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Jeff Bezos: “Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy” Bezos is asked where he gets the confidence to even attempt to build companies of such massive scale, like Amazon and Blue Origin. He responds: “I think it’s generally human nature to overestimate risk and underestimate opportunity. And so I think...

272,432 次观看 • 8 个月前 •via X (Twitter)

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Jeff Bezos explains what it means to disagree and commit “Disagree and commit is a really important principle that saves a lot of arguing.” Jeff Bezos begins. “In society, and inside companies, we have a bunch of mechanisms we use to resolve disputes. And a lot of them are really bad. An example of a really bad way of coming to an agreement is compromise.” He continues: “The advantage of compromise as a resolution mechanism is that it’s low energy, but it doesn’t lead to truth… You shouldn’t allow compromise to be used when you can know the truth.” Another bad resolution mechanism is the more stubborn person winning: “You have two executives who disagree and they just have a war of attrition. And whichever one gets exhausted first, capitulates to the other one. Again you haven’t arrived at truth and it’s very demoralizing.” Jeff tells people on his team to never get to a point where you’re resolving something by who gets exhausted first: “Escalate that. I’ll help you make the decision.” When making decisions, you want to get as close to the truth as possible: “Exhausting the other person is not truth-seeking. And compromise is not truth-seeking.” But there are a lot of cases where no one knows the real truth and that’s where “disagree and commit” comes in: “Escalation is better than war of attrition. Escalate to your boss and say ‘we can’t agree on this. We like each other and respect each other, but we strongly disagree with each other and need you to make a decision so we can move forward.’ Decisiveness and moving forward on decisions as quickly as you responsibly can is how you increase velocity. Most of what slows things down is taking too long to make decisions.” Companies tend to organize hierarchically in which the more senior person ultimately makes the decision. But as Jeff explains, that wasn’t always the case—he would often be the one to disagree and commit: “I would often say: ‘You know what, I don’t think you’re right. But I’m going to gamble with you and you’re closer to the ground truth than I am. I’ve known you for 20 years—you have great judgement. I don’t know that I’m right either—all of these decisions are complicated. Let’s do it your way.’ But at least then you’ve made a decision, and I’m agreeing to commit to that decision. I’m not going to be second guessing it. I’m not going to be sniping at it. I’m not going to be saying ‘I told you so.’ I’m going to actively try to make sure it works. That’s a really important teammate behavior.” Video source: Lex Fridman (2023)

Startup Archive

70,743 次观看 • 11 个月前

Jeff Bezos explains Amazon’s process for expanding into new products like Kindle and AWS “I would definitely advise a small startup company to be as narrow and as focused as is possible to be. If you look at the original Amazon business plan, there was no hint of anything other than books in it… I wanted to build an online bookstore, and that was it.” But the online bookstore worked better than they thought it would. So Amazon launched music, and that worked better than they thought. Then video, and that worked too. So Jeff sent an email to customers: “I picked about 1,000 customers and I said, besides the things we sell today - books, music, and video - what would you like to see us sell? And the list came back incredibly long-tailed… So it’s been kind of one foot in front of the other.” As Jeff explains, Amazon expands into new businesses in two ways: “One is from a customer need. We will work from a customer need to the skills that we need. And the other one is skills forward: from a skillset we have to a new set of customers.” Kindle is an example of a customer need - Amazon had no hardware team at the time, but to make sure they didn’t miss the transition to ebooks, they built one. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is an example of skills-forward: “We had probably more distributed computing expertise than anybody else in the world because of transactions. Transaction systems are so complicated and hard to build, and we had a service-oriented architecture of great complexity - probably before anybody else. Because we were doing that, we could see the future a little bit and decided to build AWS, which has turned into a huge business in its own right.” Jeff concludes: “Business is very situational. Rules of thumb are good, but they have to be applied to the right situation. Sometimes the old maxim that you should stick to the knitting is correct, but sometimes it’s wrong. And a senior leader’s job is to figure out: Which situation are you in?” Video source: Business Insider (2014)

Startup Archive

63,593 次观看 • 11 个月前