't need a lot of process. If you're all at the same table, you can solve an issue right there and then just by looking over and talking to someone. You can't do that when now you're in two rooms, two buildings, two different cities, or two different countries.

Yeah. One thing that you say in the book is that when, you know, Jeff was like there and there was like a, you know, tens and then hundreds of people around him, he would just like say his— say what he had to say and everybody could hear it and they didn't need a process. And you develop these processes as a way to scale that experience.

Yes. Yeah.

Yeah. And one thing you just talked about is the thing I wanted to start with, which is your hiring process, because, you know, it sort of all starts with people. And I wanted to ask you about it because I certainly want to ask you if you could sort of summarize the hiring process. And then I'd love to talk to you about Bar Raisers. But it's interesting that you said quote unquote lightweight process and, you know, like not, like not to have the process run you. I totally buy in, but it's a lot to explain. I mean, it's a, it's kind of a long chapter in the book about like your hiring process. So it does sound, I don't wanna say, you know, I said it sounds like there's a lot of weight to it. And yet I understand that the only way you can actually have rigorous hiring is to have kind of prescribed steps. So, How do you, how do you think about that?

Well, you know, again, we did it out of necessity. So it wasn't that, hey, we, we just want to come invent our own hiring process. We actually learned a lot from Microsoft on how they did some hiring. They had a similar element, some similar elements called an as appropriate interviewer. We, you know, looked at that and said, how can we learn from that, incorporate that into about Bar Raisers, but when it was developed, it was 1999, and we had what an HR executive called new people hiring new people hiring new people, and without a formal process. And so what— and, you know, people have the best of intentions. So what they do is they tap into their network, they bring in people they work with, they use whatever interviewing techniques that they had at their old company, and, and whatever culture they had. Because we didn't give them any, any tools to do it. And so we realized, and we're all in one building, you know, building in '98. And, and so you would be people in the hallways and sitting in, you know, desks in the hallways. All the rooms are crowded and you realize, well, if this person interviewed with that manager versus this manager, they would not have gotten hired or vice versa. And so if you take a look at, well, how can we grow 10x? In a consistent way by consistently raising the bar, we realized everyone was using their own subjective measure on who do I hire. And that is not a good— that's a good way to lose control of your company, by the way. And so what we wanted to do, the light bulb went on, is we wanted the hiring process to be a data-driven exercise to gather data to see if this candidate who was going to come on board would reinforce the culture and if this candidate would be a good leader, you know, tomorrow and next year for Amazon. And the way that we used to do questions like brain teasers, you know, how many marbles can you fit in a football stadium? And that tells you how people think, but it really didn't predict how they were going to perform. And that's why we used behavioral interviewing, because that was the best predictor of is this person going to be a successful leader at Amazon. So the bulk of the process is mapping a candidate's past behavior on Amazon's leadership principles. You know, someone's been working for 15 years and they're not customer obsessed. They're probably not going to be customer obsessed when they start, you know, at their next job. And so you want to, you want to tease that out, not by asking what they think about customer obsession, but how did you exhibit customer obsession in your job? Give me specific examples.

Oh, I love that. That's a really good point. You know, especially if you're hiring more senior people. Can you summarize, you know, sort of the, the, the high points of the hiring process and some of the rigorous pressure you had around it?

Sure. And so the, the Bar Raiser, it's the name of the process. There's also a role I'll talk about in that called, called the Bar Raiser. A person performs the role. So there are two things. But, you know, at its high level, as I mentioned, it is a data-driven exercise. And so every interviewer has a specific role. And, you know, Amazon now has 16 leadership principles. So each interviewer really gets 2 or 3 leadership principles that they're supposed to collect data in order to map the candidate's past behavior onto did they exhibit and how did they exhibit these leadership principles. And so each interviewer only bring— they're only collecting one small piece of the puzzle. So if you have 5 interviewers, you know, I am— I only have 20% of the information. So I've got a job to do. I'm very focused on my interview. I know what I need to do. I have to write down all of my, you know, assessment and questions and then bring it to what's called the debrief where everyone else brings these puzzle pieces together. And the goal is to help the hiring manager make an informed decision. And so, you know, based on the feedback, it has to be written. There's also, several parts that are trying to drive bias out of it. You know, if I interview someone, I can't say, hey, this is a great interview with candidate, go try to sell them. It's like, I don't want to hear that because I've got my job to do. I don't really want— and so you're not even allowed to see anyone's feedback until that, that debrief. And then once you get all of— assemble all of the data, what's interesting is the hiring manager does not run the debrief meeting. It's the Bar Raiser, which is this role And the Bar Raiser is a person who's a process expert at interviewing. They cannot report into the hiring manager, and that is to remove what we call urgency bias. Like, they, you know, if I'm a hiring manager and, you know, especially in the early days, if I didn't hire people, I would not get my, my job done. So if someone's on the fence, like, oh, let's try to bring them in. Most people overestimated the, the cost of bringing that person in because then it takes a year to manage them out. And, you know, team has been pulling double duty to cover for that poor performance. And then a year later, you're still in the same hole you were even— well, you're in an even deeper hole. So we had a role called the Bar Raiser, who their job was to help the hiring manager make an informed hiring decision. They had veto power, so they could say this person is not going to raise the bar. In practice, a Great bar raiser never uses that. I think in 1,500 or so interviews, I saw it used twice. Once was right when we were starting out, and once was with a new executive who thought, well, I can hire anyone I want. I'm a VP, why can't I do that? So, you know, he didn't really understand the process. So, you know, good bar raiser gets the panel to make a great hiring decision. So it's all about behavioral interviewing, mapping on the candidate's behavior on top of Amazon's leadership principles. That was the— so that's the objective criteria versus subjective criteria. And then driving bias out of the, of the process through requiring people to take written notes, to make their vote without talking to anyone, and have the bar raiser not get caught up in this urgency bias. But so it's a couple of different inner elements that work together. It was Amazon's first, I would say, scalable and repeatable process. And it's largely the same today in 2024 as it was in 1999 when, when it started. So, another last unique thing about it, it's not an HR process and it's not owned by HR. It's owned by bar raisers. So people who are passionate about interviewing and attracting great talent. And so You know, it really started that way and it's maintained that core. And we piloted it in one organization. Another sign of a good process is that other groups started saying, hey, can we use this Bar Raiser thing that you guys are trying in the product development group? So it started to spread organically, and that's only mandated for all salaried positions. Amazon was going to use the Bar Raiser process.

Oh my God.

That's in a nutshell how it started. And I think it's been a competitive edge for Amazon for a number of years.

Yeah, I love that so much. How does a Bar Raiser, if they're, if they're sort of, if they're trying not to use their veto because, because people and influence and decision-making, right? For a lot of good reasons, but they're trying to drive the process to make the good decision. How, what are some activities or behaviors the Bar Raiser exhibits to make sure that a good decision is made without having to use their veto?

Yeah, first of all, the Bar Raiser has to go through some training on how to do it. And it's a good leadership opportunity because you do have to exert influence over a group of people who, you know, a lot of them don't report to you. And the way that the Bar Raiser does ensure that is looks at the data. You know, it's not what did you think about the candidate, it's what data did you collect? Let's, let's— and then you have to, if the feedback isn't you know, if it's short, like, I had the lunch meeting, and so this— I want to hire this candidate. You say, well, you've kind of wasted an interview slot there because you didn't bring any information. You know, just saying, I want to hire that person, there's no additional information that you're bringing to the debrief meeting. So making sure that the Bar Raiser knows and tells people, here's what good feedback looks like, here are types of questions you can ask to get this data. And when you look at the data, At the debrief meeting, you have that discussion. You go up, the bar raiser typically goes up on the whiteboard, or if it's a virtual one, you know, whatever the equivalent is. Okay, let's, you know, reasons to hire, reasons not to hire, and list the leadership principles and look at the data. And then also ask if anyone wants to change their vote. There's no shame in changing your vote, because again, I only had 20% of the information in my interview. Now I'm looking at all 100%, and I could say, Oh, there's some data that was gathered that actually made me change my mind. So it's, you know, that's not a flaw. That's a feature of the product, the process.

Process.

So that is how the bar— those are some ways in which the bar raisers, they're not trying to prevent the hiring manager from hiring someone. They're trying to help them make a great hiring decision.

Right. So that's interesting. So like you have specific data on the leadership principles. Are they customer, are they customer obsessed? Do they have a bias for action? Right? Are they frugal? You know, whatever, you know, all those, all the different elements. And then also you didn't really say this, but also there's like room for, do they have the experience of the job function? Yeah.

I get, so there, well, for, for some interview, for positions like software engineering, they're functional competencies. You know, you're gonna have to write code., and, you know, sit, sit down with someone and actually write code at an interview. Um, it's— the Bar Raiser is not prescriptive on how you do that, but the functional competencies for like a product manager, you can get all of that through behavioral interviewing. So there aren't theoretical case studies that, you know, Amazon asks, because again, that if you ask me a case study, I'll tell you, I'll tell you what you either you think you want to hear, or I'll just say, here's how I think this thing should be done, but it won't actually give any data on how would I, how have I acted in a similar situation? So you can use behavioral interviewing to cover your case studies, but you're actually finding out what the candidate did, not just how would you approach this complicated, how would you design Amazon Prime? Well, you don't, if they've never designed a subscription service, you know, then you would, a behavioral one would be, tell me about, time when you had to develop a pricing situation for a program and you were trying to do à la carte pricing or subscription pricing. Walk me through how you made the decision. And if they hadn't done any of that, then like, I don't really care how they would think about Amazon Prime. I want to care about what they did with their own pricing scenario in their last job.

I love that. That's so good. Now, something you also alluded to was, you know, there's a vice president and he's saying, I can hire anyone I want. You bring someone in with 10 years of experience, 15, 20 years of experience. They're executives. They're used to, don't micromanage me. I know how, I know how to hire. I know how to run meetings, all those things. And yet Amazon has a certain way of doing that. How do you, how do you handle the fact that I, and I also, I would just think that Amazon brings in people who are confident, who are hard charging, who are Type A and who are kind of like, hey man, I've hired before. I know how to do it. Get outta my way.

Yeah, so there, with some processes, you need to figure out what's negotiable and non-negotiable. So what's non-negotiable is doesn't really matter which product team you're in, what level you are, you have to use the Bar Raiser, uh, process, yeah, in, in order to hire people. So that there's like, there's actually no way around it physically to open up a job rack without a Bar Raiser and have, you know, someone there. But But the— and, you know, part of it is explaining to new hires, why does this process exist? What are the benefits? And, you know, what are some risks or weaknesses to be aware of too? And after you've tried it for a while, you're welcome to suggest some improvements or even a different process. But you can't a priori just say, I'm not using this one. I'm going to start with my own process. So a lot of processes or, you know, tenets or principles at Amazon, they state it and then at the bottom it says, unless you know something better. So yeah, not these processes, they will evolve over time. You know, Amazon had 10 leadership principles when they came out in 2005, was 14 in the mid-2000s, and now it has 16. So, you know, nothing's ever set in stone. You were always learning and you, so you do wanna have some ability to get better, but just stating that, hey, this one's non-negotiable. You know, if you— how you build products, you want to use Agile, something else, that's fine. You know, use what you want. But if you're hiring people, we know that this works for Amazon.

Yeah, for sure. So if the— by the way, that's a key phrase, like, we know this works for Amazon. How can companies, in particular startups, but any company, implement something to learn from this Bar Raiser like today? Like, what advice do you have? Because it's not like, take our bar raiser, which maybe is a good answer, but what advice do you have for companies to implement something out of this today?

Well, first of all, ask yourself, am I having a problem in this area? You know, so if it's, if it's not broken, I mean, if it's working, don't try to fix it, you know? And, and so that'd be one thing. If you're happy with your hiring process, stay with it. You know, um, we're not out to make— with Working Backwards, we're not out to make the world look and act like Amazon. It's just that we felt that there were some pretty cool advances in management science that Amazon had created that we just didn't feel that story had been told so people could study it and then make their own decision on whether they want to adopt it. Um, then the second thing would be look at, well, what was the problem BarRaisers was trying to solve? Am I having similar types of problems? Is bias creeping into my, my interview process? Am I always relying on the same people to do all of my hiring? You know, do I have a scalable, consistent hiring process across divisions in the company? If you have one or more of those problems, then BarRaisers or something like it is probably a good solution to look at and investigate. So those would be a couple of things I would counsel. One, if it's— if you're not having the problem, you don't adopt it just because Amazon does it. And then two, understand the why behind it, because these processes, they're not conceptually difficult. They do require a lot of discipline, uh, to, you know, to implement. I do, full stop, they do. So if you're going to do it, you actually have to— you can't just dip your toe in the water. You have to go You know, try it and stick with it for, for, for, you know, a couple of months at least to see if it's working for you.

Yeah. And reinforce it.

Yes. Yeah.

Let's talk about the Six Page Memo. Another thing that I thought was juicy and delicious in your book, you talk about the end of PowerPoint, right? The day there was a memo that came out and said no more PowerPoint. Can you bring us back to those moments to really explain why PowerPoint was prohibited and how you came up with 6-page memo.

Yeah. So, um, first of all, it was banned at that one point in time for Jeff Bezos' staff meeting, uh, you know, for the senior leadership. It wasn't, um, starting on— what was it, June of 2004— there's no more PowerPoint at Amazon. But, you know, again, this was a response to a specific problem we were having at a specific time. Jeff would have a 4-hour staff meeting with the 14 senior leaders of the company, there'd be 2 or 3 groups that would come in and present. They were doing slide presentations. We tried, and people would not get through their presentations. People, you know, executives would be out asking questions that would be answered on page 7. We weren't really making high-quality decisions. We tried different things. Okay, you have to have this we had slide templates and, you know, you can't make the font sizes this way and you have to feel like, but we tried all those things and it wasn't working. Jeff and I had been also, you know, my, one of my jobs as chief of staff, I was working with Jeff at that time, was to help him be a set, better CEO. So we read an essay by Edward Tufte, who is a professor emeritus now at Yale and wrote a great essay called The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, how, corrupts from within. And we realized, you know, we were using a presentation tool for decision-making. And so at the heart of it, we wanted to make high-quality decisions, and this tool was not a good decision-making tool for us. And so we said, Jeff said in June, okay, starting next Tuesday, I think this is on a Wednesday, starting next Tuesday, there's gonna be no more slides at my staff meeting. Everyone has to come in, with, uh, and it was actually a 4-page memo, was, was the, the initial note. So that changed. We kind of ended up on 6. I can explain that in a little bit later, but, um, we're going to try it. So there were a couple things about that decision. One, it wasn't rash. It was, we had been trying a couple things that weren't working, done some research, and, but it was decisive. It's like, there were no exceptions. You know, I got people calling me saying I'm calling, I'm presenting next Tuesday. Can we get an exception? And, you know, Jeff's like, no, we're gonna stick with it. And having read the first 100 or so narratives at Amazon, at least the beginning ones were not very good. I'll tell you that, you know, some people would just copy bullet points and, you know, so it'd be a Word document with essentially bullet points in there. I'm like, well, no, that's not really the intent.

It was like the slides translated to the bullet points.

So yeah, it took us a while to get good at that. But the other thing, it was a reverse a reversible decision. So, you know, decisiveness and course correcting, like 4 to 6 pages for instance, was more important than, uh, well, really, should we study this some more? Should we maybe do a study on slides versus narratives? Because it was reversible. If it didn't work, 6 weeks later we could have just gone back to slides and made the same lower quality decisions that we had been making. But it really, um, 3 years later Jeff called it one of the best decisions Amazon has ever made. He does not use those terms, that term like that lightly. And it really was a powerful decision because for a number of reasons. One is that it just the amount of information that you get from the presenting team to the decision-making body, you know, which was before it was the speakers to the audience, but now it's from the writers to the people in the room. Was just a much more, uh, effective high-bandwidth way to get information across in the same, you know, hour meeting. So you get about 10, um, you get about 10 times as much information across than you would with slides, um, you know. And you— we used a tool that is, um, you know, slides have this nice hierarchical, um, linear thinking, but the world doesn't work that way. And so we wanted a tool that mimicked more how the world actually works. The other thing is, um, it puts some friction on the, the— I call them the presenters, but now they're the writers. You know, you can throw together a couple slides and start talking and not having your idea well thought through, and, and then, but you still have to come and make a decision. So we wanted to put some friction to really get clarity of thought, um, because, um, Again, our goal was to make high— increase the velocity of high-quality decisions. So you wanted to have high-quality, unbiased, objective data going into the process. And that was just a more efficient way of doing that than slides. It required some more work upfront by the writing team, but we found out that it was well worth it because the impact of the decisions we were making were getting larger and larger and larger over time. So those were a few of the reasons why Jeff said, It was one of the best moves that have been made. And then, you know, talked about a sign of a good process is that you don't have to mandate it. Other groups just started using narratives because they realized it was a better tool that would make them more effective at their jobs. So, you know, then eventually it became, well, why are you using slides for a decision-making tool? Like, you just— we should just write narratives. And so, you know, it's spread out through osmosis. It wasn't mandated other than in the very beginning, you know, to jumpstart it. But so those are a couple of interesting stories about how it started and why it actually worked. And, you know, it does take a while to get there too, by the way, to get good at writing and reading narratives.

Yeah, by the way, something I tell my clients all the time is like, you have to do this badly before you can do it well, because doing it badly is the first step of like practicing and, realizing that wasn't the right way to do it, doing a different way. And I think people sometimes don't have the patience to do it badly at first.

Yes. And the— where you can do it faster than we did at Amazon, one is share examples of what good looks like. And even if it's a different topic. So you— here's a high-quality narrative with, you know, clarity of thought. Share it so people know, okay, this is— this is where the bar is. And that's one of the reasons how we settled into 6 pages, by the way, is We, with the right information density, we thought it would take about 3 minutes to read a page. So 6 pages, it's really dictated by the length of the meeting. So for an hour meeting, 6 pages, 6 times 3 is 18. You get 20 minutes of reading, 40 minutes of discussion. And in that 20 minutes of reading, it's all silent. It's kind of eerie and weird for the first time that you step into the room. But if you were to look at it through a different spectrum, you would just see a massive amount of information being transferred from the writers over to the rest of the people in the room. So now you're having a data-driven— dive deep is one of Amazon's leadership principles, you know, diving deep into the data, making a data-driven, high-quality decision. So those are a couple of things why it is such a powerful tool.

I think that's so powerful. I think it's so powerful. But I guess I would also ask, Well, maybe first I would just say that one of the things you talk about in the book, and I think it's so important, is that with slides and presenting, someone who's a charismatic presenter and an influential presenter is kind of like, you know, privileged in that kind of medium, whereas somebody who's a little more monotone or whatever is less advantaged.

Yeah, we want to— Yes.

I just wanna, I wanna hear what you say about that point. Yeah.

We wanted to get rid of that bias, which is, you know, charisma or, you know, presentation bias. You know, most times when people ask, well, how did that meeting go? Or how, you know, people say, oh, this, the slides are awful, or the presenter was boring. The people, customers don't really care what the slides look like or how engaging the speaker was. They care about, is this company making decisions that will improve my life through its products and services? So we wanted the ideas to, you know, to float to the top. A question we often get is, well, aren't you just now advantaging people who are good writers? And good, the best narratives aren't gonna win Pulitzer Prizes. They're very objective with data. They seek the truth. And some of the best narratives that I've ever read were written by people whose first language wasn't English. So it's really the clarity of thought and the truth-seeking, those are two elements that make for a great narrative. And you could, that is a teachable skill. Again, you can't teach someone to be taller or smarter. They come out, they are what they are, but you can teach them how to write these types of documents in order to help make better decisions.

Yeah, for sure. Now when Jeff did that, and you know, you had, you were the one who got the calls to, that had to reinforce that. Like, yes, we met you. Yes, yes. As in Tuesday. Yes. Like, I just wanna say that a lot of companies these days, I think, have a little bit of a pushback culture, a little bit of a like, "Oh, that's gonna be a waste of, you're gonna make us do so much extra work and you know, we don't wanna do that." Was there that kind of thing at Amazon? And how did Jeff and you handle the fact that they didn't wanna do that?

Yeah, so there was pushback. It was an unpopular, decision. Um, you know, but, but again, Jeff said we are going to try this, like we're, we're all in on this decision, so we're not gonna litigate it or re-litigate it. And so, you know, Jeff had the credibility to, you know, okay, Jeff's pretty smart guy, you know, and he's obviously looked at this, so we are going to, to try it. Um, but it does take more time to write a narrative than, than a slide together. But the, the The thing that people often get confused is the difference between speed and velocity. You can throw something together and for an hour meeting very quickly and with slides and have that meeting, but you may make the wrong decision, which takes you off path. And so by slowing down, making sure, okay, do we really understand what we're about to, you know, decide? And maybe we need to go through another meeting and, you know, do we have all the issues? Measured from the time it takes from that point to creating a scalable product that's out there delivering value for customers. We found that was the quickest way to get from point A to point B. A lot of times when people talk about, oh, it's a lot more work or it's going to slow us down, they're not measuring the correct starting and ending point. They're measuring an intermediate ending point. And yeah, you can zip there quickly, but you may be going off into the wrong— often are going off into the wrong direction. And then you're zigging and zagging, so it takes you longer to get where, or you may never get to where you wanna end up.

Yeah, so back to long-term view for sure. And then also you have to have a real company view in mind. Otherwise it feels like, well, I'm already working 60 hours a week. I have X, now I can't spend 10 hours doing my 6-page memo. But it's more like a question of the trajectory of the company overall.

Yeah, and whether you're working 60, 50, or, you know, whatever that number is, we switching to narratives, um, you're, you're going to be more productive. I actually now find it harder to write slides and presentations than narratives because it's like, what do I take out? This is a complicated issue. Um, I, I don't know what to take out, whereas, you know, I know how to write a narrative and, you know, put, uh, you know, a well-structured argument in 6 pages together. So you can get good at it. And, um, you know, again, what's What's the cost of making a bad hire? A lot of people, you know, underestimate that cost. What's the cost of making a low-quality decision? A lot of people underestimate that too. So when you're looking at the 60 hours, how many of the 60 hours is making up for sloppy decisions that we made without the right data or, you know, tools to make those types of decisions?

Yeah, that's great. So I want to move to your WBR meetings and again, sort of the practice that it took to get those meetings. You said the initial meetings were disasters. And so I'd love to hear about the iteration it took to— what is the WBR meeting and how did you kind of iterate into it?

Yeah, so the WBR, it ended up, you can think of, it's really a meeting with weekly business review. WBR is, it answers 3 questions really. One is how did the business do last week? Two is, you know, are we on track to hit our goals? And three was what did our customers experience last week? Most companies actually do a pretty decent job at 1 and 2, by the way, looking at, you know, the outputs. But how did our customers do? A lot of companies do not measure that to the level, you know, that Amazon, you know, goes through and measures that in the WBR. And we'd be being customer obsessed. We just had, you know, Jeff would say often like we have the unshakable conviction, which means you're not gonna convince him otherwise that the long-term interests of customers and shareholders are perfectly aligned. And so we wanted to make sure that we were provide consistently providing, you know, a great customer experience. By the way, part of that customer experience has— it's, you know, speed, quality, and, and cost. So you— we wanted to have high service and, and low cost. And in order to do that, you've got to measure a lot of things to, to get right. Um, you, you look at what an Amazon weekly business review would be for, you know, typical line of business, it's probably, you know, 300 or so metrics. So there's a lot of metrics. You know, some companies say, well, I just want the one metric to rule them all. Or let's talk about the 5 most important ones. The challenge with that is it's either such a high composite metric that you have to— the rest of the meeting you're talking about, well, what were all the factors that went into it? Or, um, the, the other problem is that on any given week, some metrics are more important than others. So you have to monitor, you know, are we delivering on time? Are our prices, um, you know, competitive with Walmart and Best Buy this week? Um, or is there something going on in the fulfillment center? You don't actually know which one is important until you look at the data. So we had to come through a, a way to, um, you know, look at a whole lot of data to really get a comprehensive and data-driven answer to those 3 questions. You know, Jeff, as often, often he does, there was a fork in the road. Like a lot of companies, you say, well, I'm an executive, I want to focus on big ideas and, and vision. Jeff rejected that premise and said, I'm a senior leader at the company. I want to have a detailed understanding of what's happening at a very granular level. Across the company, and I want all of my senior leaders to do the same. So what process can I come up with so our senior leaders can, you know, again, dive deep, um, customer obsessed? Those are two examples of weaving two Amazon leadership principles into a process called the weekly business review. And how do we get through and, and do that? So it did take us a while to get there. Um, you can't look at— in the meeting's an hour, so you can't, um, study 300 metrics in depth. So it it switches to exception-driven. You know, you're focusing on variances. A lot of companies get caught up in these metrics meetings are really status reports about what did my group do. That's not the purpose of this. It's looking at exceptions to figure out how to answer those questions and get better next week. So, you know, has the meeting has to be run efficiently. You have to be willing to talk about your mistakes because that's the way you're going to get better. And that is where we had to learn how to do that. And, you know, we had to create an environment. I would say Amazon's still not perfect at it, but where people, um, you— the last thing you want them to do is try to hide a mistake, or like, I hope I don't get called on, um, you know, my metrics toward the end of the deck. And so, meeting, so maybe it'll run over. Um, you don't want that because that's a missed learning opportunity for everyone else in the room. Um, so you have to do a lot of work beforehand to look at, analyze the variances, be prepared to talk at talk through them. It's also one of the most expensive meetings your company is gonna have. They're, you know, 60 people for the Amazon retail one. You have sometimes even more. So you wanna make that efficient and you only wanna talk about things that really matter and help you get better the next week. Those are a couple of elements and it was a journey that didn't happen overnight. We talk about, we work with companies to, help them find out ways to discover their input metrics. You know, just calling something as an input metric, um, is— doesn't make it an input metric. An input metric— output metrics are things like revenue, you know, stock price, NPS, Net Promoter Score. Input metrics are the things that you can measure. If they're done right, they will result, um, your output metrics will, will go in the right direction. So you have to uncover those input metrics and then start to measure them. And that's real work to build software to do that and then to get teams to focus on the inputs and not, not just the outputs.

Yeah, that's a real culture change too.

It is. And most companies we've worked with are so heavily focused on the outputs. We wanted to drive the outputs too, you know. Yeah, the Amazon, you don't get to be a $600 billion revenue company without caring about revenue, but we just realized the best way to have a profitable large business was to instrument the business so we knew what are all of the drivers that will make a, you know, highly profitable large business that serves customers extremely well and efficiently.

Yeah. One thing you talked about, and you talked about in the book and you talked about it here, is like the difficulty in getting people to speak the truth on their mistakes. And how did you, and you say in the book, you talk about actually people kind of sniping at each other and they smell blood in the water. Yeah. And it is a hard drive, it's known as a hard-driving culture. What tools did you use to implement more psychological safety? And what advice do you have for companies trying to have better meetings where people can own their mistakes and be honest?

Yeah, so the tone is gonna be set by the senior-most person in the room. So they actually have to walk the walk, not just— and so if they see a case where someone either is not talking about something, hey, like, you have to use this as a learning opportunity. I know this is uncomfortable for you, for me, and to, you know, to talk about mistakes. Here's a mistake I made. And, you know, if you see you have a senior leader who says that, and here's what we learned from that. And this is a case where we're going to learn from this mistake. Let's talk about it. You know, you— those are different ways that you can do that versus why, why did this happen again this week? You know, and this happened last week. You know, it's just they'll set— the senior leaders will set the tone. You know, people will model that however the senior leaders act. And so it has to really start from there. When you're starting the, the weekly business review, you know, we work with companies setting them up. We come up with a list of ground rules, and that's the first page is like, here's how this meeting is going to run, here are the dos and don'ts, and anyone is feel— should feel free to point out when one of these rules being violated.

What are some of the dos and don'ts?

But dos and some of the dos and don'ts are like I talked about, exception driven. You know, don't talk about you know, brag about what your team did. Um, you know, talk about exceptions. And when, and there's a mistake, do your homework beforehand. Um, you know, not that, oh yeah, I, I noticed that this took a dip, you know, customer service calls, uh, took a dip, and I, I'll go, I'll get back to you. It's like, you, you explain, well, we've got 60 people here want to hear the answer. Next time, you know, we expect you to go, um, research this so you can give us the answer so we can get better next week, you know, because other people be— may be making similar mistakes. Um, you know, that— and then, you know, talk about making it a safe environment. You actually have to state that, that, hey, you know, it is okay to talk about mistakes. Everyone at one point in this meeting will have a mistake that they're— they or their team has made. And so, you know, treat other people as you expect to be treated. So those are examples of kind of the ground rules that you put in a meeting like that. And it's different. So, you know, it's not natural either, by the way, you know, because people like talking about positive things and putting on a positive face for everything. But sometimes it's not conducive to the goal of the meeting.

Yeah, I think what's also not natural, just human nature, if it feels like someone's, you know, if they make a mistake, it's natural to cover it up. I mean, you know, as kids, we sort of— I don't know, we sort of learn like it's not okay to have broken the lamp or whatever it is you did. And so I think that unless we are really conscious, we bring that into adulthood, and then it feels like you're being accused. And if there's enough of that going on, then actually you are being accused, and then of course everyone is attacking each other.

Yeah, if, if that is happening, that, that's hard to root out, that behavior.. And, you know, you talk about processes, like for a correction of errors report, when something serious goes wrong in a service, the team has to write that up. It's, it's a very clinical document about, you know, here's the timeframe, what happened here, the triggering events, here's what went well, here's what didn't go well, here's what we learned, and here's what we're doing to fix it. You read through that whole thing, it's, it's, you know, it's a pretty long document and it gets sent out now to thousands of people. So, you know, one is it forces the writer to say, there's gonna be a big audience reading this. I better make sure I get this right. But two is that, you know, you see a lot of these coming out, you realize that, okay, now it is okay because this is a, it's a learning, not a blaming, you know, exercise that you're going through.

Yeah, the tone is so important. You know, Colin, I'm kind of moved to ask, when you were at Amazon, You know, was there a mistake that you made that you had to own up to or that you got— were like kind of uncomfortable about it?

Yeah. I mean, a lot of them, but, you know, I mean, one that comes to mind when I was running the affiliate program. So we had about a million websites that were linking to Amazon, sending traffic, and we would pay for that traffic through referral fees for sales.. And on the other side, you know, internal people or the category managers, you know, I wanna hit my, my number, revenue number for the end of the month. Can you send out a newsletter or devote, you know, funnel some of this traffic, to this cat, to my category. And you'd get rewarded for that type of behavior if you did that. Hey, thanks Colin. You know, this is a great week. We, and I sort of felt good about that and I thought I was doing the right thing too. So it's,. But, but I realized I was thinking too short term and that, you know, by changing that fire hose, I was actually shrinking the pie and not focusing enough on my customers who are those people who owned and operated websites and how to make that experience, you know, better for them, which may not be the best thing for the category manager who has to hit his or her numbers by the end of the quarter. And It took me a little while to get there. And it showed up in the results too. And, you know, there's one Moosa annual review where, okay, these numbers aren't where we want them to go. And, and it was pretty clear what needed to happen. And so, you know, I realized it's because I forgot my customer. And as a customer-obsessed, you know, company that I didn't— never wanted to make that mistake again. So, you know, this is where customer obsession, it sounds easy, but it, it's sometimes you think you're doing the right thing, but you're actually not customer obsessed. And so that was, um, one error that I made. And, you know, we had, we had to get the team together and like I owned up to it. Like I was the one who was saying, here's how we should structure that, you know, change the fire hose for the, for this quarter. And, um, you know, used it as a learning experience, not only for me, but for the rest of the team.

Yeah. And I think it's also so like you're, you're totally right. Like You know, we can— you can say customer obsessed all day long, but then it's easy to forget that, especially because you're feeling peer pressure, you're getting support for doing something different. I can imagine that there's a lot of pressure.

Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, the pressure, it's, um, it can drive you to do— you want that pressure to, you know, some, some pressure is good to drive you to, you know, to be a better self than you thought you could be. But yeah, you need to you need to be able to recognize and handle it appropriately.

Yeah, for sure. Let's talk about single-threaded leaders, which took like almost a decade to implement. Again, can you briefly talk about what that is and why that was so hard?

Yeah, so it, um, a single-threaded leader is— well, I'll tell you again, 3 questions that will tell you whether you have it or not. That's probably the best way to explain it, is you just ask if there's a project that's not going well, One, who's the senior-most leader who's working on this and nothing but this? So it's their full-time job. Two, does that person have the appropriate skills and capabilities to make this idea a reality as big as it should be? And then three is, are they, do they have the necessary resources in order to go do their job? Doesn't mean everyone reports to them, but if they always have to fight for resources for each step along the way, that would be no. So unless you have a, a name, a yes and a yes, you, you don't have single-threaded leadership. If you do have that name, yes and yes, you do have it. So that's really what it is. If something is big enough to be worth doing, you want to have someone who is senior enough, who knows how to— like, if it's a billion-dollar business you want to build, you want to have someone running it who knows how to build, or who has ideally has built a billion-dollar business, $100 million, $10 million business. It doesn't really matter at scales. It's this nice fractal quality. And at most projects that we realized that at Amazon, we weren't answering those questions correctly. And we either had, no one was working on it full-time, or, you know, it was this new employee who was a junior product manager and was asked to build Amazon's new digital business. You can't, you would be unsuccessful. So, you know, in Amazon, they would take senior leaders like Steve Kessel, who was running the biggest business, which was books at the time, media, books, music, video, physical shipment, you know, 75% of Amazon's business and said, Steve, Jeff said, Steve, I want to, you need to go start up that digital business. You have 5 people reporting to you instead of, I don't know, 2,000 people reporting to you and your revenue is zero, but you need to, you know, cannibalize this 75% of our company 'cause someone else will. I'd like it to be us. And that can be a career breaker at some companies 'cause there's a lot of risk. You know, we didn't know whether we would be successful in digital, but Jeff had conviction that unless we put someone like Steve on it, we would never be successful.

And put—

so it takes, you know, again, easy to understand, hard to do. Andy Jassy is a good— another good example, the current CEO of Amazon. He could have had any job he wanted after working with Jeff as his chief of staff, but he chose to go to this risky venture that if it worked, it would be really big. Thankfully he did, and AWS was created because of it. And now, so how it started, again, we were, as we, we kind of got the hiring problem settled, and so we were hiring people fast, but we realized our rate of progress was just slowing down. We were being crushed by the bureaucracy. We would have to go, talk to 5 different groups to get a job done. And any one of those 5 could veto your, like, I can't, I don't have any designers or I don't have any software engineers to give you. So that would kill the project right there. And so what we, it was a fork in the road and we tried one, okay, let's get better at communicating and collaborating. And we started to build tools so everyone could know what everyone else was working on. But then, That didn't work. So we tried, well, let's view this collaboration as a defect of our organization. And so how can we get people in charge of their own destiny? And by the way, these defects really were dependencies. You can think of most of them were removing dependencies, organizational dependencies, technical dependencies, decision-making dependencies. That's what took the long time, you know, 'cause those, you know, if you spend, 10 years building this complicated code base to tease it apart in independent units. That takes about 10 years to unwind. Um, and, but once you get that way, then you— people can move fast and be in charge of their own destiny. So that was the journey that we had with single-threaded leadership and in single-threaded teams. But we found that the, the teams that got to that point were able to innovate faster and, and, and didn't they would move faster, and, and versus teams that had a whole bunch of dependencies.

Yeah, I, I love the counterintuitive insight. What you said in the book, Jeff wanted to eliminate communication, not encourage, not encourage it. As a coach, for me, that again was very mind-blowing because I literally help people communicate all day, every day. Yeah, but, but Jeff's like, whoa, Jeff's like, no more communication. So I think you already addressed that when you talk about dependencies, but is there any more you want to say about that? Oh, and then by the way, How did you discover that? Such a counterintuitive insight. Like, why did you even think that was a thing?

Well, so, you know, it came from Jeff, but I think what Jeff was very good at was falling back on, you know, first principles, which were the Amazon Leadership Principles. But, you know, thinking long-term, knowing that as we hire more people, we are just going to get crushed 5 years from now when we're, you know, 10 times bigger than we are.. And so what's— and then what's not working, you invent and simplify. Let's try to invent our way out of this. You know, we've tried everything else that all the other companies are doing. But, um, so it was, you know, it was— and it was a decisive move. And, and we did— we didn't start it— we, we started with a few small teams and experimented and tried to get good at it. So that wasn't something that you— we did all company-wide, and we started with the easier cases versus the harder cases. So those were, um, yeah, yeah. Like, how, how, how does that intuition— it was not being afraid, um, you know, to make some internal changes to how you do business if that's what's, you know, recognizing what's holding you back and, and, you know, being bold with those. You— bias for action is another leadership principle for Amazon. Like, we gotta do something different. Um, we've tried, you know, a couple of different things. So that, you know, that was the thought process on how it evolved. And again, made some mistakes along the way.

So some of the things that we've talked about today, like dive deep and not be floating above it all in the big picture concept, but actually have the data, expecting the team to know the data, and being in the details. Also the notion of make some, just like, don't be afraid to change your business practices and, you know, try things and insist that people do them. A lot of these, I think, have the sort of the whiff of what is a term these days called founder mode. Have you— has founder mode come to your attention?

Yeah, I mean, I'm familiar with the term, but yeah.

I'm not sure how much you studied this, you know, the outbreak on Twitter and everything about like Paul Graham coining founder mode. But I guess I wanna just maybe reflect that You know, I'll, I'll say again, like plenty of companies that I work in, there was this sort of collaborative leadership style where it's like, do you think we should do this? Let's get everyone on board. Let's discuss. And executives are coached to be at a level, high level, let the people deal with the details, not micromanage. So I'm not saying Jeff Bezos was a micromanager. I have never met Jeff Bezos and I didn't work at Amazon, but I'm just curious. Can you, so could you mistake Jeff for a micromanager or how would you sort of, how would you pull all these threads together about what good leadership is and how Jeff enacted that?

Well, so one, like the, I once asked Jeff like, how do you spend your, decide where to spend your time? Was it, you know, I was responsible for helping put his calendar together, so I wanted to know what he thought about it. And he said, I wanna focus and I want my senior leaders to focus on the biggest opportunities for the company. Those may or may not be the biggest businesses, by the way. And so at the time I was working with him, probably about half of his calendar was focused on relatively small teams of like 5 or 8 people in what would become some of the digital products and first few Amazon Web Services. So he knew as much about all of those services as anyone on the team. And so he dove deep there, but he had good bench strength and leaders who could, you know, run those, the other areas of the company, you know, and now he migrated over to more devices. And then, you know, with Prime going to same-day delivery, you know, dove into there. So where an executive decides to spend their time is really should be their biggest opportunities. And those things do change over time. And if you have to go down to that level of, I'm gonna be on the team every week meeting, and you know, 'cause I wanna make sure this goes in the right direction. If you have that conviction, you know, as a founder or a senior leader that I need to make sure that this is going in the right direction until I know where it's going and I trust the team, then go down to that level. There's no magical end, levels that you can't go down. So Jeff would be on like an individual contributor on a team, um, for, for some period of time, but then he would also, you know, be very, you know, high level or let other people run. He, they had to gain the trust to run those. So, um, you know, in terms of founder mode, like some knowing when to do that is tricky. Like when, when do I need to give people explicit direction And I think the pendulum in a lot of companies has gone too far about, I may be micromanaging. I just going to give them goals and then let them go do that because they'll get mad if I give them my opinion or put some structure on it. I think a lot of those teams, they're actually craving structure. And some of these constraints will breed innovation and increase your chances of hitting your outcomes. And so the trick is a leader needs to know when to give that structure and direction and when to— some people you just say, I'm going to stay out of your way. Just tell me if you need anything and I'll give it to you. And that's the most appropriate way to manage that person or team. But that's not— every team shouldn't be managed that way.

Yeah, I totally agree with you. And also, I think a lot of managers will say, well, I'm this kind of manager or I'm that kind of manager. But actually what is necessary is to assess what does this team need? What does this person need? What does this team need? What outcome are we looking to get? And are we on track to get there? And what intervention do we— do you as the leader need to do?

Yeah, there's situational leadership is one of the areas where it's called. It doesn't really matter what your style is. You have to adapt your leadership style to get the most out of the team. And if you don't have that skill set as a manager, you've got to go acquire it. Or you're not, your team is not gonna perform at the level it is. So it's, yeah, it's, you have some biases, but you do have to recognize when you, you need to adopt your style to the situation at hand.

Yeah, totally. Colin, how did you personally grow? I mean, it's a big question and I know you were there for like, gosh, 12 years. Is that right? Yeah. At Amazon?

12 years, yeah.

And you worked with Jeff and Jeff grew, you know, Jeff grew, the company grew. What reflections do you have on how you personally grew as a leader? Or as a human, as a worker, as anything?

Well, one thing I noticed, especially at the time working with Jeff and spending time on, you know, I was on the S-team too, the senior leaders, there are plenty of different, very effective leadership styles. And, you know, so there's not one, you know, don't try to be a leader that you're not, you know, like their personality, you know, doesn't fit with you. So Jeff, um, one piece of advice he gave me, he said, look at all these great leaders and find out who are just most similar to who you are. Uh, and those are probably the leaders that you want to try to emulate, you want to try to learn from. Don't try to be, um, this, you know, either— if you're not a hard-charging, you know, take control of the room, rah-rah person, it's going to come across as, you know, not authentic, and you actually won't be that successful. So I, I learned about the different leadership styles and, and what works for me and what doesn't work for me. Um, you know, embedded in my DNA now is just those 4 things I started off the interview with about customer obsession, long-term thinking, invention and failure, and, you know, pride in operational excellence. I think those are pretty good ways to build a long-lasting, uh, you know, company that you can be proud and talk to your grandkids about., there were other ways to build different companies, but that's just what, what I learned work, you know, works, works for me. And, um, then, yeah, I also realized that, um, when I— the— what was it I learned the most? Actually, it was when I studied who am I going to work for and work with, and can I learn from these people, and are these people going to push me to be a better version of myself than I ever thought I could be. So it was more that, and it was less, is this particular technology or area or how perceived importance of the area this business is to the rest of the company. Those things, at least for me, I didn't get as much out of it and learn as much as I did when I looked at the who am I gonna work with and what can I learn from.

Yeah.

Those are a couple things that I took from it. You know, it had a, Fantastic time there. I was very lucky to meet lots of great people. You know, I consider them friends and colleagues. And the reason why we wrote this book is really— Jeff also told me, don't be proud of your gifts because they're given to you. You know, you didn't create those. And, you know, be proud of what you do with those gifts. And so one of the gifts I thought was being you know, seeing these processes being developed and really wanted to create something to, again, so people could study these advances in, in management science. And, uh, like, we were— Bill and I were lucky enough, my co-author, to have been in the room while these processes were being, uh, created and, and, and, you know, tried for the first time.

Yeah. And now you and Bill have a company where you advise companies in how to implement some of these processes. Is that right?

Yeah, you know, we wrote the book and we thought we were done. You know, it's like, here it is, like, go study it. But we— what we found is that, um, you know, CEOs would start reading the book and say, hey, you know, Colin and Bill, can you help us teach us about these processes and, and actually implement some of these in, on our company? So our job now is to teach, train, and about these processes And the goal, the, you know, the measure of success is in, in running operational process that the company knows how to run. And then, you know, we kind of work ourselves out of a job there. So we've been working with, you know, companies that, you know, they're not for startups really. It's, you know, you have to need some of these processes. But yeah, so we've been doing that for almost 4 years now.

Yeah. And what have— what observations, reflections Do you have— what have you learned from spending 4 years having these conversations with CEOs and leadership teams and trying to implement processes?

A couple of things. One is that most companies still look almost exclusively at output metrics and not input metrics.

And you can do that.

And when business is going well, it hides a lot of mistakes. But it's, you know, especially with what's going on now with interest rates, You know, the companies that are gonna thrive are companies that really have a deep operational grasp of what drives their business and they're, you know, operating it effectively. You know, 'cause if you, before, if you were just saying, we'll go build X and the business grows 30% and we'll grow, we'll build Y and it grows 30%, but you don't know why, then when things change, it's hard to replicate that. So that, that's one thing. Two is with annual planning, I wish we had put more, about this in, in the book. Um, just the rigor at which the Amazon executives focus on getting the annual planning process and then the control processes throughout the year to make sure that you are hitting your plan or you need to course correct as new data comes in. That rigor that Amazon has, has developed, um, again, is a competitive weapon, but it work— it— in the amount of time the executives put into that planning and control process is off the charts compared to most other companies that I work with. So those would be the two, I would say, biggest surprises or observations in working with other companies. But I think once they switch, they're like, hey, this is a better way. We think it's a better way to operate. So.

Yeah, it is a great way to operate. At the same time, you know, I know that, you know, the Amazon leadership principles are kind of like now storied and everyone reads them. And by the way, they sound so good now. You know, I know that they didn't start, they didn't start out this way, but like they've been part, they look, sound great and they sound very Amazon. And then plenty of people wanna take them and put them on their walls, you know, like, oh yeah, us too. Yeah. So what's the downside of that?

I think, well, the downside is it typically does not work, um, because your principles are, and core values, some companies use those terms interchangeably. That's what makes you special. And usually what makes you special is what, is what makes you different from other companies, and it's how you make those tough decisions. And, um, if they're not yours, then you're— again, if you're trying to adopt a leadership style that's not you, um, it's probably not going to be as effective. So we do help companies come up with leadership principles, but, um, but it has to come— but we don't write them, uh, you know, we help people uncover your process.

What's your process?

The process is, you know, if— well, for people that have them, we go through some stress tests about, okay, run through your top failures and your top successes, and do these principles help you avoid those failures and reinforce those successes? Are these leadership principles, you know, a necessary and sufficient set of principles to completely evaluate leadership at your company? So if you only have 3 of them, like one that's often missing is hiring and developing people. You know, if you're a growing company, you need to have a principle and on how you're going to do that. So there's some stress tests for people who have them. And then for people who want to create them, it's really looking around at who are the effective leaders in your company, finding out what they do different. Again, what makes them different and special.. And then, you know, try to encode those behaviors. So you want to collect personas of great leaders around the, around the company. You want to have some mix of, um, you know, who you are and then some aspirational. Probably your 80/20 is, you know, you don't want to have 80% aspirational because then that's not really who you are. But, you know, leadership principles are something you need to aspire to, to get better at, and that you can be better there every day. So it's a process about doing that. And then We won't do it unless the CEO also agrees to spend a lot of time poring over every word and every principle. Um, because if— and then the management team, because if they don't buy it and live it and breathe it, it's just not going to stick. We just recommend, well, don't do this exercise right now because it'll be frustrating for everyone and, and not an effective use of time. So those are ways that we go through and do that with companies.

That's a That's so great. Very, very comprehensive. I love that. Colin, have you ever experienced imposter syndrome or severe self-doubt?

Experienced what?

Imposter syndrome.

Imposter syndrome.

You've never heard of imposter syndrome?

Uh, I don't know. I probably not.

I love this moment. Imposter syndrome is the feeling that you're going to be found out as fraud, that like you've done everything in your life because of luck and your luck is about to run out?

Well, I've been, I've been very lucky, um, and, um, you know, so I think luck has played a, you know, good part in, in my career. But, um, I don't— I never really look at it that way. You know, if I'm in a room full of smart people, I just think about I'm gonna learn a lot from these people. And, you know, and so, uh, yeah, I mean, I, I'm— no, I've never had that symptom. Uh, now I know what it is, but I don't think I've, I've had that. I've had some self-doubts about, hey, I— can I go do this? Um, I'm fairly stubborn, and, uh, you know, and if it doesn't work, I, you know, brush myself off and go up and, and, and try it again. Um, and then, you know, there's some— if there are cases where I realize I'm not the best person for this job, you know, then I'll try to find something else too. Um, like when Jeff asked if I wanted to be his chief of staff, I didn't say yes right away. I wanted to know, well, what am I getting into, and what does success look like, and could I do it? Did I think I could be successful in that? Mostly because if I couldn't, I'd want someone else to take that role because it was so important. But, um, no, I don't think I've ever had imposter syndrome.

But I love it. What do you wish you had known earlier on your journey?

Um, oh, uh, well, some of the lessons I learned at Amazon would have helped me earlier in, in my career, just on how to, you know, build companies. I, you know, I wish that I had taken advantage of more of the— I started working at Oracle, was my first job out of college, and did, you know, startups after that, and then went to Amazon. But taking advantage of any learning or training or mentoring, I wish I'd done more of that because I had plenty of good mentors in college. You know, the university and grad school and also in my first jobs. But I didn't think enough to take advantage of it. So I think I could have accelerated things a bit further and learned a lot of things quicker than if I had done that. That would, that would've been one thing. Yeah, that's the one that comes to mind right now.

That's great. Colin, last question. You know, usually I talk about advice for founders, but I guess I'm, I'm thinking it'd be helpful just for you to share advice To anyone trying to better their company and be more operationally rigorous and, you know, have more rigor around their leadership principles and maybe be more Amazonian, what advice do you have for like a first step for any company that wants to do that?

Well, I, I would, I mean, I would really start from asking, are, am I really, and is our company really customer obsessed. You know, you can learn from competitors. That's great. And you definitely want to pay attention and learn from them. But you really— I'm like, have I woven in customer obsession enough into my company so it could be successful? And you think about, let's say you have a coffee shop and you're the owner. You see everything. You don't have to go get the data. Your customers tell you, but the coffee's too hot. You know what happens when the pastries are late in the morning or if the lines are too long.. You, you just, you, you can intuit that as you, you grow and you, there are more and more proxies between you and your customer and you have more people, you have to combat that and you have to have that steady stream of high-quality customer data that made you successful as a founder. And you wanna spread that across the company. And that, that's not free. And it's, it's not easy, especially when you think, now I've got all these other things I need to be doing. But, you know, making sure that customer obsession is woven into the rest of the company and your, your job as it grows, because that's what made you successful starting off. And then two would be asking yourself, um, have we hit a scaling wall where what we're doing today in this area is no longer what is needed to get us to where we need to be tomorrow? And so, you know, having no ego about that and just being able to recognize it, study it, and try something else. Those would be two things that I would recommend.

Amazing. Colin, thank you so much. What a great conversation. So tactical in the best possible way. Everyone should go out immediately and buy Working Backwards, and you should have everybody in your team do that, and you should have a book club about it because people really will benefit from that. Thank you for joining me today.

Thank you so much.

Thanks for listening to From Startup to Grownup. If you like what you heard, give it a review on Apple Podcasts so other people can find it. And if you know of a founder or someone else who is meant to be on this podcast, drop me a line through my website, alisacohn.com.