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Zusammenfassung von Working Backwards

Name: Working Backwards
Rating: 4.4 (128 reviews)
Author: Colin Bryar

Colin Bryar

And Other Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

4.4 (128 Bewertungen)

23 Min.

Kurz zusammengefasst

Working Backwards by Colin Bryar is an inside look at Amazon's culture of innovation and their unique approach to problem-solving with real examples and practical advice.

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Führung Personalsuche Digitale Transformation Gründergeschichten Arbeitskultur Scrum & Agiles Arbeiten

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Working Backwards
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What’s in it for me? Take delivery of Amazon’s winning leadership philosophy.

What can your business learn from the world’s most innovative, game-changing company? Amazon has revolutionized the way people shop, read, and live. And as the blinks that follow reveal, it can transform the way you work, too.

Packed with fascinating anecdotes and plainspoken advice, this is your guide to thinking like an Amazon leader – or as they like to call themselves, Amazonians. You’ll take a look behind the scenes and learn how Amazon makes decisions, runs meetings, and hires the best people. You’ll also discover Jeff Bezos’ key leadership principles as you explore the company’s hopeful beginnings, and the stories behind its most iconic products. From Kindle to Prime to video-on-demand, you’ll explore how Amazon gets it right so often – and what happens when it doesn’t.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

how Amazon Prime changed the way we shop;
why Jeff Bezos hates PowerPoint presentations; and
the secret weapon in Amazon’s recruitment process.

Amazon’s leadership principles are the foundations of its success.

Amazon’s story starts with one man. In 1994, Jeff Bezos worked for a New York hedge fund. That year, Bezos learned that in the coming years, the user base of the internet was predicted to grow by over two thousand percent annually. Soon after, he made a bold decision that embodied the leadership principles that would come to define Amazon’s philosophy: he quit his hedge fund job and made plans to start his own Internet-based business.

Bezos realized that books were the perfect product for an e-commerce business. Even the biggest bookshops could only carry tens of thousands of titles at a time, whereas over a million books were in print in the United States alone. By offering an online bookstore, Bezos would be able to offer almost every book that was available.

The key message here is: Amazon’s leadership principles are the foundations of its success.

Bezos’ visionary thinking exemplified Amazon’s Invent and Simplify principle. Amazon leaders are always searching for new and innovative ways to get things done.

By quitting his job, Bezos also demonstrated another principle: a Bias for Action. Amazon leaders believe that speed is crucial to business success. Even if you make a mistake by acting too hastily, you can usually recover. Rather than spending a lot of time studying your options, it’s better to take a calculated risk, like Bezos did when he left the hedge fund.

Additionally, by daring to be part of the Internet revolution, Bezos wasn’t afraid to Think Big. This is a key principle for Amazon’s leaders, who understand that dreaming small only leads to small achievements. Instead, the people at Amazon envision a bright, bold future, and it’s this vision that inspires their incredible results.

When Bezos started his online bookstore, the company’s first offices were in a cramped basement in Seattle. Instead of proper desks, they used old doors nailed to four-by-fours. This embodied the principle of Frugality that still exists at Amazon. Leaders are celebrated for getting more done with less, and there are no prizes for rising headcounts or budgets.

Finally, although Amazon told its customers that their books would be sent via first-class post, in fact, each book was sent via priority mail. This cost the company more, but it delighted customers when their books arrived much sooner than expected. Today, an Obsession with Customer Experience still lies at the heart of every decision Amazon makes.

Amazon has eliminated urgency and confirmation bias from its hiring process.

In too many companies, business-critical decisions are treated as trivial. Imagine you’re a senior leader tasked with buying a multi-million-dollar factory to manufacture your company’s products. The decision you make will have a significant impact on the company’s bottom line for years to come, so you should have a rigorous process to ensure that you choose the right factory.

Yet when it comes to hiring the right people, many companies have no rigor in their recruitment processes at all. This is a big problem. After all, your hiring choices also affect your company’s performance in the long term. That’s why Amazon is so precise in its recruitment decisions.

PowerPoint presentations are inadequate for conveying complex information.

What does a meeting at Amazon look like? The answer might surprise you. For starters, there are no PowerPoint presentations – ever. Second, the first twenty minutes of every meeting is spent in total silence. This silence is the key to Amazon’s effective decision-making.

Jeff Bezos decided in 2004 that PowerPoint was derailing his senior management meetings. Up until then, every week, his senior managers took turns standing up and presenting on an important topic. But these presentations often weren’t effective. To truly understand the topic at hand, the attendees needed to examine a lot of information. Not only that, but they also needed to explore this information in depth, so that they could understand how different ideas and pieces of data fitted together.

Amazon stands out by considering their customers’ interests before their own.

What does working backwards mean? At Amazon it means thinking of the customer first. When Amazonians develop ideas for new products, they don’t start by thinking about Amazon’s needs and capabilities. Instead, they only consider what would make their customers’ lives better.

Once they’ve hit upon an answer, they work backwards to make the customer-centric product a reality.

Obsessive customer focus led to Amazon's next-day delivery option.

In 2004, Amazon had a problem. Its e-commerce sales were growing in every category, but its rate of growth was slowing. At the same time, the global e-commerce market was getting bigger every year. If things continued as they were, Amazon was going to become a smaller and smaller player in an ever-larger industry. Luckily, Jeff Bezos had a plan that would change Amazon’s fortunes, and change the face of e-commerce, forever.

Bezos eventually realized that Amazon’s biggest stumbling block wasn’t its pricing or its product range; it was its convenience – or the lack of it.

Amazon’s first video-on-demand service ignored the company’s leadership principles.

Not even Amazon gets things right all the time. In 2005, senior managers were on stage at an Amazon launch party. The product they were launching was called Unbox, a service that would enable customers to download films and tv shows and watch them on their PCs. At the launch, the audience was given a demonstration of how Unbox would work. As a movie was downloaded and flickered onto a big screen, the audience laughed nervously; the image was upside down. It was an omen of things to come.

The key message is this: Amazon’s first video-on-demand service ignored the company’s leadership principles.

Working backwards saw Amazon segue into hardware and develop the Kindle.

Amazon doesn’t mind being misunderstood. In 2005, Apple unveiled iTunes, the groundbreaking application that would allow customers to buy and store music digitally. Within months, senior leaders from across the music industry were asking Jeff Bezos when Amazon would release its own digital music product and start competing with Apple. Some music executives even tried to goad Bezos into action. But Bezos wasn’t thinking about the music industry at all. Instead, he was thinking about books.

Rushing to create a copycat digital music product to compete with iTunes would have gone against Amazon’s leadership principles. If Amazon had focused on rivaling Apple’s iTunes offering, it would have been prioritizing the competition and not its customers. After all, iTunes was a fantastic product. Were customers really yearning for an alternative?

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Worum geht es in Working Backwards?

Working Backwards (2021) tells the story of how Amazon changed the way people live. It explores founder Jeff Bezos’ leadership philosophy, and reveals how this philosophy has informed Amazon’s most iconic products and services.

Wer Working Backwards lesen sollte

Executive coaches looking for fresh insights
Entrepreneurs hoping to turbo-charge their business
Managers wanting to boost their teams’ performance

Über den Autor

Colin Bryar spent twelve years as a senior leader at Amazon, and served as chief of staff to Jeff Bezos.

Bill Carr is a former Amazon Vice President of Digital Media. Carr managed the launch of Amazon Music as well as Prime Video. Bryar and Carr are cofounders of Working Backwards LLC, an executive coaching firm that teaches business leaders how to implement Amazon’s management practices.

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