Always Day One: How the Tech Titans Plan to Stay on Top Forever

by Alex Kantrowitz

“Day One” at Amazon is code for inventing like a startup, with little regard for legacy. It’s an acknowledgment that competitors today can create new products at record speeds—thanks to advances in artificial intelligence and cloud computing especially—so you might as well build for the future, even at the present’s expense. It’s a departure from how corporate giants like GM and Exxon once ruled our economy: by developing core advantages, hunkering down, and defending them at all costs. Getting fat on existing businesses is no longer an option. In the 1920s, the average life expectancy of a Fortune 500 company was sixty-seven years. By 2015, it was fifteen. What does Day Two look like? It looks a lot like death.

There are two types of work: idea work and execution work. Idea work is everything that goes into creating something new: dreaming up new things, figuring out how you’re going to make them, and going out and creating. Execution work is everything that goes into supporting those things once they’re live: ordering products, inputting data, closing the books, maintenance.

The burden of execution work has made it nearly impossible for companies with one core business to develop and support another (Clayton Christensen calls this the “innovator’s dilemma”).

Bezos, Zuckerberg, Pichai, and Nadella aren’t visionaries, though; they’re facilitators. At the helm of Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, they live to bring their employees’ ideas to life, not their own. And they’ve built systems to do it. These CEOs are all engineers—not the sales or finance leaders who typically sit atop the world’s leading companies—and their systems draw inspiration from their backgrounds. At the heart of their inventive cultures is something I’ll call the Engineer’s Mindset.

Today, all new projects inside Amazon kick off with memos. Set in the future, these memos describe exactly what a potential product will look like before anyone starts working on it. Amazonians call this “working backwards.” They dream up the invention first and then work backward from there. Limited to six pages, the memos are typically single-spaced, typed in eleven-point Calibri font, a half inch at the margins, and picture-free, and detail everything you could want to know about a proposed new product and service.

The memo was exhaustive, containing an overview of the proposed new service, what rolling it out would mean for customers, what it would mean for Amazon’s vendors, a financial plan, an international plan, pricing, a work schedule, revenue projections, and metrics for success.

With no PowerPoint to talk through, meetings inside Amazon kick off with silence. For fifteen minutes to an hour, everyone in the room quietly reads through the memo, takes notes, and prepares to ask questions. It’s agony for the memo writer, who has to sit there and watch Amazon’s top leaders, sometimes Bezos himself, comb through their ideas without making a peep. “I don’t get thirty minutes with Jeff every week or every month,” Sandi Lin, a former Amazon senior manager, told me. “I get one shot to present my ideas.”

Facebook’s method for sharing feedback is adapted from the training company VitalSmarts. It has three main components: (1) State a fact; (2) share your story; (3) make an ask. The fact is the objective description of what happened. For example: When we last spoke, you said you’d have an answer to my question within a few days, and it’s now been two weeks. The story is the explanation that’s developed in your mind for why the thing you didn’t like happened. For instance: I know there’s a good chance you’ve been overloaded with work, but I’ve told myself you might disagree with the direction of my project, and therefore you haven’t answered. The ask is a question meant to get to a resolution: Can you help me understand?

The myth about Facebook’s mobile transformation is that Zuckerberg had an epiphany and brilliantly repositioned his company for the age of the smartphone. This isn’t quite right. The real story is Zuckerberg set up a feedback culture. And when people bought in, they brought him ideas—tough ideas that required rethinking how the company operated—and those ideas ultimately saved Facebook from disaster.

“If you want to learn, there are so many lessons out there where people will tell you about things you’re not doing as well as you could. People tell you so much if you just care about understanding what they’re looking for.”

Algorithms, AI and otherwise, have reduced execution work inside Facebook so effectively that the company’s human resources division is using them to determine how much to pay its employees.

documents.” When a Googler identifies someone they want to work with, they can study up and connect with them via Google’s intranet, Moma. “There’s an entire company directory where you can visualize everyone’s reporting structure, and within that you can see their headshot, their email address, access their calendars, and book time on their calendars,” the former Googler told me. “That was the biggest piece, being able to easily find the right people when we were trying to do things outside the realm of our daily work.”

As soon as Pichai took over Google, he directed his employees to adopt an “AI first” mentality, encouraging them to build AI into their products at every opportunity. “He wanted to galvanize the entire engineering and product community at Google to say, ‘Hey, there’s something real happening here; we should pay attention,’” Dean told me. “That shifted the thinking of some of the teams that weren’t already thinking in this direction.”

“We had to go beyond a single idea from Sundar and really start to pull in the collective wisdom of a broader set of people to say, ‘How are we going to take this broad idea and make it into something much more concrete, much more specific?’” Fitzpatrick said. “That’s really when you get into the broader, cross-company collaboration.” This style of invention was a departure from the last major Google-wide project, Google+, which took a more centralized approach and failed. “Instead of an Assistant team coming back and saying, ‘Hey, this is what we want, we want all of you to do A, B, and C,’ it took this bottom-up innovation in all the teams, and gave it a label,” Shiva Rajaraman, a former Google product management executive, told me. “That’s the secret of collaboration at Google. When these teams come together and can amplify what they do because the company’s attention is on it, it works really well.”

Life at Google is different for Osterloh, who told me people from other groups routinely email him with ideas with little regard for the chain of command. “I greatly appreciate someone taking the time to think something through about a product that might make it better,” he said.