Another fantastic book I have completed this week. This book explains some of the most vital reasons behind Amazon’s success. Bar raiser interviews, long-term thinking, hard-learned leadership principles, single-threaded teams, narrative over slide shows, and perhaps most importantly, Amazon’s thirst for innovation and acceptance of failure as a way to learn and move forward.
One of the things that struck me most is how they switched over to narratives from slides. I have always encouraged my teams to use Google Docs, while using it myself extensively, to coordinate complex plans before turning them into actionable tasks, take meeting notes, and write down our thoughts to see the gaps in our thinking during and after problem-solving sessions. One instance is by using Google Docs as the coordination and collaboration medium, we were able to quickly identify the root cause of a low-urgency outage while before everyone was simply guessing what the reason could have been but the conversation was not leading to a resolution. I strongly believe in clarity, but it cannot happen without the teams’ strong commitment to the tools that assist in creating it, and it is our job to develop a culture of clarity aggressively, customer-obsessed team mindset (hence, working backwards), and ensuring the usage of the right tools in the right way.