Jeff Bezos explains what it means to disagree and commit

Disagree and commit is a really important principle that saves a lot of arguing.

Yeah.

So, you know, I want to use.

That in my personal life. I disagree.

But commit, it's very common in any endeavor in life, in business and any, you know, anybody where you have teammates, you have a teammate and the two of you disagree.

Yeah.

At some point you have to make a decision. And you know, in companies we tend to organize hierarchically. So there's this, you know, whoever's the more senior person ultimately gets to make the decision. So ultimately the CEO gets to make that decision. And the CEO may not always make the decision that they agree with. So like, you know, I would often I would be the one who would disagree and commit. One of my direct reports would very much want to do it, do something in a particular way. I would think it was a bad idea. I would explain my point of view. They would say, jeff, I think you're wrong and here's why. And we would go back and forth and I would often say, you know what, I don't think you're right, but I'm going to gamble with you. And you're closer to the ground truth than I am. I'd known you for 20 years. You have great judgment. I don't know that I'm right either. Not really. Not for sure. All these decisions are complicated. Let's do it your way. But at least then you've made a decision and I'm agreeing to commit to that decision. So I'm not going to be second guessing it. I'm not going to be sniping at it. I'm not going to be saying I told you so. I'm going to try actively to help make sure it works. That's a really important teammate behavior. There's so many ways that dispute resolution is a really interesting thing on teams. And there are so many ways when two people disagree about something, even I'm assuming the case where everybody's well intentioned, they just have a very different opinion about what the right decision is. And we have, in our society and inside companies, we have a bunch of mechanisms that we use to resolve these kinds of disputes. A lot of them are, I think, really bad. So an example of a really bad way of coming to agreement is compromise. So compromise. You know, look, here's we're in a room here and I could say, look, Lex, how tall do you think this ceiling is? And you'd be like, I don't know, Jeff, maybe 12ft tall. And I would say, I think it's 11ft tall. And then we'd say, you know what, let's just call it 11 and a half feet. That's compromise. Instead of the right thing to do is to get a tape measure or figure out some way of actually measuring. But think getting that tape measure and figure out how to get it to the top of the ceiling and all these things that requires energy. Compromise. The advantage of compromise as a resolution mechanism is that it's low energy, but it doesn't lead to truth. And so in things like the height of the ceiling, where truth is a noble thing, you shouldn't allow compromise to be used when you can know the truth. Another really bad resolution mechanism that happens all the time is just who's more stubborn. This is also, let's say, two executives who disagree and they just have a war of attrition, and whichever one gets exhausted first capitulates to the other one. Again, you haven't arrived at truth. And this is very demoralizing. So this is where escalation. I try to ask people who on my team, I say, never get to a point where you are resolving something by who gets exhausted first. Escalate that I'll help you make the decision. Because that's so de energizing and such a terrible, lousy way to make a decision.

Do you want to get to the resolution as quickly as possible because that ultimately leads to a high velocity of decision.

Yes. And you want to try to get as close to truth as possible. So you want, like, you know, exhausting the other person is not truth seeking. Yes. And compromise is not truth seeking. So, you know, it doesn't mean now. And there are a lot of cases where no one knows the real truth. And that's where disagree and commit can come in. But it's, it's. Escalation is better than war of attrition. Escalate to, you know, to your boss and say, hey, we can't agree on this. We like each other, we're respectful of each other, but we strongly disagree with each other. We need you to, you know, make a decision here so we can move forward. But decisiveness, moving forward quickly on decisions as quickly as you responsibly can is how you increase velocity. Most of what slows things down is taking too long to make decisions at all skill levels. You know, so it has to be part of the culture to get high velocity. You know, Amazon has a million and a half people, and the company is still fast, we're still decisive, we're still quick. And that's because the culture supports that.

At every scale in a distributed way, trying to maximize the velocity of decisions.

Exactly.