Some of my notes on the same Lex interview:<p>> Identify and recognize the difference between one-way doors (reversing decisions here is difficult and expensive) or two-way doors (you can make a choice and if it turns out to be wrong you can go back and pick a different door with low risk). When dealing with two-way doors it's fine and desirable to iterate quickly.<p>> When a decision has to be made, "disagree but commit". After a discussion takes place, even if you disagree with some aspect, you eventually commit to supporting whatever plan has been made.<p>> Another key take away was that previous generations need to set up the infrastructure that makes it possible for the next generation to innovate. Jeff talks about how Amazon wouldn't have been possible without existing mailing infrastructure and the Internet. He says that he's hoping that his rocket company can help set up the infrastructure necessary for humanity to continue growing and expanding in space.
> When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. Meaning that a profound analysis on data is a must.<p>Weird to see these notes on the front page of HN, just literally two hours after I spoke about the exact point mentioned above.<p>I've watched the Lex-Bezos podcast a couple of times now, and that is the point which <i>really</i> resonated with me.<p>Perhaps a simple example: API monitoring shows no issues. Isolated reports of a specific failure type, such as a gateway timeout or something that could just be a one-off. Then more of the same type of (customer-reported) failures occur within a short time-period, say within twelve hours, and all monitoring still shows "all good".<p>Nah, the customer is (mostly) always right, and there's very likely something bad happening somewhere in the stack. It's quite natural that the watchers would rather dismiss the whining coming from places higher up in the hierarchical chain. But when the whiner is correct, the reverence of said whiner levels up and some other telemetry gets added for better alerting improved platform robustness.<p>EDIT: Just to be clear, I'm not a Bezos fan, and I think anyone who is fine with having accumulated that much wealth, should perhaps think a bit harder about, things, to say the least.
The one easily implementable item from this list that just never seems to catch on is: prepare a bullet-point agenda in advance, then make sure everyone reads it before the meeting, or in the first 10 minutes of the meeting.<p>This one is kind of mysterious to me, since everyone who has experienced it says it’s great, yet it’s still not a common practice in startups, all these years later.
I am more and more convinced that democratic decision making is necessary in companies - literally voting by employees - maybe as swiss style referendums or plain old vote for the CEO.<p>It's such a huge change it simply does not fit in most brains, but same is true for say social democracy during the time of Watt Tyler.<p>I think the point is politics exists no matter what the rhetoric of the elites says, so you may as well surface the politics keep it in sunshine and deal with it.<p>Plus it's ridiculous to grant a tiny elite the power to allocate resources of society simply because they got promoted...
> In your meetings, the order of voice should go from the most junior person, to the most senior person.<p>Somewhere I read, that this was also a principle in the Prussian army's general staff.
>(Jeff Bezos): "Your most junior person can overrule your most senior person, if they have the data to back it up. In your meetings, the order of voice should go from the most junior person, to the most senior person."<p>Wholeheartedly agree!<p>Phrased another way:<p>"Data is <i>senior</i> to <i>seniority</i>."<p>(At least, let's presume that it is, or should be, 99 times out of 100 -- 99% of the time -- barring exceptionally rare and unusual situations and circumstances. Accumulated <i>Wisdom</i> over a lifetime sometimes trumps <i>Data</i> ("What is the <i>exactly right thing to do</i> given this situation, given this set of circumstances?") -- so <i>Wisdom > Data > Corporate Seniority</i>, although in an ideal world and under normal circumstances, all of them should be in exact agreement...)
>As a company/team, you need to seek for ways/mechanisms that enable your employees/folks to tell the truth.<p>In my old company, we used to have team-seeking meets every week, which consisted in a stand-up 10 mins per employee. It was quite handy cause we learned to tell the truth in benefit of everyone there.
Perhaps to state the obvious: all these lessons mostly pertain to making large companies with history, processes, and bureaucracy/coordination costs a little less stuck in self-serving projections.<p>Indeed, most of the Amazon business heuristics published elsewhere pertain to rivalry within and among groups -- lessons learned from Microsoft.<p>Actually "building business value" means making the right decisions, and not making self-serving decisions is not good enough for that.
> When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. Meaning that a profound analysis on data is a must.<p>This sentence seems logically inconsistent.