(The audio and video are the same, but with a bit more color than what is below. I enjoyed putting this together and hope you enjoy it too.)
Jeff Bezos, talking about hiring:
"Will you admire this person? If you think about the people you’ve admired in your life, they are probably people you’ve been able to learn from or take an example from. For myself, I’ve always tried hard to work only with people I admire, and I encourage folks here to be just as demanding. Life is definitely too short to do otherwise."
Lex Fridman shared his conversation with Jeff Bezos in episode #405, which yielded several lessons and reminders for me. Here we go:
Invention & Efficiency Are At Odds
Incremental improvement is linear and critical in everything we do. You have to work hard to make things a little bit better.
Invention is different. Invention happens when you don’t know where you are going. Invention and efficiency are at odds. You must give yourself space, time, and resources to wander if you want to invent.
Killing Ideas Is Easy
New ideas are not fully formed ideas. Once they pass the first level of scrutiny and you are ready to show them to someone else, it’s important to remind people,
“It will be easy for you to find objections to this idea, but work with me - there’s something here.”
It’s easy to kill ideas. It’s hard to do the work till it works.
Brilliance Is In The Cost-Reduction Phase
The new idea is essential. Going from a new concept to something usable generally comes in the cost reduction phase. Henry Ford didn’t invent the car. He invented how to reduce the cost. This is happening with Space X and Blue Origin. They aren’t inventing going to space. They are lowering the cost.
“Cost reduction means inventing a better way.”
One-Way Vs. Two-Way Door
It's still one of my favorites. Here he said:
“A two-way door decision, you pick a door, walk out, and spend a little time there. It turns out to be the wrong decision, you can come back in and pick another door. Some decisions are so consequential and so important and so hard to reverse that they really are one-way-door decisions. You go in that door, you're not coming back.”
The senior team makes one-way door decisions. Two-way door decisions should be made by an individual or a very small team as close to the problem as possible. If you use a heavy-weight decision process on all decisions, you will be slower than needed and use resources better allocated elsewhere.
Two-way door decisions are where you should test and fail fast. One-way door decisions should be slower and more intentional.
Compromise Is Bad
He goes on,
“You have two executives who disagree, and they have a war of attrition, and whichever one gets exhausted first capitulates to the other one. Again, you haven’t arrived at the truth.”
Exhausting the other person is not truth-seeking, and compromise is not truth-seeking. This is where you escalate the decision and ultimately ‘disagree and commit.’ This is not compromise and commitment. This is disagree and commit. By compromising, you are regressing to group thinking and likely an average decision. This will produce average results.
Your organization will only move as fast as you can responsibly make decisions. Sometimes, you won’t know the truth, but take the best information possible and commit.
Humans Are Not Truth-Seeking Animals
Truths don’t want to be heard because they are uncomfortable, difficult to hear, awkward, exhausting, challenge norms, hurt egos, and threaten positions. You have to talk openly about how hard it is to find and tell the truth. It takes energy to get the truth and remind people it’s okay to be uncomfortable.
“Humans are not truth-seeking animals. We are social animals. Go back 10,000 years, and you are in a small village, and you go along to get along. You survive. You procreate. If you were the village truth-teller, you might get clubbed to death in the middle of the night.”
You have to set up your culture so that the truth comes to the surface, and the “most junior person can overrule the most senior person if they have the data.” Data will not always have the answer or at least won’t always be where we see the first truths. This is especially true if you are tracking the wrong metrics.
“A lot of our most powerful truths turn out to be hunches. They turn out to be based on anecdotes. They’re intuition-based…I have a saying which is when the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right.”
A Proxy For Truth Can Be Dangerous
At some point, you began managing the success of your organization through a metric. That metric was what you used to determine success on what was most important to you, like customer happiness. That metric is not customer happiness. It’s a proxy for customer happiness.
The person who created the metric understood the connection between the metric and the result you wanted. Ten years later, they are gone, and the organization forgets the truth behind why you were watching that metric. The world shifts, or the metric is missing something. Now you’re measuring the wrong thing and don’t have the truth.
Ultimately, you don’t care about the metric. You care about customer happiness. The metric only matters so much as it affects your understanding of customer happiness. You must honor the past and know how you got here, but question everything.
“You never wanna get trapped by history. It doesn't mean you discard history or ignore it. There's so much value in what has worked in the past. But you can't be blindly following what you've done.”
Bezos reminds us about the idea of Day One thinking. You have to approach each day as a fresh start and approach the opportunities and problems with that day’s perspective. Don’t get trapped.
I’ll leave you with this from Bezos,
“You aren’t trapped by what you were or who you are.“
If you found this helpful, could you hit like and share it with someone who will like it, too? If you want my full highlights from his conversation, please drop a comment or email me.
Take care,
Jeff Bezos on Hiring, Compromise, Inventing, Decision Making, and Truth Seeking