Good Morning Move Fast, Think Slow readers!
A few weeks back I wrote about a little brotherhood and post LA Marathon recap notes. Also, shared a life-enrichment homework assignment for you!! GET TO WORK TO FIND YOUR NAMASTE! 🧘♂️
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RIP TO A GOAT
The name of this newsletter was not completely inspired by Daniel Kahneman, but it also kind of was. The great, influential Economist just passed away last week. His studies with Amos Tversky illustrated how human beings generally act in fully rational ways and that any exceptions tend to disappear as the stakes are raised. Their behavioral school of study is based on exposing hard-wired mental biases that can warp judgment, often with counterintuitive results. He wrote great books and won a Nobel prize in 2002.
While I’m no behavioral economist, I do think Kahneman’s work inspires a key element of MF/TS. There are two sides to every sword. The rationale and data and also the abstract and intuition based perspectives. The real insights doesn’t lay in one or the other, but most often times somewhere in between.
RIP to a brilliant mind who gave us a lot of pearls of wisdom, insights, and perspectives to nourish on.
THIS WEEK IN MF/TS - HIGHLIGHTS FROM JEFF BEZOS/LEX FRIEDMAN INTERVIEW
In this week’s newsletter, we’re geeking out on a few things I want to explore in 2024.
How hard data and creative thinking comes together to make game changing results.
Geeking out on is why / how leaders get teams to consistently perform at a high-level.
Inspired by Lex Friedman’s interview with Jeff Bezos, his conversation with Lex offers nuggets to help us understand how to get the answers more right than not. And how to do it with a lot of people. All at once.
Philosophy, intention, focus, good habits, and truth-seeking debates are highly valued by Jeff Bezos.
In his interview with Lex, Bezos shares his modus operandi for how you use the information to make key decisions with teams is quite exceptional.
Think about it.
Bezos consistently got senior teams, and then larger teams to execute big business ideas. And do it exceptionally well.
THE LITTLE ENGINE THAT COULD - LET’S BACK IT UP
Bezos started a little book eComm company in 1994. In 2024, it’s one of the largest and most successful digital eComm businesses in the world with extensions in various verticals.
Amazon is 40% of the entire eComm marketplace with a $1.895 trillion dollar market cap! 😮😮😮
The fact that Amazon expanded by launching new products AND acquiring/investing in key businesses flawlessly is quite an achievement.
They didn’t bat 1.000. But no one does. Yet, one could argue they’ve batted a .775 average broadly speaking and that’s absolutely insane especially if you compare that to nearly every other high growth / young business in the history of modern biz.
HOW DID HE/THEY DO IT?
When I think about Jeff Bezos the innovator, the business leader, and the titan of industry I ask a few questions:
How did he do it?
What did he know that Wall Street could never know?
How did he keep innovating and outperforming the marketplace on customer experience and price?
A NOTE ON EXECUTING WITH EXCELLENCE
When I was played Football as a young kid the prompt from the Coach was always can you execute the play? Meaning, can you hit your mark, but better yet can you do it with excellence?
It sounds very straightforward.
But the truth about good execution is it requires intense focus.
That’s just for yourself.
And then consider having to worry about executing a play with other humans all at once.
IT’S VERY HARD THING TO DO!
It’s one thing to execute the plan.
It’s another to execute the plan with excellence.
And then do it consistently over time.
BEZOS BIZ SCHOOL AKA INSIGHTS WORTH STEALING
FIVE KEY TAKEAWAYS
Day 1 Thinking (Fending off Day 2 Thinking)
High-Velocity decision making
Truth Seeking / Safe Spaces for Debate
Intention & debate
Leaving room for art
These are the big concepts Jeff covers once he and Lex start talking Amazon. (Worth listening to).
Many of these ideas are covered in Jeff’s 2016 letter to shareholders. Also very much worth the read.
This dude F’ING gets it.
DAY 1 THINKING
Per Bezos:
In summary Day 1 thinking is:
Starting fresh every day
Openness to make new decisions every day on
Invention
Customers
Operations
He/They have Rules for New Programs at Amazon
Make Tenants - Main ideas we want the program to embody
Unless you know a better way is what they put down next to the tenants; leaves room for optimization/stress testing go-to-market plans
Bezos spoke about fending off Day 2 thinking, which helps further explains his Day 1 ethos.
“Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.”
Yikes. No one wants to be Day 2. Day 2 sounds like failure. Or at bare minimum mediocrity. Mediocrity sucks.
Jeff’s starter pack to fend off Day 2?
Having customer obsession - Think the experience, ease of use of product, delightful memories, fulfilling on the promise of the product/brand.
Skeptical views of proxies - Be skeptical of process because outcomes are more important than the process. Be skeptical of data points that drive the behavior, they sometimes aren’t reliable after large periods of time.
Eager adoption of external trends - If you won’t or can’t embrace powerful trends quickly and fight them that means you’re probably fighting the future which pushes you into Day 2. Adopt the trends then you have tailwinds.
Key Takeaways:
Bezos says you never trapped by dogma or history.
Fending off Day 2 is about leveraging objective truths of customer experience, the data point that matters, and being actively aware of leveraging tomorrow’s market forces
Each program at Amazon has rules and intentions built into them; is that why they tend to launch and perform better than most?
HIGH-VELOCITY DECISION MAKING
“Compromise is not truth seeking. And there are a lot of cases where no one knows the real truth and that’s where disagree and commit can come in, but escalation is better than war of attrition. Escalate to your boss and say, “Hey, we can’t agree on this. We like each other. We’re respectful of each other, but we strongly disagree with each other. We need you to make a decision here so we can move forward.” But decisiveness, moving forward quickly on decisions, as quickly as you responsibly can is how you increase velocity. Most of what slows things down is taking too long to make decisions at all scale levels. So it has to be part of the culture to get high velocity. Amazon has a million and a half people and the company is still fast. We’re still decisive, we’re still quick, and that’s because the culture supports that.”
Key Takeaways:
Bezos clearly believes that answering questions / solving problems with speed is absolutely crucial to increasing the odds to be in Amazon’s favor.
Most organizations lose sight of the importance of forward momentum. It’s part of what makes great projects, great. They happen quickly in short bursts.
Also, reminds me of what the head coach used to tell us about speed in football b/c it’s true in business competition as well: speed kills.
TRUTH-SEEKING & SAFE SPACES FOR DEBATE
One of the more interesting parts of the interview is a question that prompts an explanation from Bezos on why truth-telling is a core tenant to finding out the real answers to the programs they want to launch at any given point in time. Or the programs that need an optimization update.
Lex: “What does it take to have a culture that enables that in the meeting? Because that’s a very uncomfortable thing to bring up at a meeting.”
WE ARE NOT ENCOURAGED TO TELL THE TRUTH
“You have just asked a million-dollar question. If I generalize what you’re asking, you are talking in general about truth-telling and we humans are not really truth-seeking animals. We are social animals. If you’re the village truth-teller, you might get clubbed to death in the middle of the night. Truths are often… They don’t want to be heard because important truths can be uncomfortable, they can be awkward, they can be exhausting.”
IF YOU WANT TO BE SUCCESSFUL HONESTY & TRUTH ARE AT THE CORE
“But any high performing organization, whether it’s a sports team, a business, a political organization, an activist group, I don’t care what it is, any high performing organization has to have mechanisms and a culture that supports truth-telling. One of the things you have to do is you have to talk about that. You have to talk about the fact that it takes energy to do that. You have to talk to people, you have to remind people, “It’s okay that it’s uncomfortable.” Literally tell people, “It’s not what we’re designed to do as humans.” It’s kind of a side effect. We can do that, but it’s not how we survive. We mostly survive by being social animals and being cordial and cooperative, and that’s really important. But…you want to set up your culture so that the most junior person can overrule the most senior person if they have data.”
Key Takeaways:
Truth is primary and generating a “safe space” to get to it is absolutely crucial
Many group cultures aren’t primed to chase truth (social animals note)
Sometimes it’s an uncomfortable process to find what matters the most in a group setting, but those conversations tend to produce the best results.
INTENTION AND DEBATE
“I like a crisp document and a messy meeting.”
When new people come in, like a new executive joins, they’re a little taken aback sometimes because the typical meeting, we’ll start with a six-page narratively structured memo and we do study hall. For 30 minutes, we sit there silently together in the meeting and read. Take notes in the margins. And then we discuss. And the reason, by the way, we do study, you could say, I would like everybody to read these memos in advance, but the problem is people don’t have time to do that. And they end up coming to the meeting having only skimmed the memo or maybe not read it at all, and they’re trying to catch up.
Bezos goes on to share his issues with PowerPoint (what everyone in Corporate Land uses to find alignment).
“But one of the problems is PowerPoint is really designed to persuade. It’s kind of a sales tool. And internally, the last thing you want to do is sell. Again, you’re truth seeking. You’re trying to find truth. And the other problem with PowerPoint is it’s easy for the author and hard for the audience. And a memo is the opposite. It’s hard to write a six-page memo. A good six-page memo might take two weeks to write. You have to write it, you have to rewrite it, you have to edit it, you have to talk to people about it. They have to poke holes in it for you. You write it again, it might take two weeks. So the author, it’s really a very difficult job, but for the audience it’s much better.”
Fascinating Key Takeaways:
The memo writing forced logical arguments to be made and larger conversations to unfold - does the size of the task meet the size of their big idea/new marketplace opportunity? For example, going after/creating the Amazon Web Services business.
The messy meeting is a call for healthy debate. How good are debates after people read and take notes for :20 minutes? I bet they’re better than when we just throw PowerPoint slides at each other.
This ethos trickles through Amazon’s programs in development, as mentioned above, all Programs must have tenants, principles, and rules.
LEAVING ROOM FOR ART + ANECDOTES
“By the way, a lot of our most powerful truths turn out to be hunches, they turn out to be based on anecdotes, they’re intuition based. And sometimes you don’t even have strong data, but you may know the person well enough to trust their judgment. You may feel yourself leaning in. It may resonate with a set of anecdotes you have, and then you may be able to say, “Something about that feels right. Let’s go collect some data on that. Let’s try to see if we can actually know whether it’s right. But for now, let’s not disregard it. It feels right.”
Key Takeaway:
I love how Bezos talks about leaving room for intuition, I call this leaving room for art.
I also read anecdotes as various anchor elements that are known truths, and therefore can potentially confirm net-new truths. Meaning, new combinations may infer a new innovation that’s never been done before. And therefore is a value space to develop products in. That’s why Bezos says “something feels right there, let’s go collect some more data on that.”
IN CONCLUSION: HOW TO FIND YOUR BEZOS CHI
You might not be starting huge programs for a digital eComm juggernaut, but I bet you’re thinking through how to make something better.
Or you might be trying to come up with a new idea that generates revenue.
Or you might be trying to novel solutions to a particular opportunity space.
And if you’re trying to do these types of things, there are good questions to ask yourself (and your teams) to sit with; to re-imagine; to re-think potential ways in to generating very good ideas that generate very good results.
Are you being as imaginative as possible about the new possibilities?
Do you put some defining principles into the efforts / key outputs you are going to make? Generate a deadline to when you will make those decisions?
Are you moving with enough speed to create momentum and out hustle the marketplace?
Are you intentionally programming your projects and the thinking spaces around them?
What data are you leveraging and what truth is it really telling you? How/why are you actioning off of it?
Are you encouraging a safe culture that promotes truth-seeking?
Are you leaving room for art and intuition?
Capitalism is creative destruction. So if you’re not thinking of the next big thing, or big ideas to sustain your product’s sustainability within the marketplace your competitors will be thinking up of next big thing.
Bezos offers us interesting tidbits that may push us to re-think our typical ways of working. The typical ways of thinking. Because if you can just find a different angle into a creative opportunity, you just might find different results.
IMAGES OF THE WEEK
Go forth.
Stay safe.
Ride the wave.
-Mitch