More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
April 7 - April 11, 2020
But look at Zuckerberg and his counterparts—Jeff Bezos at Amazon, Sundar Pichai at Google, Satya Nadella at Microsoft—and you’ll see trained engineers more eager to facilitate than to dictate. Instead of answers, they have questions. Instead of pitching, they listen and learn.
“What does Day Two look like?” Bezos asked. “Day Two is stasis, followed by irrelevance, followed by excruciating, painful decline, followed by death.”
Today, Apple is having its Windows moment.
It’s an odd word coming from one of the earth’s most successful companies. But in today’s business world, where Day Two is death, it’s the key to survival.
Your entire purpose at Amazon is to invent. If you’re not inventing, your job will get simplified and then automated. At Amazon, you invent or hit the road.)
“Many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study,” it says. “We value calculated risk taking.”
“Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting,”
(Bezos hated the idea of putting customer questions and answers on product pages, one ex-employee recalled, but he told the team to go ahead. Now these questions and answers are an Amazon staple.)
In a world driven by code, where the cost to create is lower than ever, competitors can copy what you’re already doing with relative ease. To survive, you need to be creating the next big thing constantly.
Inside Amazon, Bezos has developed a culture that empowers employees to invent and lets them run the thing they’ve created (another leadership principle: Ownership). The deeper you dig in, the more apparent it becomes that this culture, bolstered by Wall Street investors who don’t demand Amazon turn a profit, is what’s behind the company’s array of beloved products and services: Echo, Kindle, Prime, Amazon Web Services, and Amazon.com. It is, in no uncertain terms, Amazon’s competitive advantage.
On June 9, 2004, at 6:02 P.M., Jeff Bezos banned PowerPoint at Amazon.
“No powerpoint presentations from now on,” he wrote to his senior leadership team. PowerPoint, Bezos understood, is a terrific selling tool, making mediocre ideas look great by dressing them up in bullet points and fancy templates.
Bezos offered an alternative: written memos. Instead of slideshows, he wanted Amazonians to write up ideas for new products and services in documents composed of paragraphs and complete sentences—no bullet points allowed. These memos would be comprehensive, making it easy to spot gaps in thinking, and they’d help Amazonians’ imaginations run wild as they composed them. “The narrative structure of a good memo forces better thought and better understanding of what’s more important than what, and how things are related,” Bezos wrote.
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.
“It’s a story for something that doesn’t exist.” There’s actual fiction involved too: The six-pagers often contain fake press releases announcing the would-be product to the world, complete with fake quotes from executives hailing its arrival.
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,
“For the first hour you sit down, you give everyone the pieces of paper, stapled, with a highlighter and a pencil—you don’t mail it out beforehand because no one pre-reads; that’s bullshit—then they basically are quiet for a whole hour and everyone reads,”
When a six-pager is approved, Amazon gives the person who wrote it a budget to start recruiting and build the invention they’ve dreamed up.
