Bill Carr shares the book that had the biggest impact on Jeff Bezos’s strategy for Amazon

And this is about the same time when Jeff and the S team were reading the book Good to Great. And I would, you know, you have to ask Jeff what it is. But if you ask me, I think that this was the single most influential and effective management book for our company because what it caused Jeff to do, and I won't describe what you know, most of you probably know what it is. If you don't know what it is, go read Good to Great. It is, in my opinion, has the best, you know, most important management book you'll ever read. Because what it did is to help us codify our growth flywheel, meaning what are the, what are the inputs that if we improve these things, which in our case was, you know, how do we have broad selection, how do we have a great customer experience? Where great customer experiences in retail, things like how easy was it to find what you wanted to buy, how easy was it to buy it and how fast did it get to you? Were the prices low? Do we have lots of merchants on our platform? And by the way, could we drive out cost? So we identified these things on our flywheel and this identification of these things was such a critical moment for the company because then it realized, okay, well, what we need to do is spend our time focusing on how do I measure each one of those things and then how do I improve each one of those things. So it shifted our focus away from this short term thinking of pushing the revenue number up to this longer term thinking that if we just improve these things, whether it's, there's no day that people will wake up 10 years, 20 years, 30 years from now and say, all else equal, I'd rather shop at a store with fewer items than more items, or a store with higher prices than low prices, or a store where things get to me more slowly versus more quickly. So if we can just improve these things, this is our path to winning. So those are all inputs, inputs to the customer experience. And so we then figured out ways to measure them, creating a set of input metrics. And so then when we would develop, develop our, our operating plans and, and review our business each week and set our goals, we were hyper focused on those inputs and input metrics. As a simple example, there was one tool that Jeff and the leadership team, the S team, used called S team goals, which are effectively a list of what they would harvest would be like. Here are the most important goals for the company that I've harvested from all of our operating plans. And I can't remember exactly what year. Something around like 2007, 2020. They looked at that list which is about 500 items long by the way, and they counted it up. And of that list only 10 of them actually had a financial metric in it like revenue or free cash flow or gross profit. These other things were generally speaking all one of those inputs like I mentioned to you about low prices and selection and speed of the customer experience. So yes, the point was again it's this other article. So we took it as an article of faith that if we can just improve these inputs the outputs will take care of themselves. The inputs are the things that drive the outputs which are revenue, customer activity, free cash flow. And so one of Amazon's, you know, it's not really a secret but one of Amazon's great strengths was that we focus on those things and make, you know, just continuous process, continuous improvement on each one of them and measure them, you know, rigorously.