But we kept coming back to one name: Jason Kilar. Before leaving to take a break from the grind, Jason had spent nine years at Amazon, building up its DVD service from scratch before moving to other roles. What attracted us to Jason was that he’d grown up under Jeff Bezos’s theory of innovation management. As an Amazon executive, Jason had attained a Zen-like mastery in managing conflict. To Jeff Bezos, workplace harmony is overrated; conflict is the spice that leads inexorably to innovation. Executives at Amazon are inculcated in Bezos’s management notions, such as #13, Have Backbone;
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