Jeff Bezos' big bang theories

Book review of Working Backwards: Insights, Stories and Secrets from Inside Amazon

This book may have been a little different if founder Jeff Bezos’ comment that Amazon must treat its employees better had come earlier. In a letter to shareholders recently, Mr Bezos, who will step down as the Amazon CEO later this year, said, “I think we need to do a better job for employees…. We need a better vision for how we create value for employees — a vision for their success.’’ This was a surprise from a “customer-first’’ company that has been slammed many times for its aggressive business practices and burnt-out workforce.

 The book, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon, is an attempt to capture the success of the Seattle-headquartered online major through its principles, processes and practices. At the centre of it all is a customer-first approach, as co-authors Colin Bryar and Bill Carr — both long-term Amazon insiders with experience of working directly with Mr Bezos — narrate convincingly through the pages.

Indeed, no conversation with any top Amazon executive is possible without a reference to customer obsession — the first of the 14 leadership principles at the American firm. In an interview to Business Standard in 2014, Mr Bezos had harped on it, in between his characteristic throaty laughter, when he was asked how Amazon was coping with competition from Flipkart during the big Diwali sale. He had said that Amazon (a new player in India at that point) believed in keeping the head down and cutting the noise out so that it  could focus on customers. By noise, Mr Bezos meant competitor obsession — a no-no, according to the company’s tenets!      

Working backwards goes into great lengths to elaborate each of the 14 leadership principles and devotes the first half of the book to terms and phrases such as “two-pizza structure” (where no team would be larger than the number of people who could be adequately fed by two large pizzas) and “bar raising hiring process” (employees were expected to be like “missionaries” with a long career in the company and not “mercenaries” looking to make a quick buck and leave) that any ambitious company may find useful to replicate. For others, it’s the second half, with details on Amazon’s creations such as Kindle, Prime and AWS (Amazon Web Service) that holds readers’ attention.    

The origin of Kindle, for instance, is linked to BlackBerry, the book tells us. “He (Bezos) wanted the Kindle to be like the BlackBerry—no wires, never a need to connect to your PC…..he wanted the bookstore right into the device so you could shop and read on the go….’’ Also, the idea was that once a person started reading on the Kindle, he should not notice he’s using a device.

Working Backwards: Insights, Stories and Secrets from Inside Amazon

Author: Colin Bryar & Bill Carr

Publisher:  Macmillan

Price: Rs 699

How Prime Video came into being is also narrated well. The journey to the 2011 launch (of Prime Video) took more than “six years of work and a string of missteps, challenges and, yes, outright failures”. Around mid-2004, the initiatives began under the brand name Unbox and the customer experience was a failure, the authors admitted. While the company perfected Prime Video with time, the book lists Amazon Fire Phone as a dud. After the failure of Fire Phone, Mr Bezos was asked about it. His answer: “If you think that’s a big failure, we are working on much bigger failures right now—and I’m not kidding.”         

Messrs Bryar and Carr, who were at Amazon for more than a decade (1998-2010 and 1999-2014, respectively) and then left to pursue their own endeavours, have told it like it is and that’s the beauty of the book. “We both worked extensively with Jeff (Bezos) and were actively involved in creating a number of Amazon’s most enduring successes, not to mention some of the notable flops in what was the most invigorating professional experience of our lives.’’

Mr Bryar, who joined as an executive, went on to become Mr Bezos’ technical advisor—a role that was referred to as “Jeff’s shadow”. Mr Carr, who joined as a product manager in Amazon, led the launch and development of what’s now known as Amazon Music, Prime Video and Amazon Studios.    

       

In an interesting chapter on why PowerPoint was banned at Amazon top leadership meetings, Mr Bryar writes, “One of my roles as Jeff’s shadow in the early days of the company was to manage the agenda of the weekly S-team meeting which took place every Tuesday and typically ran for four hours.” Realising the amount of time that was wasted at these meetings in watching presentations, Mr Bryar sent an email at Mr Bezos’ direction to the S-team members on June 9, 2004. The subject line was: “No PowerPoint presentations from now on at S-team meetings”. The reaction from the team members: “You must be kidding’’. But Mr Bezos’ doggedness in executing what he thought was the best had to win. And so, a six-pager narrative format was introduced for meetings instead of the managerial dream product PowerPoint.

It’s perhaps the same doggedness that is on demonstration now as Amazon fights an all-out court battle against the deal between Kishore Biyani’s Future Group and Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance to make a point and claw back what could be lost in the Indian retail space.