Bill
Carr
Track Timing
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Learnable elements from Jeff Bezos's leadership (07:57) |
Bringing 14 leadership principles to life (26:17) |
Raising the bar on recruitment (33:22) |
Recognizing and developing good judgment (41:50) |
Disagree yet commit - bringing it to life (54:06) |
Written communication - a competitive advantage (01:00:09) |
Building a culture of learning from failure (01:17:16) |
"What" decisions versus "Who" decisions (01:21:02) |
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Co-Author
Bill Carr is the Co-Author (along with Colin Bryar) of the recently published book Working Backwards - Insights, Stories and Secrets from Inside Amazon.
In Working Backwards, these two long-serving Amazon executives reveal and codify the principles and practices that drive the success of one of the most extraordinary companies the world has ever known. With twenty-seven years of Amazon experience between them, much of it in the early 2000s―a period of unmatched innovation that brought products and services including Kindle, Amazon Prime, Amazon Studios, and Amazon Web Services to life. The book offers unprecedented access to the Amazon way as it was refined, articulated, and proven to be repeatable, scalable, and adaptable.
The book demonstrates that success on Amazon’s scale is not achieved by the genius of any single leader, but rather through commitment to and execution of a set of well-defined, rigorously-executed principles and practices. In our conversation, we first spoke about some of the distinctive elements of Jeff Bezos’s leadership before getting into some of the elements at Amazon that have turned it into a value creation juggernaut over the years.
Published in April 2021.
Nuggets from the
Conversation
Learnable elements from Jeff Bezos's leadership
Bill speaks about some of the elements of Jeff Bezos’s leadership that make him distinctive. While some of those elements are in-born and hard to replicate, he teases out some of the elements that we could learn and imbibe as we go through our journeys.
Bringing 14 leadership principles to life
Bill speaks about the story behind the evolution of the 14 leadership principles at Amazon. He speaks about how Amazon reinforces these 14 principles in the way it hires, conducts performance appraisals and the way it brings it to life when it comes to making hard decisions.
Raising the bar on recruitment
Bill speaks about how Amazon uses the Bar-Raiser process to ensure that it recruits great leaders into the company. He specifically speaks about the role of a Bar Raiser and how he/she is empowered to uphold quality standards without being pressurized by the “here and now” demands of the business. He also speaks about how Amazon trades off the Type 1 and Type 2 errors that often occur while recruiting.
Recognizing and developing good judgment
Bill decodes the Amazon Leadership Principle – Are right a lot. He speaks about how Amazon thinks about good judgment and the nuances between 1 way door decisions and 2-way door decisions. He speaks about how Amazon creates a culture of open-ness to multiple perspectives in the spirit of enabling good quality decisions.
Disagree yet commit - bringing it to life
Bill speaks about how decisions are made and how well people are listened to which ensures that there is minimal dissonance post the decision leading to “passive aggression”. He links it back to the writing culture in Amazon to ensure that complex ideas are presented with all the nuances for people to appreciate the various trade-offs.
Written communication - a competitive advantage
Bill speaks about how Amazon uses written word as a source of differentiation and a competitive advantage. He speaks about how meetings are run in Amazon and the impact on productivity and effectiveness when people submit written documents. He also speaks about the PR/FAQ process which, in a way, is the backbone of the Working Backwards culture at Amazon.
Building a culture of learning from failure
Bill speaks about how Amazon drives a culture of risk taking by being open towards failures. He also goes onto speak about the distinction between good failure and bad failure and how companies should ensure they don’t mistake one for the other
"What" decisions versus "Who" decisions
Bill speaks about how Jeff Bezos made the distinction between “what” decisions and “who” decisions. He takes us back to 2004 when the whole media world was transitioning from physical to digital. Bill lays out how Jeff thought about the decision and first focused on deploying the most prized resources (the who) in the company to go after the opportunity, who put in place a set of processes (the how) to explore new opportunities that eventually led to them going after the opportunity (the what).
