The Boardroom sits down for an in-depth interview with Colin Bryar (picture below), who was Jeff Bezos' former Chief Of Staff at Amazon from 1999 to 2011. He and Bill Carr are the authors of 'Working Backwards', a seminal book that we think will shape management thinking for a long time to come.
Colin, it’s been two years since the book hit bookshelves, both virtual as well as physical. What's been the number one feedback you've gotten from, readers both positive and not so positive?
Well, the book is basically two parts. The first part is ‘nuts and bolts’ and on how Amazon works. We go and dive deep into the principles and processes that Amazon uses. And then the second part is stories. Creation stories about Amazon Prime, Prime Video, Kindle and AWS. The bulk of the interest has been on the ‘nuts and bolts side’ which was a bit of a surprise for us. We were always told, as first-time authors, that stories are a great way to get points across, but we also had kind of this ‘how to’ section because we wanted to make sure people could read that book and go away and actually do things with the knowledge, implement some of these principles and processes in their own company. So, the biggest – I would say positive surprise – is that the ‘nuts and bolts’ is the most interesting part that we've gotten feedback on. By far.
I'm sure you've had some criticism or nay-sayers about the book that you both took as feedback.
The book just was describing our first-hand account of what we observed at Amazon. We're not out to try to make the world look like Amazon or convince people to use these principles and processes. So, it's fine for people to disagree that it's not for their organisation and we don't try to convince them otherwise. We think that Amazon has created these advances in management science that are worthy of study. Some people wanted us to talk more about the current place that Amazon occupies in society in the world today. We can't give a first-hand account of that because we've been gone from Amazon for a while. So, we just chose not to talk about that and really made it more geared towards businesspeople, non-profit, for-profit, B2Cs and also B2Bs and everything in between to implement some of these processes. Some people felt there was stuff missing but it wasn't our goal right at the start to be a historical or definitive ‘everything Amazon’ book.
How would you distinguish fans of the book to the people who really want to adopt and get into the ‘nuts and bolts’? Is it a particular segment of industry or age or reader you've come across that fits into these segments?
Yeah, so we found out that the processes we talk about are pretty close to universal. We've worked with small companies and large companies who want to adopt these across a wide variety of industries. But I would say, if you’re a brand-new start up some of these processes just aren't needed because you can look over your shoulder and talk through things.
But once you get to a point where you're scaling and you can't be involved with every important decision of the company, that's when you start to figure ‘how do we layer in processes and principles there?’ The sweet spot we found is Series C or D and higher, these companies have a business model, are growing all the way up through to very large public companies where they've learned about some of these processes that Amazon has used and want to implement one or more of them inside their own organisation. It’s really the scaling challenges that we work with companies quite a bit on.
Do you find that founders come to you or is it the C-suites?
It's usually the founders or CEOs who have read the book and they contact us and say ‘Hey, we would love to learn more about it’ or say, ‘Can you help us integrate some of these processes into our company?’ Our two years of business development was really writing the book, getting that story out there and so the people who contact us, they've already read the book. As I mentioned earlier, we’re not trying to convince people that these processes are for them. We've explained what they are, what they can do for organisations and how powerful they can be. So, it's typically the founders or CEOs.
I'd love to know what Jeff Bezos thinks of it. Could you share any of his initial thoughts or encouragement when it first came out or since?
Well, when we first decided to write the book one of the first people we talked to was Jeff. Bill (pictured below) and I wanted to talk about defining the principles and practices that Amazon had used and what made it successful just because we hadn't seen any complete description of those. The blogs or interviews that we read were either incomplete or incorrect. And we just really wanted to get that story out there. So, the first thing was we wrote a ‘PR FAQ’ and used the ‘working backwards’ process itself to write the book. We wrote a chapter and a table of contents and just emailed Jeff and said ‘Hey, Bill and I are thinking of writing this book. Here's what we're going to write about it. Here's a sample chapter.’ And he wrote back and was enthusiastic and said ‘Done right, I'd love to see a book like this published.’ And that’s a double-edged sword because when Jeff says ‘done right’ you know, it puts a lot more pressure on you. I haven't seen any publicity around it [his views since launch] but I'm sure he's been a big fan of the book since it came out.
Do you plan a follow-up now, with so many things happening the last 18 months? Is it time to fine-tune some of the messaging based on your insights from the market?
You know, we're still collecting feedback from other people. I don't have another story in me right now but we have some ideas kicking around. One thing I wish we had put more of in the book was things around operating cadence and, you know, in operating rhythms for the company. Things like annual planning, quarterly business reviews, etc. There are some things that we just took for granted because we were at Amazon for so long and when we started talking to companies there was a lot of interest in that when people come to us and some of that's not in the book. Right now, I don't have another book in me, but who knows? We'll see what happens in the future.
The corporate world has adjusted itself to a new way of working: with hybrid working hours, shorter workweeks and even inclusivity. Could some of these new norms challenge any of the LPs?
So first, they're not set in stone because there are now 16. Right about the time Andy Jassy took over as CEO from Jeff Bezos there were another two leadership principles that were added. Every company needs to have their own set of leadership principles, but you also need to, on occasion, look and say ‘Hey, do we need to change some of these things?’ But you know in terms of a lot of these processes they are pretty well-suited already for a distributed virtual office. One example is in terms of writing narratives. You can now just have a Zoom or Google Meets call and you share documents. And then you do your collaborative commenting and editing and people can be anywhere to do that. So, a lot of these processes actually have been pretty well suited to a virtual office or hybrid-type environment.
In terms of the two new LPs that were added, one is ‘Striving to be Earth’s best employer and the other one is ‘Success and scale brings broad responsibility’. We started out in a garage but we're not there anymore, so it recognises the fact that Amazon does occupy a different place in society and some of the those policies impact millions of people.
In terms of ‘Striving to be Earth’s best employer’, diversity is included in there and I'm excited to see some of the innovations that will happen. I think a lot of companies are still learning as they go along. So, it's going to be an interesting next few years, I think, in terms of that whole space.
I love how Part 2 focuses on Jeff’s mission to turn Amazon into an invention machine. But why create an advisory service for CEOs to turn their company into invention machines? Isn't that the realm of like a chief innovation / technology / product officer to champion from within?
Yeah, that's a great question. First of all, we didn't write the book to start the advisory business – we wrote it to get the story out there and people started contacting us in enough numbers that we felt we’ve got to do something with this. So, the advisory business came after the book. Part of these processes that Amazon uses is that you want to distribute the single-threaded leadership. We've got single-threaded leadership in some roles like a chief product officer, for instance. Those are quite different than in a single-threaded leader world because you can't have one person making all of the key product decisions across the company.
With a chief innovation officer, you hear that title a lot and people then think ‘OK, well the innovation happens over in this group.’ And innovation is something like breathing. Everyone needs to do it! And it needs to be distributed across the organisation. Where change is going to happen is if the CEO is on board with one or more of these changes. They won’t stick if only part of the company wants to go try it. If you want to switch from slides to narratives, you have to try it and actually see how it's going for a few months before you decide to roll back that experiment. But if the CEO is not on board with that then it just doesn't get traction, you know.
Creating an invention machine is a paradigm shift. It’s a thinking transformation or mindset transformation. How do you guys get involved in doing that or do you work with other experts in that area?
Bill and I are both operators and inventors at heart. We don't only work with the CEO. If he or she says ‘We want to implement the ‘working backwards’ process or figure out how to get the operating cadence setting or annual planning process set, once we get that kind of thought process aligned with the CEO then we roll up our sleeves and work with the people who own the financial planning or the annual planning process. It's just Bill and I right now. We only handle a few companies at a time because we want to make sure that these changes stick and are successful for the companies. But when we do that we’re the guiding those people through the process and the operating unit leaders themselves, in addition to the CEO.
What's the time scale you're looking at for changes to happen?
It depends on how many processes people want to do. Anything from four to 12 months is really the typical timeframe that we've seen. Even Amazon didn't adopt all of these processes at once either. You can do maybe one or two at a time because there are some fairly substantial changes. For example, it takes a while to create a weekly business review and look at identifying your input metrics, and then instrumenting all of the systems to collect those input metrics and getting the data ingestion pipeline to go visually display those to run your own weekly business reviews like Amazon does. That’s a several weeks or months process right there. We sit in on those weekly business reviews, we give feedback and guidance on types of questions that will get people self-sufficient, so that just takes time to do.
Can you share about some of the companies you've already started working with who posed early challenges that you were able to turn around by working deeper?
I can give two examples. The first one wanted to implement a weekly business review process. The first thing we did is to work with the company and the individual operating units to explain what controllable, customer-facing input metrics are and how to identify those to say ‘Well, if we do these sets of things ‘right’ you'll generate the desired results in your output metrics.’ That's not a straightforward process. It's an iterative process. Quite honestly, a lot of companies are heavily focused on output metrics and just figuring out what those input metrics are. A leap of faith is needed in the beginning that will identify them. But once we started measuring them, we were driving them in the right direction.
Once you do that, you'll get a better understanding of your business and you'll know what those knobs and levers are so you can actually consistently grow quarter over quarter. It really hit home in the very first weekly business review they did, where we got everyone together. We saw how all of the individual components of the company worked together and what the impact of group A had on group B and how it impacted the customers. They realised it pretty quickly once they got the whole weekly business review up and running, saying ‘Yep, this is fantastic. I wish we had done it sooner because we now understand what actually drives the business and what things create customer value.’
The second example was an annual planning process for a client. Before we came onboard, the individual groups presented their annual plans to the CEO. But the way Amazon does it is each operating unit writes an annual planning narrative and that rolls up. And then the whole executive team looks at all of those operating plans. So, they get to really dive deep into all of the areas for the company. The CEO, at the end of the process, said: ‘This is the first time I felt that we, as a management team, understand in-depth what's going on in every area of the company and I feel very comfortable with how we've allocated our resources, identified our initiatives, and identified all of the dependencies. Just as important, we now have a set of audit and control processes to make sure that we're going to either operate according to this plan or course correct when necessary.’ So that was another positive validation after going through that process.
Do you see some of these LPs being transferable to working with start-ups?
We don't have any special sauce that will really help people find product-market fit. And there's a lot of factors, especially in a brand-new start-up, that are outside of your control that will determine whether you're successful. One of the things we strongly encourage is to identify your leadership principles or core values, codify them and write them down. It’s usually the founder who knows them and there's just part of their DNA but their job is to write it down into some type of constitution for the company because that's what you want people to rely on when you're not in the room, when they have to make tough decisions without all the information, and quickly. So you get your core values or your leadership principles written down. Then the second step is that you have a deliberate hiring process. So, as you grow from five people to 10 to 15 people, you’re looking at people to evaluate them through the lens of your core values. Then those people coming on board will reinforce your core values. If you don't do that, they'll bring whatever their principles or values are from their other company and your company is going to change.
One of my favourite LPs is customer obsession it's amazing how you know even large product companies whether it's a retailer or someone selling a B2B product the people who work in product sometimes or marketing you know don't have a customer obsession. Do you start at the top or is there one more important than the other?
The very first day I met Jeff Bezos was back in March of 1998. He said he want to build Earth’s most customer-centric company. I didn't really know exactly what it meant. I thought it sounded kind of cool but over the years I’ve definitely learned the difference between customer-focus and customer-obsession. I personally think being a customer-obsessed company and having that in your DNA is a good way to build a long-lasting company. Customers care about the value that you're bringing them in their lives, not your P&L statement and how you’re structured internally with different groups.
Has the book been reprinted in different languages and how's that going in terms of cultural receptions to what's essentially an American company that’ s famous for being big in America?
Yeah, so it's been translated into many languages. We work with a lot of international companies outside of the US and when I talked about these processes and principles being universal, so far, we haven't really found a case where that's not true. Customer obsession works just as well inside the US as it does outside. I've been pleasantly surprised by the feedback we've received from people who’ve read the book, either non-English versions or just young people living outside the USA who want to learn more about how Amazon operates too.
Editor's Note: To know more about Colin and Bill's book, read TBR's review of it here.