Amazon Leadership Principles: https://www.aboutamazon.com/about-us/leadership-principles
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Get Right People In
- Interview
- Detailed written feedback offered immediately after the interview.
- 1--4 rating (strongly inclined, inclined, disinclined, strongly disinclined)
- Bar raiser
- Diversity: every female candidate gets a phone screen
- First decision in a big bet: who will lead (they get to think through the questions/etc.)
- Interview
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Work Backward from Desired Customer Experience. Use PR-FAQ:
- PR: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jMxaBv3tnxdR13dT9DniVxEL6Oqay7rHcJ3eCjmD4kA/edit
- FAQs are divided into external (customer focused) and internal (focused on your company) sample template: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LBEaot-s17IlhRbosie5rtsId5Qs1kyNTaeoIe5EvtQ/edit
- Most PR-FAQs won't get approved: think through the problem without committing resources
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6-pager
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Focus on controllable input metrics, rather than output metrics. Controllable input metrics (e.g., reducing internal costs so you can affordably lower product prices, adding new items for sale on the website, or reducing standard delivery time) measure the set of activities that, if done well, will yield the desired results, or output metrics (such as monthly revenue and stock price).
- The Flywheel: Input Metrics Lead to Output Metrics and Back Again. This sketch, inspired by the flywheel concept in Jim Collins’s book Good to Great, is a model of how a set of controllable
- Define-Measure-Analyze-Improve-Control or DMAIC for metrics iteration
- Use surprising data/etc. as opportunities to learn: Correction of Errors (COE) process, based upon the “Five Whys” method developed at Toyota and used by many companies worldwide. When you see an anomaly, ask why it happened and iterate with another “Why?” until you get to the underlying factor that was the real culprit.
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Separable, Single Threaded Leadership: person, unencumbered by competing responsibilities, owns a single major initiative and heads up a separable, largely autonomous team to deliver its goals.
- “The best way to fail at inventing something is by making it somebody’s part-time job.”
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Jeff exhibits discomfort when presented with an either/or proposition in which both results are mediocre.
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Shipping promotions drove significantly higher growth than any other type of promotion. The perceived value of free shipping was higher than straight discounting of product prices. Put another way, if the average discount of a free shipping promotion was 10 percent, we’d see significantly more demand lift (called elasticity) by offering free shipping than by discounting product prices by 10 percent.