The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon by Colin Bryar, Bill Carr

Episode Date: April 9, 2021

Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon by Colin Bryar, Bill Carr Working Backwards is an insider's breakdown of Amazon's approach to culture, leadership, and best practices from two long-time Amazon executives. Colin started at Amazon in 1998; Bill joined in 1999. In Working Backwards, these two long-serving Amazon executives reveal and codify the principles and practices that drive the success of one of the most extraordinary companies the world has ever known. With twenty-seven years of Amazon experience between them, much of it in the early aughts―a period of unmatched innovation that brought products and services including Kindle, Amazon Prime, Amazon Studios, and Amazon Web Services to life―Bryar and Carr offer unprecedented access to the Amazon way as it was refined, articulated, and proven to be repeatable, scalable, and adaptable. With keen analysis and practical steps for applying it at your own company―no matter the size―the authors illuminate how Amazon’s fourteen leadership principles inform decision-making at all levels and reveal how the company’s culture has been defined by four characteristics: customer obsession, long-term thinking, eagerness to invent, and operational excellence. Bryar and Carr explain the set of ground-level practices that ensure these are translated into action and flow through all aspects of the business. Working Backwards is a practical guidebook and a corporate narrative, filled with the authors’ in-the-room recollections of what “Being Amazonian” is like and how it has affected their personal and professional lives. They demonstrate that success on Amazon’s scale is not achieved by the genius of any single leader, but rather through commitment to and execution of a set of well-defined, rigorously-executed principles and practices―shared here for the very first time.About Colin Bryar Colin Bryar joined Amazon in 1998 -- four years after its founding -- and spent the next 12 years as part of Amazon's senior leadership team as Amazon grew from a domestic (US-only) seller of books to a global, multi-dimensional powerhouse and innovator. Colin served as a Vice President at Amazon, and for two of his years he was "Chief of Staff" to Jeff Bezos, AKA "Jeff's shadow", during which he spent each day attending meetings, traveling with, and discussing business and life with Jeff. After Amazon, he and his family relocated to Singapore for two years where Colin served as Chief Operating Officer of e-commerce company RedMart, which was subsequently sold to Alibaba. Colin is co-founder of Working Backwards LLC where he coaches executives at both large and early-stage companies on how to implement the management practices developed at Amazon. Colin holds Bachelor of Science and Master of Engineering degrees in Operations Research from Cornell University.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks this is voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming here with another great podcast we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in to see the video version of this podcast go to youtube.com forward

slash Chris Foss, hit the bell notification button. You can also see all the groups we have on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram, follow them as well, and the Clubhouse app also. Today, we're going to be talking with one of two authors. He's the co-author on the book Working Backwards, Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon. We're going to talk about the secrets right now with Colin Pryor. Colin has joined Amazon in 1998, four years after its founding, and spent the next 12 years as part of Amazon's senior leadership team as they grew from a domestic U.S.-only seller of books to a global multi-dimensional powerhouse and innovator, Amazon. You may have heard of them. For two of his years at Amazon, Colin was chief of staff to Jeff Bezos,

aka Jeff's Shadow, during which he spent each day attending meetings, traveling with, and discussing business and life with Jeff. Welcome to the show, Colin. How are thou? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me, Chris. Good. It's awesome to have you on. And give us your plugs for people who can find you on the interwebs. Sure. We've got a website. It's workingbackwards.com. And it describes a little bit about our book and then also some of the advisory services we offer to companies, early stage companies, all the way up through public companies. There you guys go. And you guys both, you wrote this with a gentleman named Bill Carr. You guys both worked together at the company and stuff. Tell us a little bit

about that. Combined, we were there for 27 years, both of us. And we actually worked mostly in different places at Amazon. Bill was in the retail business and then started, he was the second member of the Amazon's digital team. I started out in the retail business and then started, he was the second member of Amazon's digital team. I started out in the software group and worked with Jeff Bezos as his technical advisor, as you mentioned, and then went over to IMDb. So we have pretty good coverage from what was going on at Amazon during that time. And so when Bill started a year after I did, but it was a really small company when we started. We could fit the whole software room in one team when we would discuss what to build next. It was a little cozy, but we could all still fit in a conference room there and just really got to see an experience and be part of how

Amazon really structured itself in order to grow a very large while staying nimble and true to its roots. And who knew it would be prepared so well for a moment like coronavirus? That was really being at the right moment at the right time, but being prepared for it. Yeah, that has accelerated the shift from offline to online. Definitely. So give us an arcing overview of this book that you guys have put out. Yeah, so we really decided to write this book because most of what we had read about Amazon was from the outside looking in and was either incomplete or just not correct, to be quite honest. And we wanted to

really set the story straight of how Amazon worked with the intent of helping the next generation of business leaders. So often when people talk about Amazon, they ask, you know, how many Echo devices are they going to sell? How many Prime memberships are there? What is AWS all about? And that's interesting to know. It's not actually that useful if you're in an organization. And so we wanted to talk about the specific principles and processes that Amazon uses for small groups and large groups and explain it in a way that readers can take it away and implement it in their own business. Because we found out that these principles and processes do work in small orgs and large orgs and across a number of different industries. Usually what's successful

one business can be successful another, at least in the management styles, culture and different things like that. It's really interesting because yeah, there's for a long time, it seemed Amazon was not really secretive. People didn't really know what was going on. And you get a lot of rocks thrown at you sometimes because of that, especially when you start becoming the powerhouse. What were some of the principles? Let's touch on them and talk about them that you guys used to build this juggernaut. Yeah, Jeff coined the term. Jeff Bezos coined the term. It's an invention machine. And so Jeff and his management team put a whole lot of work into structuring the company,

getting principals so people could make decisions when he wasn't in the room. And so Amazon is famous for its 14 leadership principals. They're up on the website. You can think of those as the first principals everyone relies on to solve the tough problems with lots of unknowns that they face when the senior leaders aren't in the room. So that really underpins everything. And then Amazon faced the same set of problems that every other growing organization solved. How do you hire people that reinforce your culture, that don't change your culture? How do you organize into teams to where as you get more people,

you don't slow down the pace of innovation, It actually speeds up how teams interact with one another, how you develop new products, and then how you measure things. And those sound like things every company has faced. Well, Amazon developed quite different solutions in a lot of cases than was traditional management science at the time on how to do that. And what it's effectively enabled Amazon to do is it grew from $150 million in revenue when I started now to where they did $125 billion in the last quarter and expanded across a number of different industries. So really this invention machine,

it's just the 14 leadership principles in a set of five scalable, repeatable processes. And you said they were on your guys' website on workingbackwards.com or you have a list there in the book? Yeah, they're in the book. And it's Amazon's bar raiser process for hiring how the separable single threaded teams for how you keep separating the small teams and then writing narratives. Amazon's famous for writing narratives and not using slides. There's a process called working backwards. It's the title of our book, but it's also a very specific process Amazon uses to vet ideas, to decide whether to take them to market. And then Amazon really focuses a lot on what we call controllable input metrics, which are things that if you do those things right, it'll generate the desired outcome in your business for output metrics.

And output metrics are things like revenue, free cash flow, stock price. So Amazon doesn't put as much focus on those output metrics. It focuses on what do we need to do in order to generate the results that we need. One thing that was really interesting about Amazon for so long, I remember the moment they went public and they'd beaten Barnes & Noble to, not public, but they went online and they'd beaten Barnes & Noble at getting online by about, I think it was like six months. And it was like, so, it was like so important that they dropped first online and beat Barnes & Noble. And then after that, they seemed like basically, I don't know if the right term is reinvesting

their profits, but for so long, he ran that thing losing money or at least, you know, it looked like it was losing money in the balance sheet. And it's like, when are you going to make a profit? And they were just investing so much in who they were and building and stuff. But I think this book is pretty cool because it, at least that's the impression I had. Is that correct? The organizations evolve over time. And there was the theme for about two years.

It was called Get Big Fast. And where we wanted to move into different categories and geographies as quickly as possible. And the reason for that was you could be a very profitable small online business or a profitable, large online business. But if you're stuck in the middle, you incur all of the costs of building all of that infrastructure, software, and just the corporate divisions, but you don't have enough volume going through that to pay for all those fixed costs. So we didn't want to get caught in the middle. And we also didn't want to be a small online retailer. So we really focused on scaling very quickly and moving into a bunch of different geographies and categories. So in 1998, for instance, we went into music, video, went into

UK and Germany all in the same year. That was just from selling books in the US at the beginning of 98. So we really did get big fast as Jeff was asking us to do. And it's brilliant. You guys, like I said, in a moment like the coronavirus, you guys are totally prepared for that. I don't know if anybody's really prepared for that, but you guys had the best positioning. Let's put it that way. I think even you guys had to ramp up at Amazon. And I think more and more just people, Amazon has such a great product with the Prime. I've been a Prime member for a billion years.

I can't even remember when I started. It's been so long. February 2005 is when when it started i probably bought it right about then i just it was i'm like this seems like a good idea and then i started buying stuff and i'm like crap i'm saving a ton of money back then you'd save a ton of money and like shipping and there was any taxes back then or they weren't everyone was like i was a weird age. But so the walking backwards, why did you guys decide to take that principle of Amazon and make it the title of your book? Yeah. So that is one of the very unique processes at Amazon. And it sounds simple, but it's all about starting from the customer experience and working backwards from that.

But it's different than how a lot of organizations make decisions. A lot of organizations use what's called the skills forward approach. They take a look at what are we good at, what are our competitors doing, what's out there in the marketplace, and how can we nudge over into a market? So something like a SWOT analysis is a common tool that you'd learn in business school, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. But really what's often not mentioned in that with a lot of organizations is the word customer. And Amazon's first principle is customer obsession. And so what we did is we decided we wanted to create a process to vet ideas that was customer obsessed.

And so we threw all that MBA science out the window and started experimenting with how can we keep the customer front and center from the very germ of the idea. And it ended up what we decided to do was we would write the press release first and then write a frequently asked questions document along with it. And this is before the project is greenlit, before it has any resources or even before you know what you're building. So you guys are really looking at from a, how does this get released? How does the public get involved? And what's the impressions of it if we were to ever launch this or greenlight this?

Yes, and the press release is a one-page document. And you're explaining to the customer what the product is, what the problem you're solving for them is, why it's good for them, and why they should adopt it. And if you don't have that, you don't go to the next stage. So it's an iterative process. And actually, most ideas do not make it through this process. You decide either it's not big enough, it's not worth doing now, or we don't have the technology ready, or there's some other factors that prevent it from going to market. But the reason why we wrote the press release first is because the internal teams, you have to read that. And if you're not willing to jump out and go buy that product or use that feature right away, you can't move on. You haven't defined a problem that's worthy enough for the customer to part with their own dollars and give trust into Amazon.

So you have to go back and try another idea or refine the idea. And I think that's brilliant. So if I understand correctly, the value of what it gives the customer is how it's judged in whether it advances beyond the PR stage or the value of the problem it's solving is what's going to probably largely determine how it advances. And it's what the customer, the value to the customer versus can we do it? And so a great example was with the Kindle. And we talk about this in the book where we realized we wanted to create a digital reading experience and that a lot of the innovation had to happen at the device level. And this was back in 2003, 2004. We had never made a single device, but we realized anyone who's going to play in this space and create what would be a reader, that's where it's going to make a device manufacturer and designer, rather than let's

go contract it out or to say, we're not device people, so we're going to just skip this space and move on to something we're good at. So the working backwards in a customer-obsessed process will lead you often to unexpected paths or lead you down paths that you may not, don't have those capabilities yet, but if you want to play in that space, you have to go figure out how to acquire them. So that process took about almost three years to really define the e-reading experience to when the Kindle was launched in 2007. But we knew one thing, we didn't want to release it too early before we were ready because it would not have been a useful enough solution for a customer problem. Did Amazon see the whole vision right away of the Alexa experience and that tie-in?

And then of course the devices that you're talking about and making everything. The Alexa thing is pretty brilliant what you guys came up with because people can just talk to things in order and it really took things to like a whole new level. But did they see the whole thing or was that an involvement as you guys moved through devices? Most of these innovations are evolutions and it's hard work to really focus on what is the customer issue that you're trying to solve. A funny story is it was back in 2004 when we were first tinkering with this working backwards process. We describe how it is today, but these processes don't come out fully formed. We tried different types of documents and different ways to keep the customer front and center.

But there was one brainstorming session where each of us were required to go to the meeting. And this is before we even knew what digital product we were going to launch, whether it was books, music, or video, and come in with another idea. And Jeff had a one-page idea about a puck that you could talk to and ask it to order your groceries. And it turned out we didn't do it at the time. We eventually did the Kindle. But so these ideas, it is more like peeling the layers back of the onion and really uncovering the truth of what is the core value you're unlocking for the customer. So it's not go away and do a think week and come up with the next great idea that's going to take your company. But maybe some people or organizations do that.

We just found that doesn't work. You really have to just get deeply immersed in the customer experience. And then you'll come up with what are the actual customer problems worth solving that are big enough. Oh, I really love this idea of really defining the customer, what problem you're solving for customer. Because the thing I've always talked about, the thing I always love, the beauty of entrepreneurship is solving some sort of problem. Most entrepreneurs actually solve their own problems. They're like, I can't find a product that does this. I'm going to make one. And then everyone probably wants to resolve this problem and make it. And I've seen a lot of businesses, sometimes I've seen like on shows like Shark Tank, somebody will show up and they'll be like,

hey, we've got this business that we've figured out we can make a lot of money at. And they'll be like, what problem does this solve for anybody? And they're like, it doesn't, but it's a great business to make money. And you're like, I don't know. I don't know if anybody's going to really buy that thing. But I think it's really brilliant what you guys do. One of the things that I think you guys really excelled at at Amazon, too, was like you mentioned, that customer service-centric sort of thing. I came of age in search of excellence with Tom Peters

in that seminal book that he had where a lot of people really started looking at customer service. Sadly, across the board, except for Amazon, that seems to be dead everywhere. Like he needs to come out with another book or we need to create another revolution. But Amazon has always been that way. They've always protected the customer. If you want to return just about anything, you can return just about anything. I say that, but I think you can return just about anything. And then I've been an Amazon seller since probably reseller, I think is the term. Amazon seller, reseller.

I'm an Amazon seller since 2012, 2014 or something like that. And it's still very customer centric. If the customer says, hey, I want to return this, that customer's returning it. And any disputes that I've ever had, I've to return this, that customer's returning it. And any disputes that I've ever had, I've run across a couple of scammers that's they either stole credit cards or scam, but it's really rare. But, and sometimes they're really abusive to the policy. They're playing games with it. But other than that, it's, it works like a charm and it gives you access to an incredible market. I know a lot of people that are, they're making a lot of money on the Amazon

seller thing, but just having that trust value, the trust value, that's the most important point that I want to make in that the trust value of where I know I can trust Amazon. I order something, she's going to get delivered. If there's any problems at all, sometimes I've, I think several times I was promised a product to get delivered and the vendor didn't send it like three months later it shows up or a month later it shows up and it's beyond what i wanted and amazon's just forget about it's yours don't even worry about it i had one time where i ordered some coffee sugar and they showed two bottles of the coffee sugar and they only sent one and the ounces were off too and reported the amazon like forget about it.

We'll deal with them. And so just that trust value, and like you mentioned earlier, the customer-centric thing, it really gives Amazon a lot of power. Yeah, and this is where if you look at some of these decisions or policies, if you just look at it purely through a spreadsheet or the income statement, you often will make decisions that aren't really customer friendly. And a great example is the customer returns.

The typical return process with a company is you ask if you can return it. And if you get permission to return it, sometimes you pay for shipping and then you eventually get the product. The company has to open the package up and then you'll get your product. The company has to open the package up and then you'll get your refund within six to eight weeks. It may show up on your credit card statement.

And so what we, I remember, and that Amazon's was like that a long time ago. And we thought about that and said, this isn't really customer centric. Most of our customers, the vast majority, are trying to do the right thing. And most of them are returning it because we made some type of an error. And so we're not going to make our customers pay for

our sloppiness and poor execution. So we said, we'll automatically give you the refund. And then we still want the product back and we'll inspect it when it gets there. You don't want to punish the 99.5% of the people who are trying to do the right thing for that 0.5% of the scammers who are trying to defraud you. And so once you have a different, the policy is really designed to serve those 0.5% in a lot of companies versus the 99.5% of people who are trying to do the right thing. And make no mistake that if their people are trying to defraud the company, we will try to detect that and go after them. But in the vast majority of cases, you just make things right for the customer.

And that trust accrues over time because they know the next time I order something from this company, I know they have my back. And that's how you build up trust and trust accrues over time. It's also very easy to lose. Your policies have to be customer obsessed through and through. Yeah. I remember the first time I got the refund as soon as they saw that the package was in the mail, they picked up the barcode. And I was like, geez, I just dropped that off at the post office a couple of hours ago. And the refund comes through and you're like, wow. And what's interesting about it too, is it says to me that amazon trusts

me too which is a weird thing for a corporation but it actually has an effect where i go these people are pretty damn cool man because like you mentioned there's some companies where you know if i want to return like i don't know the the cable thing the cable wi-fi because it's bad i gotta go spend two hours with comcast or whatever just to be able to get in the mail. And then we're going to send you a box that's returned that thing. So that's going to be a week. And there's so many different things. And so that trust factor is a real key. And then the customer center focus. What are some other aspects of those point systems that you guys detail in the book that we haven't talked on that maybe you'd like to share? So one of them, yeah, is just how the way teams communicate. So every company that has

more than a handful of people have to share ideas between teams. And typically the way you do it is you go into a conference room or now a Zoom call and someone walks through a set of slides. And then you try to make a decision. You ask questions at the end. By the end of the meeting, you try to make a decision. So back in 2004, that's how we did things that way too. And we realized our business was getting too complex. We were not making great decisions. And it wasn't that the teams were not well-intentioned. They were smart, contingent teams trying to put together information, but they would never get through their presentation

because you'd be peppered with questions that would veer the presentation off track. And there was often not enough information. So we decided to try and experiment. And again, most companies use slides and use this way to make decisions. We said no. And Jeff said, starting next week,

it was at his management team meetings. This was in June of 2004. We're going to require every team to come in with a written memo and which now we call Amazon narratives. It's just really a six page or less written memo. And the first couple of ones that I read, they were laughably poor to quality compared to what they are today. So it took us a while to get this right. But Jeff has later said it was one of the best moves that Amazon had ever made. And for several reasons. One is just the information density you can get with a memo or a narrative versus a slide. It's about seven to nine times the amount of information you can get across.

It removes a lot of bias. And one huge bias is presentation bias. You can have a charismatic presenter with, or even a bad idea who convinces a team to go or the company to go do something that you probably shouldn't do. Or the flip side is you can have someone who has a great idea, but just as a lousy presenter. And you're just like, when is this presentation going to end? And your people are focused on the presentation and not the idea. And so narratives invert that where the idea floats to the top.

And people also read faster than they talk. So all in, you get 10 times as much information with the same unit of time. If you spend an hour at a narrative review meeting at Amazon or an hour looking at slides, it's the same hour, same hour investment, but you get 10 times the or more of the information. So you're more often than not going to make higher quality decisions. And so Amazon, and this was one of the processes that started just with Jeff Bezos' staff meetings, but we realized that it was such a good tool that other teams started adopting it. And that's another thing that when something is a good process, when it's easy to learn, it's scalable and repeatable, and you don't have to enforce that people use it.

They realize, I'm going to switch to narratives because I know it's going to help myself or it's going to help my team perform better and make better decisions. So it just started spreading out throughout Amazon. And so Amazon meetings are quite unusual. If you were to walk into one meeting, let's say pre-pandemic times, everyone's in a conference room and someone would circulate the memo, either online or send out the link or they'd hand out the physical document. And then the next 20 minutes of that meeting are just silent. And so it's darn right odd if you're in it for the first time. But everyone's reading that document, taking notes, entering notes or questions online. And then you have 40 minutes of high quality discussion about all of the issues. And you also have a record of what was what written down, what all the issues are. So a lot of companies relitigate issues over and over again,

because if you listen to a presentation, you think you may have heard something or you hear what you want to hear. And then you walk out and different, slightly different ideas. So this creates alignment and better decisions. And we go through how to write a narrative, how you read and comment on narratives. And this is, again, something any organization can do. You don't have to be this multi-hundred billion dollar behemoth to go do something like this. You can try it in an organization of five or 10 or 20, and you'll probably make better decisions with this type of tool. I love this. This is brilliant because it's very idea centric. And like you say, people can screw it up and people get focused on the delivery person as opposed to the idea itself.

And that takes away from it being idea centric. One of my friends used to pitch in front of Steve Jobs. And one of his fun stories is telling you about the time he was pitching something and showing it on the computer and the thing started to glitch out on the software. And he made the mistake of trying to fix it in front of Steve and try and do everything on the fly. And Steve called him a fuck shot and threw him out of the room. And it's a real funny story. He ended up going on to build the iPhone. But so that was the example of where he had a, he probably had a great idea and just, it's got lost between the software presentation and there's nothing worse when the slide projector won't work or this is the wrong slide. And you're just like, oh dude.

But the idea of being focused on the idea itself and the purity of that is really good. I think that's, I think that's brilliant. Yeah. It's also customer obsessed too, because at the end of the day, customers don't care how the presentation went, whether it was boring for the company or exciting, which is the question people typically ask after a presentation. How was it? Oh yeah, it was a great presenter. They just care whether the company evaluated an idea and is going to build something of value to make the customer's lives better. And the process is about the customer, not about you. And so that's another interesting twist on this narrative process. That's really brilliant.

And you say that was one of the things that Jeff Bezos said was probably really key to your success. Yeah, and it was unpopular at the time. So I was working as Jeff's technical advisor. And so I remember it was June, 2004. It was where after one day, we had a particularly painful meetings for the past several weeks.

And I was in his office at the end of the day and he said, let's switch to narratives. And he asked me to send out that note. And so I sent out the note, hey, next time anyone comes to present at Jeff's staff meeting, management team meeting, you have to come in with a narrative, there are no more slides. I got phone calls, emails, it was a long night and a long week,

you know, saying, hey, I'm presenting next week, my slides are already done. And this was just a rip the bandaid approach. And that's another thing Amazon is unafraid to do. If something's not working well, you just be decisive, it has a bias for action and goes, tries things. And if the narrative process somehow failed or didn't work, we could have always gone back to using slides after a couple of weeks or a couple of months. But it's just another thing to remember is don't get paralyzed because everyone else is doing it the way that you have to do it, or you haven't yet figured out exactly what you want to do next. Sometimes just try something if a process is not working. Amazon's famous for one way and two way door type decisions. Two way doors, you go through a door and if you realize,

oh, this isn't for me or I made the wrong decision, you can just back out and try something else. So their speed is a lot more important. A one way door is something like, where are we going to build the next airport for a city? That's a big decision. You make that decision, you buy property, you're in it for the long haul. So you have a different decision-making process for the one-way door versus two-way doors. And a lot of people use the same decision-making process for those two different situations. And so we always take a look at, is this a one-way door or a two-way door? And that tells you and your team how you should act and organize moving forward.

Wow. So what are some different ways you approach either door? With two-way doors, it is more speed. So if it's software, you can launch something. You still have to go through this working backwards process. Writing a one-page press release is actually pretty easy in fact, but then you launch it and you get data and you pivot. And if it doesn't work, you either roll it back or you refine it over time. So for where you have to go put the next fulfillment center, you need to look at labor costs, labor availability, proximity to transportation hubs. And so that is, and as there's big capital expenditure, you're signing

a multi-year lease. So there is an approval process that you go through for that. And that is more iterations. And that's just a much heavier, heavyweight process in order to go do that versus what, how are we going to change the search algorithm and electronics to make people find phones, make it easier for people to find phones. So those are two different scenarios and two different ways you operate. I like the idea of the one door and being able to innovate and do different things. One of the things that I learned from one of my CEOs I worked for back in the day was he had this capability to, you could be working on a project for forever. You're trying to resolve it and you're trying to go, why can't we

fix this one thing that just won't make the thing work? And he could walk in and he'd ask you a couple of questions. He'd look at what you're doing and he goes, oh, you need to do that right there. And then he'd leave and you'd hate the hell out of him because you'd be like, damn it, how did you do that? And I learned that from him and being able to walk into things and being able to take that top down sort of bird's eye look at things or out of the box thing. And part of it is you're out of the box. You're able to look at it and go, I see what the problem is right there. But also part of it was so many times I, and I became an entrepreneur at his company where I would go to different departments and I'd be like,

this process is too many steps and too much work that's involved here. Why do we need all these steps? And it was always the, we always did this way. So that's the way we do things because that's the way we've always done things. It was the favorite story that I have, the turkey in the oven, if you've ever heard that story, and how through generations they would cut the legs off the turkey. And mainly because originally in the original generation, the oven was too small to fit the turkey legs in. And so just everybody kept, I don't know, that's the way we've always done it. And so I could innovate in different

departments because I could walk in, look at processes from an outside top-down aspect or whatever you want to call it and make those changes. And sometimes if they didn't work, we could pull them back. But making those changes and stuff was really just important innovation. Yeah. Yeah. Jeff was similar to, he could read a narrative and come with some comments where I've either written narratives or I've seen him when other teams have come in and presented to him or, and he's like something you think, yeah, I should have thought of that. And I think the easy answer is Jeff or a CEO can pattern match because they go to so many different places. Not everyone gets to do that, do that context switching. And so for these narratives, I would sit down and I'd sometimes would ask Jeff for the narrative afterwards and

read his comments and look at mine. And they'd just be there at night comparing, like, how did I miss this? He had this great insight. I read the same document, but I didn't get it. And so I studied a few of them. Then I finally asked him, I said, how do you come up with these? And he said, it's not IQ points. It's really the perspective of the reader. And he was channeling Alan Kay, who is a Xerox PARC researcher. If you take an idea or you evaluate something, you just turn it around and you look at it from different angles until you're satisfied and you kick the tires at, hey, this is a good idea. And so what Jeff would often do is he would take a look at the core assumptions that teams are making and really ask, is this right?

Because those are the building blocks that your idea is built upon. And one simple one was a publisher, this is early on in Amazon's days, called up Amazon and said to Jeff, hey, I'm not sure if you realize this, you're in the business of selling books and you have customer reviews on your site, which are negative customer reviews for products you're trying to sell. And this is before when customer reviews are relatively new. So it was in the 90s. And Jeff thought about it and he said, you know, we're not in the business of selling books to customers. We're in the business of aligning customers to make informed purchase

decisions. And that's just a slightly different way of, it's not even stating the same thing, but it is a different view, but it leads you to do drastically different things with your business to say, sometimes we're going to tell a customer, this may not be the product for you. And there's even some, and one feature that came out of that was we call it instant order update. And it was a stripe at the top of the screen that said, hey, you bought this product on such and such a date. Are you sure you want to buy it again? We did the typical A-B test. It actually decreased sales in a statistically meaningful way. And so again, purely you're looking at a short-term spreadsheet, you think, well, let's roll back that feature. But really what it was is for our best customers, they bought

a lot of books and they didn't remember sometimes that I bought this book. And so you'd get it and then you put it on your shelf and you realize, I bought it six months ago. Why did I do this? And so we, for our best customers, wanted to remind people that, hey, you may not, unless you want to, don't buy this product again. And again, that builds up trust. So the time horizon that you make your decisions is hugely important. And Amazon is really long-term thinking is another principle. And so if you make that decision on a two-week or a quarterly basis, you're probably not going to have that feature. But if you look at how do I build up customer trust over the long haul, it makes obvious

sense to do it. And I used to use that in my company. I used to call it the crazy Ivan, where I took it from Red Hunt for Red October, where every half an hour on the bottom of the hour or whatever that he would turn a starboard I used to call it the crazy Ivan where I took it from Red Hunt for Red October, where every half an hour on the bottom of the hour or whatever that he would turn a starboard or to the other side to check his, check what was going on behind him. And so I used to use the crazy Ivan approach to take apart an idea like you mentioned to run all the different aspects.

Is this really necessary? Are we really doing the right thing? Is this, we take it apart and I ask people, I'd be like, I'll come to them and I'd be like, hey, I think I have an innovation for a company here. What's wrong with this? And they'd look at me like, I don't know, you're the CEO, it's your idea, so it must be brilliant. And I'm like, no, the fact that I am the CEO means that it could be wrong. Because I operated my companies with Zaspik, I don't have all the right ideas. If you run your business thinking that because you have the CEO title or you started the company or you're the boss or whatever, and you think that all the brilliant ideas fall from heaven on your head and you're the grand delivery person, you're going to be in bankruptcy court really fast.

And so I always tried to have a learning organization. The fifth discipline, I think, was one of the books I'd read that encouraged that. I always wanted a learning organization, but also an organization that would help me think and go. I used to tell people, I go, it's not about who has the right idea. It's about what is the right idea. And so I would do what we call the crazy Ivan, where if we had something we wanted to do, we take it apart from every different angle.

I'd be like, what's wrong with this? If I wasn't getting answers as to what was wrong with something, I'd be like, there has to be something wrong with this. Why won't this work? Why will this fail? And people would be like, just do it and just we'll figure it out. And I'm like, yeah, but that's a hundred thousand dollars, buddy. If it fails, the other aspect of what you mentioned that I wanted to feed back to you too, is yeah, it builds on the trust, that bar that you guys have over the top and the fact that, you know, you guys have so many products. So if you're warning me, and I've gotten those warnings sometimes, like sometimes you might not get this in time, but there's some other products that you guys have everything.

So it gives a challenge, not only the sellers on your site to make sure that they're, they got fast products, they can deliver fine. But I'm a guy who I can't do conditioning on my shampoo. So we're going to go really deep here on management. It's a business structure. The other day, I've been too lazy to get out of the store to buy shampoo. And every time I keep going, I keep forgetting and I'm out of shampoo. And I know you guys probably deliver it by the time I get to the store again, because I'm lazy. And so I'm like, screw it. And I just need men's plain shampoo. I can't have any moisturizing or any sort of dyes. It's got to be the plain stuff. And so I'm going through

and I'm just like, oh man, it's the hardest thing to find. I don't know if you've ever just tried to get men's shampoo, no conditioner, no moisturizer, nothing with strawberries in it, just some damn shampoo to clean my hair. And nothing with the flowery, whatever. And so it's the hardest thing to find. If you go to the store, you can look at the whole shelf and like somewhere buried down the bottom, you'll find like one of them. And so I'm going through Amazon.

I'm trying to find a good men's shampoo too. Those are also hard to find. And I come across this one item and I go, this kind of looks good. I don't know. It is a little expensive. It's got some peppermint and I kind of like a peppermint thing. And then the bar came across the top that said, you've bought this twice in the past year. And I was like, oh, okay. Oh, I like this product. Okay. Yeah. Okay. All right. Bye. And that, that helped close that deal. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And now I have beautiful hair.

Amazon gets another, builds up some more trust. Amazon's helping me on Tinder. So anyway, actually I still have my, I still have my coronavirus haircut, so we got to fix that soon. But anything else you want to touch on before we go out to plug the book? Just that these processes, they, they don't just work for e-commerce. They work for, we use them for Prime Video, which is digital streaming of bits, AWS, which is a B2B service. We obviously use it for the B2C e-commerce business, to build devices. And these processes also work for small groups too. And so really, I think that it is work that advances in management science that are worthy of study, whether you implement them or not.

It's Amazon has created a new way to build organizations, small organizations from the ground up that can grow into very large businesses and household names. And that's really what we wanted to get across in a practical way was how you can learn about narratives. I can go then start writing them the next day, or Amazon has, we won't have time to go into all these processes, but how you can hire. And a lot of people don't have a deliberate hiring process. And if they get to the point where a year later, they say a company isn't like it was before. It's usually because of one of two things. They don't have their core values or principles defined. So they don't know what type of people they're looking for. They're just looking for someone to come in and do a

product management role or software development role. But Amazon, we realized early on, we needed to have those core values. We call them leadership principles, and then a very deliberate process to assess whether the person who's going to come onto this role will reinforce those principles and make the company stronger and retain true to its roots, be true to its roots. Or if you don't do that, you're just going to get the next person who comes along who's smart enough to pass the interview. And you do that enough times, your company changes over time. And we talk about a deliberate hiring process Amazon uses called the bar raiser process. Again, it's a fairly easy process to learn. And then I guess the last thing is with metrics. We've seen a lot of organizations just focus on the output metrics. It's like looking at the end

of a processing machine and just trying to tinker with what comes out of the box. You need to figure out what goes into the box, what are the right knobs and dials to turn. You have to be a great operator at those, and that's where you spend your focus. And we do this and we try to provide case studies. We made a lot of mistakes along the way. And so we described where we made some mistakes and how these things evolved, and then just enough information for how you can go go try some of these out if you think it's for you. Yeah. And you guys have done it with one of the most successful companies in the world. So if there's any companies out there, leaders, et cetera, et cetera, CEOs, they should grab your book, pick it up and learn from the best. Really?

That's what I think. We think it works well. And we've taken it to other companies too. And it's been pretty successful so far. There you go. Even if you don't adopt it, it's still worthy of study. Give us your plugs where people can go to find out more about you guys and the book and order it up. And you can go to, we have a website, workingbackwards.com. You can buy the book anywhere. Books are available for sale, obviously,

Amazon, Barnes & Noble, local bookstores. And we tried to make it a very readable and approachable book. And one of our goals was also to help the next generation of business leaders. So we tried to put enough practical tips and advice in there so that you can go do something after reading the book. But if you want to engage in a more meaningful way, we do work with a handful of organizations that are growing fast and really want to figure out when do I layer in the process, what's the right amount of process to do so it actually helps me and doesn't slow me down. There you go. So it's been wonderful to have you on the show, Colin. Thank you for coming on, sharing all the great details and some of the insight to the book. Thanks, Chris.

I really enjoyed our conversation. Thank you very much. So did I. And I probably learned a few things here. I love some of the ideas that are in here. So I'm going to have to grab the book and read it. Check it out, guys. Working Backwards, Insight Stories and Secrets from Inside Amazon.

It's been available since February 9th, 2021. You definitely want to pick it up. It's got 321 ratings at four and a half from Inside Amazon. It's been available since February 9th, 2021. You definitely want to pick it up. It's got 321 ratings at four and a half stars on Amazon. So there you go. You probably designed that system, maybe. I don't know. So guys, pick that book up. And of course, you can get it on Amazon.

How weird is that? Amazon books on Amazon. So check that out, guys. If you want to see the video version of this, go to youtube.com. Forge. That's Chris Voss. Hit the bell notification. Go to all our groups on Facebook, 4chesschrisvoss, hit the bell notification. Go to all our groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter,

all those different places we are, and you can follow the show over there. Appreciate you guys tuning in. Be sure to wear your mask, stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time.