Most of you know me. I'm Ethan Evans. I'm here with my friend, colleague, former report, all of the above, Dave Anderson. We worked together at Amazon for a brief period. He had an Amazon career. I had an Amazon career. As it evolved, we both ended up writing and publishing newsletters. So we kind of do similar things. But the specific topic we're going to cover tonight has two pieces mainly.
So Dave got a big jumpstart on writing his newsletter by writing a very well-received article about leadership principles. So I'll let him introduce himself further, and then we'll talk about that. And then beyond that, though, we are going to talk about how those are applicable beyond the Amazon. So while they are the Amazon leadership principles, we're not going to just be Amazon-specific tonight. So with that said, Dave.
Introduce yourself. What have you done? What are you doing now? Where can people find you? Hey there. Yeah, so what have I done? I worked at a small B2B company until 2007. I miracle of miracles got into Amazon. It was a lucky coincidence that I managed to get through. But then I worked at Amazon for a number of years, went from level five, which is like a junior manager to tech director, GM working for Ethan. Worked out really well for me.
Some number of years before I left, I ended up being a bar raiser at Amazon, doing a lot of that kind of hiring stuff. And some number of years before I left, I had been, for many years, writing instructions to people for how to get into Amazon. I'm like, hey, this place is amazing. You should come on over. So friends, relatives, colleagues, friends of friends. It ended up being my wife's friend's cousin, whatever, heard that they knew someone at Amazon. And they're like, hey, can you practice interviewing with me?
So sure, I did that. And then what advice do you have? And I ended up like over and over again, copying and pasting this email and like slightly modifying it and sending it to say, you know, like, here's what to expect from the interview process. And more importantly, the behavioral interviews that Amazon asks are heavily like biased towards answering questions about the leadership principles.
You know, like if you want to know if someone has bias for action, you say, tell me about a time when you didn't have enough time to do something. And so we listen carefully for bias for action. And so I wrote this long thing and I realized, boy, I'm sending this email over and over again. It'd be sort of cool if I could just link someone to a web page that I could just update. And so on a Saturday, I remember it was a Saturday and my wife was gone with my kids or something. And I'm like, oh, how about if I just...
spend some time writing this up so i wrote up the article sent it and it just like blew up on linkedin and and had uh tons and tons just ridiculous amounts of traffic and my followers like quadrupled overnight kind of thing and uh i became like the number one or two google search result for like amazon leadership principles for quite a while i don't know where i am now so anyway that got me really started in terms of linkedin followers i wrote articles once in a while for fun because i just enjoy writing it's just a thing i enjoy and uh
When I eventually left Amazon, I was at Baseless Academy for a bit, helping them start up. That's Jeff's nonprofit. I was their CTO to help get off the ground. They're doing free preschools across the US. And when I left there, I thought, what I really want to do is get into writing. And while I'm thinking about what my next job should be, I'm going to do writing. I'm going to write a book. And I thought, well, I've failed writing a book for the last...
40 years of my life, maybe I should try to think of a way to force myself to write regularly. And I thought a newsletter, I could just schedule a weekly newsletter and do that. And so that's what I've been doing ever since. Because I started the newsletter, I'm pretty sure because of my traffic on LinkedIn due to this article, got me a head start. So I got over the hump of no traffic to like 1000 plus subscribers in a couple days when I started writing. And it just grew from there. And so I've been writing a newsletter.
I do that weekly. It's a newsletter only. I am in some ways a bit different than Ethan and Jason and that I've optimized for mostly minimize my time spent on things other than just writing my newsletter. And so I'm very rarely around. I swung through. I live in Seattle suburbs. I swung through here briefly. I came back from sailing and I'm going off camping tomorrow. But once in a while, when I'm at home, I write quick newsletter so I can keep things going.
So that's my quick summary, if I didn't forget anything. Perfectly sufficient. So as Dave mentioned, we did work together. We only actually ended up working together about six months when the opportunity arose for him at Academy. I guess if you looked at his LinkedIn, because I checked my facts, it's eight months. And so while we're colleagues, we don't have a deep history, but it does turn out.
And probably most of you who are here and will see this, a lot of you will follow both of us because we end up advising similarly. No doubt. The reason we ended up deciding to work together was we kind of saw things the same way. And now without coordinating or collaborating at all, we tend to write things similarly. Dave writes at more length in his newsletter, and I tend to write more frequently in shorter form. But other than that, there's a lot of similarities.
I noticed when I went looking for the latest version of your famous leadership principles post that you've updated it a few times. It says like update of this date, update of that date. What do you feel has changed? So in the evolution of Amazon or of your view of Amazon and all of the leadership principles, what have you sort of felt you needed to update over time? Well, the most obvious update was when they added the most.
two recent leadership principles. Sure. I felt like I would be remiss not mentioning the fact that they exist. And so I put them in there. I'm not sure that they still fall in the realm of... I keep talking to people who still work at Amazon to make sure that nothing is getting out of date in regards to what is the process for interviewing and stuff like that. I don't think that those interview questions tend to come up very much on the new leadership principles. This is more... I would say in the things that I've seen beyond
how it's implemented. Because everywhere across Amazon, as with any other large company, you see very big differences in how leadership principles are implemented. I know when we worked in your group, Ethan, like between you and Mike, your manager and other people, there were some long-term Amazonians who had very specific views of what the leadership principles meant. There are certainly organizations where they hire in a new VP from outside of the company who hires three new directors. And you can see this bubble of the leadership principles may not be.
followed quite to the level of which I would say longer term Amazonians end up following it. But overall, as much as people like to say things change over time, when I joined in 2007, I was interviewing with leadership principals, going over your competencies, ownership, bias for action. And I would say, when I left, it did not feel drastically different. I could have taken a template from 2007 and interviewed because unlike technical skills where you might expect different skills over time.
demonstrating ownership or demonstrating a bias for action or demonstrating, you know, ability to disagree with people and then, you know, commit on what the collective decision is. I don't think that those things drastically change over time. And I should, this is a good point. I should have started early, probably many of the people listening live, but people who see this eventually on YouTube, et cetera. Let me just briefly explain the Amazon leadership principles, what they are.
Lots of companies have slogans on the wall. Some companies have a set of principles or guiding strategic goals or core values, or they have different names. And in fact, I predate Dave at Amazon a little bit. Right when I began, there were three separate lists. There were things called leadership principles, but there was also like a core values and like one other thing. And shortly after I got there, they...
Combine the three lists into one. And so those are probably the leadership principles Dave is familiar with. But they did compress them. Second, though, the idea is Amazon worked really hard compared to many companies to try to make sure that the leadership principles were actually meaningful, that they were used and understood. And the goal, clearly from Jeff's perspective.
was to distribute good behavior, what he defined as good behavior, he and his team as good behavior and good decision making. So the leadership principles focus a lot on how you work and how you choose what to do. But the way they tried to push them into the company is three main areas, which Amazon would call mechanisms. One, they interview. So when four or five people are chosen to interview someone,
Each person is usually assigned two leadership principles. So eight to 10 of the 14 get covered. And the idea is you will interview the person and try to figure out, do they meet these principles? Do they have, do they think this way or do we think they can think this way or do they, is there evidence that in the past they've acted in these ways? That's thing one. So we're trying to select for people who can fit the principles. The second thing is,
they are part of your annual review. So every year you get a review and part of the review basically is your peers saying which leadership principles they think you do the best on and that you exemplify and which ones they think you can do more of. And the third place is they're in all promotion documents at some level and definitely more at the leadership level. So between selecting for people, reviewing people,
and promoting people based on their exemplifying these principles, at least in theory, you get that behavior over time. Now, we'll talk about some of the drawbacks, but I'll pause and say, Dave, that's my explanation of how the leadership principles get used. Is there anything you would add to that or that you see differently? No, and I guess I would just emphasize, I think from what I've seen of other companies and like that things are listed, but rarely come up and then it becomes.
the thing in the document, if someone says, yeah, I sort of know what our five guiding principles are, our seven whatever, you know, lights at the end of the tunnel or whatever they want to call them. I really feel like Amazon's is in everything that you do. You frequently list them, you frequently talk about them. It wasn't a day when I wasn't, as a manager at least, mentioning some leadership principles in some way, not.
because i'm forced to but because they're just how you operate if you're saying is someone performing well in what way are they performing well you just automatically go to the leadership principles and say mostly like they're just really good at bias for action they're just really good at think big or whatever it is because that's again how you're writing the performance reviews how you're writing promotion documents it really becomes part of how you operate and so it becomes so natural to use them that they um i think really shape how everyone works with each other
And so it's just more than any other place I've ever heard of. The fact that these things are documented and explained becomes a way that the company operates. I'm not complaining, but an observation I had when I was working. Facebook was called Facebook, not Meta back then. I was in a meeting. I observed that a specific group of 45 engineers wasn't needed. I actually said, this is a duplicate of this other team. We should maybe consider.
reallocating them to something else this is before layoffs happened this was literally it was like oh thank goodness we could reallocate them and i literally was asked in front of like by a group of directors but why would we we have plenty of money and it's just this like shock i felt because at amazon one of our leadership principles is frugality no one would ever dream of saying why would we we have plenty of money it's just so
It's insane to say such a thing that it just shocked me because I could never imagine that. And so no one would say, why don't we just go slower at Amazon? Why don't we think smaller? These are all opposites of leadership principles. So no one would ever say, why don't we just spend more money? And so I think it's just something that manages to keep almost everything on rails of at least we're going to be emphasizing the importance of thinking big, moving fast, being right, all these kinds of things, which I think it really helps guide the company.
Yeah, and I realized while you were talking, I talked about all the ways we select personnel. The leadership principles get used on a daily basis. And if you happen to have a technical background or familiarity, I actually find they're a shorthand, a bit like a design pattern. And so you can convey a whole concept using keywords because everybody knows what the keywords mean. So if I say something as a class factory to an engineer,
They're like, oh, OK, got it. It's a class factory or a singleton. Well, if I say to someone at Amazon or someone familiar with Amazon, we really need to dive deep on this, the keywords dive deep carry a huge context. And I've conveyed a whole idea in a sentence. And so they do get used that way as a as a meeting or an internal shorthand to some degree, the way some other companies would use three letter acronyms.
you know, for special internal concepts or projects, but more in the context of a shared company-wide thing than maybe a specific project. So if you want more on this, one of my early VPs, a guy named Bill Carr, wrote a whole, well, not a whole book, but he did write a whole book. The book is called Working Backwards, but it has a whole chapter on the leadership principles. And Parag and chat asked why other companies can't do it.
I'm not going to go into that at this point, except to say the book talks about how other companies could do it. So if you want more, the book tries to give a recipe. It says, look, you don't necessarily have to use Amazon's principles, but make a set. And here's how you could do it. As for why companies don't do it, many, many reasons. But I think they start organically. And the trick is Jeff and his.
team got these in place relatively soon. And so the company was able to grow up that way. I think it's much harder to take, you know, like if you wanted to say put in leadership principles at Walmart or IBM or Target or pick some other large company, SAP, now it would be hard. Like, how do we inject this? Because it would take 10 years of pushing before it got integrated. So, Dave.
I would love to know, because I'm sure you have a big audience that goes way beyond Amazon, and yet you do talk a lot about Amazon leadership principles in your newsletters. What do you think people outside Amazon who aren't part of this culture we just described, what can they get? If I'm not from Amazon, I'm not planning on working there. Is there any reason to listen to us talk? I think that a lot of thought was put into what behaviors a leader anywhere should have.
I think Amazon, you're talking about how did it work at Amazon. I'm pretty sure that it mostly only works because Jeff himself cared deeply about it. His SVPs, therefore, also care deeply about it. And it goes down. You cannot make a company care about leadership principles as a line manager. I just don't think that's a working upward strategy that's going to work. The fact that they care on the way down is important.
The key of what a leadership principle is, is it's not how Amazon wants things to operate. I think it's how any good leader operates. I have absolutely seen other companies literally take Amazon's principles, ask me, as a side note, I think it's funny, it's like, are these things copyrighted or something? And I said, I have no idea. It's a really interesting question. But I know other companies who actually use them in their interview process because they say it's the best way to verbalize the various behaviors we need to see from the leaders we're hiring. And so it's just, it's...
Just this really clear checklist. I have rarely thought this manager is failing in a way that I cannot just very clearly point at a leadership principle and say that's why they're failing. And similarly, if they're really good at something, it's very rare when I could say they're great at this thing that I don't have a leadership principle for. I just think it's a very great verbalization of general leadership skills. And other than, I would say, classic Amazon thing, empathy itself.
is notably absent and has been talked about plenty of times in the past. So I agree with you, you know, empathy or care for employee wellness is not nearly as strongly in there as I think would be ideal. But I also want to say about the leadership principles. I lost my train of thought, but about how other companies, well, first, I don't believe they're copyrighted. They're certainly public on the website. Second, though,
Gosh, I lost that train of thought. It was something about, oh, leadership principles are not only for people managers. The word leader often gets conflicted with, oh, okay, got it. This is how the manager is supposed to act. Amazon definitely said, look, everyone is a leader in something. They're leading the finance function. They're leading the marketing function. They're leading legal for this project.
uh influencing other engineers they're one engineer on a team but they own this component their viewpoint was everyone is a leader and the principle certainly did apply to managers um but was very much about individual conduct yeah so i wanted that's another thing is in that sense
One thing anybody can take from this discussion is to the degree that Amazon has been a successful company. And one of the major drivers of that is potentially this culture using these principles. They can be good guides where you can look at them and say, well, if these are valuable, how does my behavior line up with them? Am I frugal? Do I know what that means? How am I diving deep? How am I thinking big?
What would be the difference? And this is one of the ones that's tricky. There's a leadership principle about thinking big, and there's a leadership principle about invent and simplify. How is thinking big different from inventing? Which a lot of people would say, well, those are synonyms, but that isn't how it's meant. So I'm curious, Dave, do you have a favorite leadership principle? One you identify with, one that you think is your superpower, one that you wish was, or you think is really insightful?
Yeah, I will say I'm a fanboy of all of them. But I think it's just been one of those funny things. My wife and I both worked at Amazon for 12 plus years. And like we joke about we've regularly used leadership principles when we're talking about something we want to see our kids demonstrate, which is really sad, but also fun. That ownership would be, I would say, is definitely, which is unfair because it's frequently.
by many people called the biggest leadership principle in some ways. But I think it's an overriding thing of if you're an owner, you will act in many of these ways. And so if you view yourself and you honestly, sometimes it's like a conscious thing where you say, this software, this team, this whatever, I'm going to be an owner over this. I'm not going to say I'm doing this because someone asked me to. I'm not doing it because I'm going to get a good rating. I'm not doing it because if I don't, I'm going to get in trouble. It's like, I want to do the right thing.
And I'm going to ignore, like the reason I'm going to do this is because I want to do it as an owner. Like I'm going to have pride in ownership. And that means so many things about it. It means I'm going to be frugal because I'm going to be careful with how I spend my resources on projects. I'm going to think big because I'm not thinking about getting this one project out the door two weeks from now. I'm thinking about, I want this team to be awesome three years from now.
Like these are the kinds of things I regularly would in fact say to the team. And when everyone's stressing about hitting the deadline on next Friday, I'm like, okay, but we're going to have V2 immediately after this and V3 and V4. Let's not stress so much about the first version. Let's pretend we're all going to be here in four or five years. What really matters when we're getting this launched? So I think that for my happiness at work,
for my really getting into it and feeling like, boy, that was a great day. That was always wrapped up in this ownership concept of mine. And also how I like to be managed, as a side note, which was I very frequently had some very polite version of back off and let me do my area, always, which was I want to make sure I understand what would look good to you, what do you want to avoid, and what are you worried about, and I will do my best to communicate in such a way that my manager will worry about everyone else.
and not worry about me because I'm on top of things. And it feels so good when I check in on the weekly check-in with my manager and they haven't seen me since the last week's check-in. And they're like, so are you still good? I'm like, I'm all good. Like, okay, good. Because everything else is not okay. Your stuff is good. So I'm going to go move on again. I'm like, okay, that's sort of awesome. That feels really good to me. So I think everyone could aspire to have a job like that where you sort of feel like...
You're on your island, just sort of like a startup, but with a lot of capital cushion in case the market turns down. Working in a place like Amazon where you can have ownership just feels so good. Yeah. Not surprisingly, it's something I sort of want to write about, but it's tangential. So I'm taking a note real quick. I think that's funny because I have a notebook open for all the things I want to write about later. Right. Yeah. Okay.
So not a surprise that two authors would be thinking about what is outside the context of this conversation that they still want to share. So let's go the other way. And I will share my I guess I'll share my own take and I'll let you think about this while I do it. The next question I want to ask you is in there, is there any leadership principle you struggle with or find low value?
Maybe you could leave aside the two that we didn't really work under, the two new ones, or not. That's your choice. But it's hard for you and I to authentically comment on those in a way. Anyway, while you sort of meditate on that, for me, it's funny. Some people know, I don't know if you remember, I wrote part of the ownership leadership principle. So that one's important to me. But I actually live by bias for action.
The thing I love most is that Amazon had a sense of, you know, Bezos said speed matters in business. And he wrote a whole thing that you can find in one of his, I think it's the 2017 letter to shareholders. But he wrote a whole thing about like what it means to get the hell on with it and why we need to move fast and how to do it. And I like the fact that even as the company grew, it designed internally to allow for speed.
And it favored risk-taking, at least on a relative basis. Now, some of my worst incidents were where I pushed that too far. So, you know, I have a little too much cowboy in me. Which probably was dangerous for me working for you because that's like, if I've ever been in trouble for doing something, it almost always was too much bias for action. So, yeah, positive and negative for working with someone who had the same opinions.
Yeah. So that's interesting here. I'll give you something you can spin your own way in your own newsletter someday. I call that stacked flaws. We tend to hire ourselves more or less. And then the problem is if you have a gap and someone's trying to say like, warning, Dave has a gap. I'm escalating. I'm there going, I don't see a gap. He's pushing forward. I love it to me. I love it. Right. And so I'm like, I'm going to back him. We're going to drive right off that cliff.
So I've thought a lot about stacked flaws and I have definitely observed them at least three layers deep because it just, you know, it's mini me's all the way to the bottom. Human nature. Yeah, I have both purpose. I have absolutely not for my manager, because in some ways I feel like I do hunt down people who have my opinions because it makes me feel more comfortable working on them. But definitely for the people I've hired, I did make a very conscious effort to hire people because I am.
very big on think big move fast and in my weakest area personally would be like detail oriented whatever detail oriented ends up falling under um probably dive deep yeah it's dive deep like maybe almost delivers results sometimes of like you know the last five percent of the project bores me i'm ready to move on um i have very carefully hired people who are very detail oriented and i've had amazing conversations with some of these people and i can think of them in my head of who they are where they were
almost always like my number two the person i relied on when i was out of the office and also when i would say hey i have this idea and i'd bounce it off of them and you know the when they would say dave dave dave that's a bad idea like it was my uh little conscious conscience uh kind of thing of making sure that the people who think differently than me will also see the holes in what i'm planning on doing you know oh i think we could just just get this launched tomorrow it's like no we can't um
And I think it always worked out really well, as long as I was very careful to aim at having at least someone who I knew thought very differently than me. Yeah, for sure. It's a good idea to have like the loyal opposition, right? The person who has a different view, but is working towards the same aim and good faith is the ideal model. It's wonderful. Yep.
The hard part is that you have these great ideas and then they're constantly poo-pooing them saying like, no, that's a terrible idea. I'm like, oh, come on, get on board. But certainly, you know, this is interesting. While we're talking about it, there are famous cases of Jeff wrestling with that because Jeff really wanted free shipping early. This again predates both of us. Actually, they implemented free shipping. Jeff really wanted free shipping and Wilkie and Wilkie's sort of predecessor, Rick Dalzell.
were telling him like, yeah, free shipping sounds great, Jeff, but like shipping actually costs money. So what's your plan? And they had to hash through that. And then later, Wilkie, and you can read his perspective on it, Jeff wanted to build the Kindle and Wilkie was like, we know nothing about hardware. We're a retail company. We're not profitable. You know, we're kind of up to our arse and alligators. What would possess you to think we should work on hardware?
And that discussion is really interesting, even though we're off base on leadership principles. Wilkie eventually said, I think this will take longer and be harder than you believe and cost more. And Jeff said, well, I hope you're wrong. But I think for these reasons, we should do it anyway. We need to do it and we'll get good at it. We'll add a new capability to the company. And will you come with me on that journey? And Wilkie said, well, sure. You know, you're the boss. I'll follow you.
What happened was it was it did take longer. It did cost more, like even sort of more than Wilkie thought. And it still was the right decision. So that's kind of, you know, your point about the loyal opposition. Yeah. Jeff just was, you know, and obviously later Jeff famously pulled the same trick with the fire phone. And, you know, it was it was the dumpster fire phone in the end. Right. It didn't work out. So I'm not trying to say Jeff is always right or always perfect.
I think the key there for the loyal opposition in some ways is separating out your implementation from your goal. And so we're both on board with X, whether it's someday free shipping, someday cheaper shipping. We know that customers want this and you figure out a path towards it. And Jeff says now, someone else says later. My own mini version I've had, I wanted actually our release cycles to be much, much faster on some of our hardware devices.
I was trying to move fast on that. And, you know, it was essentially getting on the same page with my team members saying, we all agree on the goal. Let's just talk about like which implementation speed is the right level of speed to go at, which is, you know, the fine line between too fast, everything becomes chaotic or too slow. Like we're not really moving on this. So do you have a least favorite or one you struggle with? Yeah, I mean, struggle with, I think some level of like what we were talking about dives deep.
um i think yeah you i guess you mentioned it at some level that well you mentioned the things that are hard for you i guess connected to the details i i think uh in there's various versions of that where i do just great and various versions where i don't you know when you talk about like here's the process we need to do every three days and we're going to do it religiously these seven pages of metrics need to be filled in and stuff
And it would just bore me to tears and I wouldn't do it well or I'd forget about it or something. It's just like repetitious things I have hard time with. Oh, my goodness. It just drives me crazy. I'm like, someone else, please take over. I'm just not good at this, which works well. If you're a manager, you can delegate. You can even try to delegate as an IC. Sometimes it works just to say, this is not my strong suit. Maybe you should use me in a different way. But leadership principles, if you're saying like, if you stack them on how well I think they drive behavior.
I would personally put learn and be curious towards the bottom of my list. Not at all. I don't think people should learn and be curious. I just think for myself, if you're diving deep in frugality and bias for action, all these things end up driving learn and be curious. I would view it as close to a side effect of if you're doing these things well, you are always learning things. You're always curious about new possibilities and exploring it. It sort of treads the line with invent and simplify, figuring out new ways to do things.
That's my personal judgment of that leadership principle is like on the lower side of like, is this overlap with something else? You know, if I had to write them and say we have to cut one, I probably would just like slide a little bit of that into the leadership principles and delete it. Interesting you would mention that because I think that was another later addition. It was, yeah. I think that was after 2007 even. I think it came after I was there. Yeah, so it got added. It got added, you know, okay, this is a good thing. Amazon is trying.
to learn, update, and adapt its principles. At the same time, it now has 16, and that is a lot of effing stuff to try to balance and manage. So, you know, God was good with 10 commandments, right? So, okay, maybe that's a little too, wow, somehow I lost my Zoom window. I've never done that. Here we go. Anyway, moving on.
I think frugality gets very little used. But it's core. It's so core. Okay, you say it's core. I watched hundreds of employee reviews come in and frugality was the least commonly mentioned of this person. It is a running joke. Yeah, yeah. Who got frugality on their performance review is a bit of a running joke. Yeah, yeah.
So if it's so core, this is a good discussion point. If it's so core, why is it never a strength or a weakness of any employee? Yeah, I think that, I think it should be probably brought up more. And I think it's, the word frugality is rough, right? Because people view it as like both the combination of the frupidity, the kind of like stupid frugality that often happens of like.
I spent years, literal years of documents and updating, arguing that we should give our developers two monitors before they finally agreed to do it. Like this kind of ridiculous frugality levels of that's just stupid. So that's like goes overboard. But on the other side of things, I think like it talks about constraints create resourcefulness and invention. And I have seen it time and time again.
that the team of seven that should be 15 ends up doing something amazing because they only had seven people. And this project shouldn't go on. We've seen that it doesn't work. Let's shut that thing down and move on. And it's like a core ability, I think, for Amazon to be successful is that ability to rip the bandaid off and say, we're done with this. Let's move on. And many of the mistakes I've seen, leadership-wise, at least what I've viewed as mistakes, and I'm just going to call them mistakes instead of saying it's my opinion, they're mistakes. Mistakes made.
was frequently things not being stopped early enough where you let this thing go that was clearly never going to be successful. And they let it go an extra year or two just to see if it could work. And so why is it not used? I'm not sure. I think in some ways, that's why I would not want to put it on the list of my view of leadership principles. I think if anything, it'd be like, hey, we need to call this out more and talk more about when someone shuts down a project, we should give them more credit for it. Yeah, definitely agree with that. Okay. Well, a couple more questions.
There's a common controversy, I guess. One of the most controversial leadership principles when people hear about it is have backbone disagree and commit. First, it often gets summarized as only disagree and commit. But do you have a take on that leadership principle, what it means to you, whether it was well, generally well understood and used or misused? I would say it was.
Quite possibly, I'm trying to think if I'm wrong about this. I think it was quite possibly the least, the hardest to follow and one of the more valuable ones for people to follow. As in, if you do it right, if you have a whole team willing to do it well, disagree, sorry, have backbone, disagree and commit. If you have a whole team willing to do that, it really changes the dynamic of an organization and it's very hard for people to do it well. And I think every aspect of that.
It's like all those words are important because the having backbone when your manager says, I think we should do X and you 100% need people to disagree. You need them to have backbone and say, I don't think that's a good idea. And the same thing is like on the other side is when we do make a decision and say, okay, we've heard all the feedback. We've heard everything else. This is the answer, everyone. It's so important that people commit this whole like the idea of the commit side of things, which a lot of people don't understand is it's not just commit as in like you do it.
Or you commit to disagree. That's a very bad misunderstanding that some people have. It's like, I commit to disagree forever. It's like, no, no, no. This is like half backbone, then you disagree, and then you commit. Because what you're doing is you're committing to the final answer for your organization. At some point, it's like the bias for action comes in of like, one way or the other, we need to do something. And so we've decided the answer is we're launching Project A, not B. Okay, everyone, we're done. This conversation is over. Unless someone has something new to bring up, this conversation is over.
And what you really need is people to say, great, that's what I'm doing. I'm going to make A successful. I'm not going to wait for A to fail and say, told you so. Because told you so is just poisonous to an organization. So you have to make sure no one ever says, hey, I said B was the right answer. No, no, no. We committed to A. The fact that A didn't work is also on you. And that's something very hard for people to understand. And so I think from backbone to disagree and then to commit is...
just so important and so hard for people to get right. But when they do, it works amazing. Yeah. And a couple of things. First, I agree with you. I look at it as a sports analogy. I'm going to use American football, but you could use other things. If ultimately the decision in the huddle is pass, even though you think it should be a run, and then you go play like, well, I'm going to play like it's a run anyway, you're doing the pass to failure, right?
The point is the whole team has to execute whatever the play that's decided to give that the maximum chance. Now, I see in this case, I see some comments in chat. Bruce is kind of saying, well, if you disagree and that reveals a stronger argument, then you can commit. Sure. The ideal is everyone becomes convinced. However, there are plenty of things.
where you can argue until you're blue in the face and don't have the illusion that data will win. We want to say data makes all the difference, but the truth is data, people can twist however they want. So without taking a position on it, consider either what you think about the safety and efficacy of COVID vaccines or in vaccination in general.
Or what you think about the security or lack of security with the last U.S. election. And I can find you people who will argue until they're blue in the face about what they believe is the data and not convince you of different than you believe. And so just recognize that while what you say is ideal, we don't always get there. But in a company, you still need everyone to execute the same way.
What is subtly listed in there is have backbone disagree and commit or please resign. The famous put your badge on the table if you're going to if you cannot commit to this like that. Yeah. You know, opt out. And the company really means that, which is and that isn't meant to be a threat. It does mean disagree. Jeff talked all the time. He had this example.
You know, you can see the ceiling behind Dave and his picture. And the question would be, well, how tall is the roof? That was Jeff's example. How tall is that roof? And if you look back in the corner, we can say, well, there's a guitar and, you know, guitars are between three and four feet. And there's a little bit of space above it. So like maybe that corner is about five feet. And someone else said, yeah, guitars aren't that long. They're more like three feet. And that's like nine inches. It's three foot nine. And Jeff would say, just measure it. If you need to know, just measure it.
So he hated what he called social cohesion because he felt social cohesion. This is really interesting. Somebody talked about empathy and we'll get back to like why empathy is there or not. Jeff definitely didn't want people to say, well, you might be right. I think it's three, nine, but you've said five feet and maybe you're the manager. Sure. Five feet. He didn't want that. He wanted you to fight tooth and nail.
But then ultimately, if a leader did make a decision that you didn't agree with, also then fight tooth and nail to make it happen. And I agree, that's very hard for a lot of people. It's extremely hard to, you know, whatever, pick one of the positions I gave earlier. It's extremely hard to believe with all your heart that vaccines are killing children or saving them and then take a job.
stopping or implementing vaccine programs directly against that, right? And that kind of was the ask, albeit without the moral killing children part. So the best example of where this, I would say this came up for, and I'll put it as managers, but certainly, again, the leadership principles apply to everyone. But for managers, the best example was, I think many people know that every year Amazon manager, or sorry, at least organizations in Amazon need to flag a certain number of people as underperforming.
Like they'll be put into coaching, they'll put into whatever else, right? There's this percentage. Unregretted attrition. Unregretted attrition. Like we're going to kick some people out of the company. I'm a manager of 10 people. My manager comes to me and says, so Dave, you need to tell me who your weakest person is on your team. First of all, I'm going to have backbone and say, I disagree. And here's why. And I'll explain that. Our performance has been good. Everyone on my team is great. These people are hired recently. This other person is rated really well.
Here are the nine reasons I have data and otherwise explaining why I don't want to go through that exercise. It's uncomfortable and like per the leadership principle, it's uncomfortable and exhausting to explain to my manager why I know you would prefer me to do this, but I do not want to do it. And here's why. So I go through it. I am disagreeing through the point of which I have explained every point that I need to make. And my manager says, I understand. I've heard this, this, this, and this. I want you to go and tell me who your weakest person is on the team.
This is like the commit phrase. If you don't want to quit, you say, got it. Okay. And you go back to your team and say, okay, whether it's a team or you go back and you go and figure out, you stack rank everyone, you get the list, you come back and say, here's my stack ranking and here's the person on the bottom. Like there's no, and if you fire them, I'm quitting. Or if you fire them, like you're wrong or our projects are all going to fail because you're doing this. The idea is, is that at some point you're now on board. Like you have to be on board. You have to, you've said your piece.
You may think that it was something you don't agree on, but that is a huge part of this. And so you might have a collection of managers all coming together. And the idea is you're not supposed to say, this is a terrible exercise. You're supposed to say, we're here for this exercise. I'm here to perform. I'm here to do my job. I already disagreed. I went through that. Now I'm committing and we're moving forward. And so it's just one of those things. And sometimes it's a project that you think shouldn't be canceled or should be canceled. Sometimes it's whatever it is.
You're supposed to, again, fight tooth and nail when you think that there's something that they're not considering, and then you commit when a decision is made. All right. I agree. Moving to another question, and then we'll move to audience Q&A here shortly. Was there a leadership principle that you found, Amazon has an opinion on this, and you may have seen it, but is there a leadership principle you found you had to hire for? Meaning,
There is this theory in Amazon that some leadership principles are easier to improve upon and some you're kind of either born with or learned by the time you're an adult or not. But I'm curious, is there something you found like I never really saw people get better at this? They either came pre-made or not. I think everything was on a spectrum and I've seen the effect, the research, there was like this fancy data graphs that they came up with.
theoretically explaining that some leadership principles uh wasn't super convincing to me i went through the whole appendix and i was not totally convinced that their uh conclusions were correct but i committed to just move forward and ignore it because i i had to pick my battles um but uh i would say for things of which you've hired someone you're like this is my risk and it never went away for me it was probably actually bias for action um you'd hire someone
who, and frequently it was like someone who had a longer career. They're working in the military or they're working at whatever. And like, they have this set, like I need to go through the procedure. I need to do it right. I need to make sure this thing is exactly right. And maybe it's all tied together in terms of insisting on high standards. But in some of my groups, you know, you're working on a consumer facing application that sort of like getting changes out is more important than never having a problem kind of thing. So it's like, we need to move fast. We have this feature. It needs to be out Friday. Let's just get it out. If it breaks, we fix it.
It's not the end of the world. And for some people, two or three years, and it seemed to be the end of the world for them if there was a problem still. So I would have people just like almost refusing to be able to launch it. It's like, I know it's done, but I need to go through one more pass on QA. Give me two more days. I'm like, we do not have time for a third pass on QA. We need to get this thing launched. We haven't found a bug. Let's push it. That was just my impression I got was that I think when someone's really tied up in this idea of I don't want to be wrong, moving fast is very hard for them.
Yeah, well, that definitely, I mean, Jeff's talked, you know, Jeff's talked a great length about that. All right. Did you do anything special or different to try to teach leadership principles to your teams? So when we talk about how to take this to other companies and we agree it's tough if it's not top down, but still, maybe if you were starting a new company, you know, how would you think about I'm actually going to help people learn to use these?
I think some of that is explicit. Obviously, everyone knows the leadership principles here. So there's some level of basic, if you want to bring it to a company and you could hire tomorrow as CEO, it's like, okay, here's the leadership principles we're going to follow. Everyone read them. Like, okay, sure. I find that the best way I felt like I got results in terms of people's behavior changing was like the constant reinforcement of things that were like the pivotal. So have backbone, disagree, and commit.
I distinctly remember purposefully. And this is like a good one. I think it's just a good example. In an organization I joined where I felt there was some level of I had way more experience than a bunch of the managers reporting to me. And they were very much of, okay. I'm like, really? You think that's okay? You're sure? No one has a different... We should do X. They're all just like, oh, okay. I was like, come on. Or what's your opinion? And so I very purposefully said...
ridiculous, but like fairly ridiculous things that no one should agree with. It was a very bad idea. And someone spoke up and I thank them very much for bringing it up. And that's a good point. We shouldn't do that. You're right. And I did this repeatedly because I needed to enforce to them that I was untrustworthy and they needed to disagree. And that disagreeing with me was not dangerous. So the very first time there was a long pause of Dave saying this thing that should not be done, it was pretty clear. It was like,
Why don't we just skip QA this time and launch this tomorrow? That kind of thing. And it's like, well, I guess we could. Like, yeah, yeah, let's just do it. And then someone said, I really don't think we should. We probably should test this first. I'm like, really? You sure? Yeah. Which sounds stupid, but some level of like... Power dynamics are a real thing, right? It's a real thing. And I think like for power dynamics, it's like the thing that would come up, it's like, okay, how do I break through this? And then someone disagrees. I say, really good point. I'm so glad you brought that up. And then next time people start actually like feeling more comfortable breaking through that.
I think that, I don't know if there's like an overall thing. I mean, for Think Big, you know, you look for bold direction. Like I think I've had repeated meetings. There is various kind of processes you go through where you say, let's break out of this whole, like what project is coming in three months. And you sit down and say, let's just look forward four years and start talking about the vision for our systems four years from now. Because if you're stuck up on what's possible three months, six months from now, it's so hard to think of where we could go long, long, long term.
And so I found it to be valuable to just completely break away from reality where someone says that that's going to cost too much. It'd be too many people. It's like, forget that. Let's just, where would we want to be in four or five years? And you spend a meeting or two like that. And boy, does it change everyone's opinions of like, we're here now, we're taking this baby step forward, but really we're going to be over here someday. And I think that changes how people think. And so for each of these leadership principles, there's some aspect where you can sort of go through.
and experience, hire and develop the best, shadowing someone. And they say, I think we should hire them. And you're like, well, what made them amazing? Just give me one thing that they were amazing at. And they're like, well, amazing. I mean, they just sort of passed the bar. I'm like, just sort of passed. Doesn't sound exciting. We want to hire people who are exciting. Were you excited about this candidate? And so I guess in many ways, it's asked the right questions, go over the leadership principles and trying to enforce the critical aspects here of each of them. Very good. Well.
I think some people have asked some really interesting questions. I encourage people, a few people have asked questions in the Zoom Q&A tool. I encourage there's 35 people here, vote on those because nothing has more than a couple votes. Meanwhile, I really do want to address the empathy thing we brought up, which is someone in chat asked about why, if we have this strive to be Earth's best employer leadership principle, do you and I say,
there's still an empathy gap. So I'm guessing, though Dave and I have never talked about this, I'm guessing we somewhat agree. But I'm curious, Dave, what led you to say there's an empathy gap? So when this new leadership principle came out, I talked to a number of peers of mine to say, wow, look at that new leadership principle. It's very wordy, first of all. It's very different than a normal Amazon leadership principle. This was not written by Jeff.
I agree. To your point, things come from the top if they're going to happen. Yeah, come from the top. And I said, so going through your performance groups, you know, I mean, you're a director, you have 470 people working for you. Did these new leadership principles come up? And they're like, no, like that's, it's not like from the top down, it was not being pushed as like a part of the processes. It hadn't been rolled into the mechanisms yet. And so that was one big aspect for me was if you are very serious about
leaders demonstrate empathy. You have to hire for it. It has to be rolled into the mechanisms. You have to say on the performance reviews, this has to show up. Boy, a bunch of people on your team were crying at their desks. You're fired. Why is that not a thing? And then promotions as well. And so until I hear that strategy to be Earth's best employer was listed as one of the four leadership principles someone excels at and that's why they're getting promoted, I would view it as a...
a bit more of a marketing thing than an actual thing, which is driving behavior. Because it means nothing if you're saying we care about this, if it's not driving behaviors. What does that even mean? If it's not changing how people act? Yeah. And again, Dave and I haven't talked about this. I'm equally cynical. At that time, Amazon was very much in the spotlight for warehouse worker abuse. There was a case in Staten Island.
where a man was claiming to have been fired for trying to unionize. And there was a lot of stuff in the pandemic, you know, that Amazon workers are so tightly, man, they work in very hot warehouses and they have to work under these harsh conditions and they're peeing in bottles because they don't have time for a bio break. And do I think some people at the company legitimately intend, you know, to make positive changes? I do.
But that principle and its related one of scale brings responsibility were both somehow written by PR. Like, we need to say something about this. And they weren't originated by Jeff being like, I want to say something about this and I want to drive change. And that's why I don't think they have the same weight. I also think that's a systemic, it's a weakness of Amazon.
because it's a weakness of modern Amazon. I think old Amazon would have said, yeah, you know, strive to be Earth's most profitable employer. You will get paid a lot. You will work a lot. That's the deal. You know, they know as with because also at the time those were rolled out, Jeff was the richest man. And that's, by the way, not something he wanted. He wanted all the money. Don't get me wrong. I'm sure he wanted to have all his billions.
because he can use them to build rockets. But he was actually sad when he became the richest man, because the amount of press and scrutiny he attracted as the world's richest man was like 4x what the second richest man gets. And he would much prefer, you know, like when Elon Musk and then other people took that over from him, I'm sure he was like, thank God, now I can go back to work in relative obscurity.
Perhaps we're cynical, but talking to Amazon now, employees, managers, I don't see signs that there's a serious effort to be Earth's best employer, at least unless you define that in very sort of narrow countercultural ways of like the best place to be well paid and work at scale on challenging problems. But if you think of it as like.
Work-life balance, empathetic, well-trained managers, concern for employee well-being. No, that's not the Amazon thing. The Amazon deal is straightforward. Dave, I'll take a breath and let you nuance this if you feel different. I think the deal is straightforward. We will pay you relatively well, maybe not the best on earth, but relatively well. We will put you on challenging work.
And if you do well at it, we'll give you more of both those things. That's the Amazon deal and nothing else. And listening to friends who left Amazon and sometimes came back or people who were at other big tech companies and came back, I would say it was very... In some ways, it was just black and white what you get at Amazon in comparison to the mishmash values. You're going to grow as fast as you could possibly grow because we're going to keep giving you stuff if you don't fail.
until you explode or tell me no. And that was like one of those fun things of like, oh my gosh, I can just keep saying yes to things and get more and more things to do on my plate. And it'll feel really important until I realize I'm working 14 hour days. And that was like, it's like an Amazon thing. It was like, I remember someone saying who'd been at a different company, like, why is your manager doing that to you? And I'm like, I can't even, I don't even think that's my manager's job to say no for me. Isn't that like my job? Because that was my, you know, the Amazon way is.
Can you do this? In fact, I've written articles about that where it's like, it's not my job as your manager. It's my own opinion to throttle your work. You figure out your work hours. You figure out how much you can get done. You tell me when you're full. You're a glass that I can't see inside of. I just put things in there and we see how much you can get done. And so many of the people I saw leaving saying Amazon was just too rough for me were making it rough on themselves. But that's just because it's Amazon's way of like, you have to say no. Saying no is...
That's ridiculously critical. And no, we're not going to be nice to you because we're going to say the truth. That was a fascinating difference. I was told, I think within the first two weeks at Facebook, just one of those funny quotes of someone literally said that social cohesion is extremely important here. I'm like, wow, because I remember a quote from Jeff saying, we don't like social cohesion. So it's fascinating for you to say it's so important here. Because what happened was someone was...
proposing a project and i said that this is a really bad idea and i got so many bad looks and i'm like what did i do wrong it's just a bad idea i didn't get it that you're not supposed to say a project's a bad idea there um it's just not a thing you're supposed to do you're supposed to be subtle like wow let's talk some more about that next week until they give up um right but at amazon you're supposed to say i don't think that's going to work like that's just not going to work and here's the three reasons why that's not going to work do you disagree or should we move on like
You get a tiny bit of thick skin. But it's not mean. If you go mean. No, it's hard. It's direct. It's direct. It's extremely frugal with my time. I don't have time to be wishy-washy. There's seven other projects I need to get to. So that one doesn't look like it's going to work. Can we move on? You know, like, let's go. And buy us for action. And so it can feel rough. But I think it's what you're promised. If you don't like that, then you shouldn't be at Amazon.
If it works well for you, if you can get past the fact that your manager said, I think that's a bad idea. And it's not because they're being mean to me or they don't like me. They just think it's a bad idea. Like, that's it. It's just black and white. That's what it is. It's the kind of company. Yeah. Yeah. And by the way, since both of us faulted for lack of empathy, we do think we call out it has a lack of empathy and we somewhat faulted for that. We do think there were places where that.
again, I'm speaking for Dave, I'll speak for myself, where that went too far and people became poor listeners or wouldn't take no for an answer on I'm full or other bad behaviors because anything can be taken too far. That said, let me go to this first question in the question list that a lot of you have said you want to know about.
And that's a question, Dave, you can pull up this list and see it yourself if you sort by most upvotes in the Q&A tool. But basically, it's asking you commented bubbles exist. And the question is bubbles of outside hires that don't follow the leadership principles. The question is, do those ever get worked out? And I have an answer, but I'll invite you to go first and say what you think.
I think it's I would say, yes, they get worked out, but probably a little slowly. That would be my impression of the bubbles I knew that existed when I was there. You would have what frequently the bubbles would be almost natural is a VP gets hired from X company and then they hire three directors from their X company. And those people hire a bunch of people from their company. And you have this culture flow downwards of whatever it is that they came from. And sometimes that's just fine. And sometimes it was very non Amazon.
And it could take a while to get fixed. And I guess part of it would be sometimes culture changes over time, as in people just become more Amazonian over many years. And sometimes people disperse. And so, you know, if everyone stays in a group for two or three years, you have a large mixing tending to take place. But I don't know what your points, what your thought is, Ethan. Yeah, I think at Amazon, they got worked out because overall, they were surrounded by like a bubble being surrounded by water.
they were overall surrounded by cultural pressure. At the end of the day, Jeff and now Andy were at the top with a consistent set of views. And so there could be a bubble, but it was going to have downward pressure on it. And then it was also going to have sideways pressure because those people would go to a meeting with another group or try and get something done. And everyone else in that meeting would be talking about bias fraction or diving deep or frugality or thinking big or whatever.
They're basically immersed in it. And they're not successful if they don't start to at least some level of comply. When someone tried to do a PowerPoint to their SVP, I remember seeing the results of that and it was not good. And it was like, okay, well, that's not going to last. Like the fact that they didn't want to do a six pager is not going to last. Correct. And I watched someone, you did see adaptations. I watched someone who was not a writer and tried to do some visual stuff.
And was kind of being clubbed about the head and shoulders like thou shalt write, thou shalt write. And the way that got resolved was that person ended up hiring someone to do their writing. And because that person was a high enough level VP with enough other valuable skills, it was decided that like the affordance or the adaptation of let the non-writer have a writer was a reasonable investment. But the fact is, you know.
That group switched to narratives at that point. Anyway, so I think those bubbles did go away at Amazon. They can only go away, though, if there's consistent holistic pressure. Otherwise, what you get is and I think a lot of companies have this. They have they don't have a culture. They have a hodgepodge of cultures. And so it's a little bit like if you stir everything together on a palette of paints, you get sort of a muddy gray brown.
That's what a lot of companies have as a culture is they have a little of everything somewhat stirred together. And I think, by the way, you can read the book Built to Last, obviously now an ancient classic. But I think one conclusion it had right was it said, you know, sort of matters less what your culture is than that you have one. And they talked about the example of RJR Nabisco, which was a tobacco company.
And they had a very pro-smoking culture. And in the days of physical paychecks, when you went to pick up your paycheck, you were handed two cartons of cigarettes with your paycheck. Nobody asked if you smoked. You didn't have to smoke. You could throw them out. You could give them away. You could sell them. But the message, we are a pro-smoking company, was unavoidable. If you want a much more modern example, Starbucks.
gives every employee, they can have a pound of Starbucks coffee for free every week. So clearly there's a message. Again, you don't have to drink coffee, but you aren't going to miss the fact we are a coffee-centric company when you're being given a pound of coffee every week. And you're like, I don't really want this. So a couple examples. Another great question. This one from Irina.
Have I seen leadership principles being weaponized? And I've actually written about this. So Dave, what do you want to say? She asked about our right a lot, which actually isn't the one I've seen weaponized the most. But what would you say to using the leadership principles as a club and where you have or haven't seen that and how much it's done? Oh, for sure. And I think sometimes because I was just thinking which leadership principle is most abused in that way.
But I would say definitely someone will have an opinion. For example, it would be more customer-centric for us to do X. And they'll say, because I care about customer obsession, I think we should do X. What do you think? And it's like, okay, you're attaching your answer to the value of which obviously everyone wants to be customer-obsessed. And I think there's some term for that. There's literally a term of you associate something that everyone's going to have to agree with to your opinion. And now you say, well, your choice here theoretically is to say either
no, I don't believe in customer obsession or yes, I, you know, or yes, I agree with your idea. Yeah, right. The classic framing of that, I'll update it slightly, but it's the question, have you stopped beating your partner? Yeah, exactly. Yep. It's implying that either you did, but you no longer do. So you're a bad person or you still do. So your work, like your choices, you know? Yeah. So I've forgotten what that.
fallacy is called maybe someone in chat so insist on the highest standards i just i just remembered which one was most weaponized i think was insist on the highest standards because i care about high standards i think something something screw you um was was the the sort of version of i'm stopping your launch or you know uh i'm not going to approve this promotion you it was frequently i would say wielded when promotion
promotions or ratings or a launch or something where if someone wants to stop something, they'll just say, I just care about high standards so much, I have to say no. It's like, okay, you don't like this in some way and you're going to label it as high standards because that makes it theoretically the right thing.
So I think I saw it a different way, which was earn trust. If I need something from you, it's the same trick. If I need something from you, Dave, can you drop your project and build my project? No, Ethan, I have a roadmap. Oh, Dave, you're really not earning trust with me. Yep.
you know, I trust you to support this important initiative and it's not happening. You're really not earning trust. They can all be weaponized. A hundred percent of them can be weaponized. And I have seen that they can also be dumbed down. You know, they can, they can be minimized. The most common example of that is the one Dave already talked about, which is we used to call frugality misuse, frupidity. So stupid frugality, but they can all be dumbed down and simplified again, high standards. Well,
High standard is really easy. The highest standard is nobody. Nobody gets promoted, right? They all have limit cases. So the author of the question asked, how do you make sure that conflict is handled properly? When you see one of those, I think you have to call it out, right? You have to call it out and say, let's decouple whether or not what you're saying is correct from, you know, high standards have a limit.
So Gallaty has a limit. They all have limits. Let's talk about the actual subject, not the leadership principle. It's one of those tricky things. There was an interviewing wiki internal to Amazon that I really liked and vaguely wish I'd sort of copied because I had some really neat insights. But their idea was that it's not like you need to be really good at Ernst's trust, but it was like everything's on a continuum and you have too little or too much on any one of these leadership principles and had examples on both sides. And so...
It was the right amount of this. And that makes it harder to weaponize because if you just say, I'm sorry, I care about high standards, so I'm going to say no. It's like, okay, well, you can care about high standards too much, which starts to impede our ability to launch things. So I would say in those kind of cases with that kind of thing, it'd be like, okay, we all care about think big, bias for action, whatever the leadership principle is. I think we can all agree that we all care about that. So let's separate out the leadership principle from the thing we're actually debating. Should this launch happen or not?
What is the right level of risk to take? We all care about high standards. Should this promotion happen or not? Obviously, we want high standards. High standards is promoting people who deserve to be promoted. So let's discuss that, not the leadership. Leadership principle can retroactively define why we care about things, but it should not be the thing that makes the choice. Yeah, that's an excellent explanation. I think you did a much better job than I did. Write it up.
We'll take just one or two more questions. We've been going a while. But what's your recommended recommendation for holding senior leaders to the LPs? How would you approach it? I'll just say, I think you can generalize this. How do you hold a senior leader to anything? What is the approach to question power? And I'll let Dave take a shot at either the smaller question, the more specific, which is how would you approach a VP or SVP about?
When you feel they're out of line with the leadership principle, or you can take the bigger question of just tackling power upwards. And I can always add on. Well, certainly you can't say.
I'm trying to think of a good example here of like, we're hiring too fast or something. You can't say, hey, I care about hiring and developing the best. So why don't we slow down this hiring or something? Because obviously, again, going back to the same weaponization thing, you have a different interpretation than they do clearly of the thing that you probably should assume that they have an opinion on. So holding them to the LPs, I would guess that in their own heads, they're doing the right thing already. And so you don't want to say, how do I...
clarify for them that bias fraction matters. And bias fraction is an easy one. If someone's saying, why don't you just wait another two weeks? I think it's addressing what are your goals, like getting on the same page on the goals of what you're both trying to achieve. I've had some amazing conversations with senior leaders when I'm disagreeing, where you just say like, what I'm most worried about is that we have three more phases of this project and we really want it to look good for Christmas. So I'm thinking like, how do we get these three projects out over the next five months?
And make sure it's stable so that when we get all the kids about getting their tablets for Christmas, everything's looking good. And they say, I don't care about this Christmas. What I really care about is making sure that there's no bad press about the product because what I'm worried about is the new product coming out next March. And I need to make sure we're in really good standing with the PR outlets, something, something. What are you worried about? What's your priorities? What do you care about? Almost always, you'll find that your disagreement is that you have different priorities.
not that you're actually disagreeing on bias fraction matters, for example. Yes. So I agree completely with some additions, but no contradictions. Addition one is sometimes leaders get busy, distracted, or lack information. And they really, they're doing something. So the first thing is just asking the question politely and honestly.
Why is there such a big rush on this project? I understand bias for action, but it seems like you have a lot more energy about it. Why is that? Or whatever the issue is. Just ask them, what are they thinking? And are they aware of A and B? The second thing, Dave talked about conflicting priorities. And then I do think there's maybe even something beyond that, which is just there's leaders having forgetfulness around awareness. And then there's leaders.
simply not understanding a critical detail because as your teams get bigger and bigger, there may be something going on, you know, more and more at Amazon, people are managing extremely complicated systems. I know people, you know, they have a bachelor's degree or whatever, and they're very, very smart and they've worked very hard, but now they're managing a dozen PhDs in a specialty. And they may just, I have an acquaintance, Dave knows him.
tangentially as well he'll know who i'm talking about who worked at prime air and talks about how the original set of leaders that got put into prime air had no experience with things that fly and amazon has maybe a flaw which is believing that a smart leader can learn anything and take over any area well yes and no like aeronautics is a
pretty damn deep field to just pick up in your 40s in 12 months. I'm not saying someone in their 40s can't become a great aeronautical engineering leader in five or eight years, but not in five or eight months, maybe. So you have this problem of maybe the leader just doesn't actually get it. And so you have to help them get it though without saying, um, I think you're stupid because they're not stupid, but they may be ignorant. So it is interesting, by the way,
From a story viewpoint, Amazon began as a retail website building distributed web services exclusively on Linux to sell physical things. And there were a lot of growing pains moving outside of those boxes. I remember my first services, for a bunch of reasons, needed to use Windows and Windows servers. And this was so bizarre to the company.
that our data centers wouldn't touch the project. They're like, that's a showstopper. We won't do it. And so the way we got it done is the very small data center that did the corporate email systems, which used Windows, that guy said, I'll house your systems. Like, we'll put them next to like the email servers because we have a few people who understand how to run Windows machines. But you saw weird growing pains like that. So that's just a fun aside.
Dave, I'll give the platform back to you. Obviously, people can find you at Scarlet Inc. Is there anything you want to add to this discussion or anything about what you're doing and where people can find you, can talk to you, can follow you that you'd like to share? Well, the following usually is LinkedIn. I would say LinkedIn is my main social channel.
Jason just posted a bunch of stuff. So that's my main place. Usually I'm posting stuff. I haven't lately because I haven't been home almost at all. You're the one who taught me how to schedule posts. Oh my gosh. I have things scheduled, but I ran out of posts because I was somewhere else. I was somewhere in a foreign country. My wife schedules us and I don't even know where I'm going. I know she said with humor in her voice recently.
did you know that the rest of our summer is scheduled? You have no free weekends. And I said, that's funny that you've done this to me. So I have no free weekends the rest of the summer until the kids go back to school. I'm somewhere every single weekend. So anyway, so I schedule newsletters. That's my main focus. I love writing. I love long form writing. So Scarlet Inc. is my long form writing. I have written, I've sort of defined it as anything having, I write about anything that has to do with big tech careers in general.
Everywhere from preparing to interview to interviewing, finding jobs, getting hired, ramping up promotions, managing people, senior engineering jobs, and then eventually retiring. So moving on to the financial independence stuff. So I would say the entire swath of like, oh, in fact, I mentioned getting internships as a high school student. So I started high school and sort of go through retiring and everything having to do with career. So it's a little broad, but at the right times, I really enjoy.
writing some of these articles is just really fun topics. Weirdly enough, as I went to Substack headquarters recently, the newsletter hosting company, and they said it's like one of the highest converting articles recently of people signing up to read the whole article was my financial independence post that I wrote a few weeks ago. They said it was just like, oh, that blew up, which is funny because as these things go, you write off topic a little bit and people get all excited.
People would like to know what the figure is. Yeah. Is it number five? Yep. Yeah. Made out of nuts and bolts though. Did you build it or? I did not. That'd be so cool. My sister got it for me for a gift. Yeah. Nice. Nice. All right. Well, cool. I appreciate you taking the time to discuss this. I know a lot of people here benefited from it. I know many more people will ultimately on YouTube. It's of course good to see you. I will not ask to see you.
Dave and I negotiated for months to get together for coffee, basically. And we did manage to have lunch for about 90 minutes. We live about an hour apart. The problem isn't willingness or friendship. It's between his schedule and my schedule. It begins with, well, we are both in town over the same days next in November. Yeah. Are you free on any of those days? Right. Because, yeah, I don't know if you have you done. Have you.
Had the thought or the computation, how many days a year do you sleep other than in your own home? I have not calculated it. I've estimated it. It's a double-digit percentage. Oh, for me, it's close to... I will spend between four and five months of nights not at home per year. I'd say I'm pretty close to that between regular work travel or hiking. Because my wife and I do long-distance running.
We do ultra marathons and trail running and stuff. So we have frequently done something like drive to the Northern Cascades, run for two days, come back. So that's sleeping overnight in our car because we're overly frugal, speaking of leadership principles. It's like once in a while I'm laying in the car, looking out the window thinking, thought I had a lot of money and why am I sleeping in the car again? There's just something wrong with me.
But that's gorgeous. Yeah. Some things you just don't shake. Like I don't need to waste money on a hotel room when all I'm doing is sleeping. So, you know, I realize we're just small talking now. I hope other people enjoy it. It shows we're friends. Do you know about the climber from the Northwest, Fred Becky? You would enjoy this. Fred Becky passed away a couple of years ago. He was quite old when he did close to 90. He was.
An early rock climber did a lot of his climbing even before World War. Well, started his climbing career as a child before as a teen before World War Two and was often the first dirt bag. But up into his 80s, he would drive out to go climbing, pull off on the side of the road, throw his sleeping bag down right on the on the ground night beside the highway, you know, kind of behind his car. And he just thought like.
Why wouldn't you do this? So you're following in hallowed footsteps. Feel free also to get a hotel room though. Yeah. There's a saying that I remember hearing, and I think it's totally applicable to companies, not to be totally off topic, but also personal life, which is if you're privileged enough, you can do anything, but you can't do everything.
and so you know i can buy just about anything but i can't buy everything and i can you know uh do any any project you can't do everything and so it's like everything is a prioritization thing i don't want to spend money on fancy hotels when i'm just sleeping overnight and uh i don't want to spend money on business class tickets because economy works for me and we fly a heck of a lot uh you know these little trade-offs you make and uh then i have a you know multiple
very expensive cameras sitting around with piles of lenses because it matters to me. And I like good photos. Yep. Makes sense. I have a lot of skis. I always thought like, oh, skis, you have a pair of skis. I learned there's a term called a quiver. So like having a lot of arrows, you know, I have skis for kind of every type of snow condition. And for people who don't ski, they'd be like, that's insane. Snow is frozen. Why, why, why, you know, and I get it.