Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

by Colin Bryar

“Our culture is four things: customer obsession instead of competitor obsession; willingness to think long term, with a longer investment horizon than most of our peers; eagerness to invent, which of course goes hand in hand with failure; and then, finally, taking professional pride in operational excellence.”

He truly embodies the Amazon motto, “Work hard, have fun, make history.”

Jeff often used an analogy in those days when describing our efforts to innovate and build new businesses. “We need to plant many seeds,” he would say, “because we don’t know which one of those seeds will grow into a mighty oak.”

Another of Jeff’s frequent exhortations to his small staff was that Amazon should always underpromise and overdeliver, to ensure that customer expectations were exceeded.

“Good intentions don’t work. Mechanisms do.”

“Separable means almost as separable organizationally as APIs are for software. Single-threaded means they don’t work on anything else.”

As analysis becomes more causal, multivariate, comparative, evidence based, and resolution-intense, the more damaging the bullet list becomes.