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.
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.
Plus it's ridiculous to grant a tiny elite the power to allocate resources of society simply because they got promoted...
If this lead to more successful companies, we'd see more successful democratic companies.
As things are, it will take an extraordinary amount of evidence for a claim this extraordinary.
If something hasn't been tried at a wide-scale I wouldn't say you can conclude that.
Concluding democratic systems don't work in the 15th century would be somewhat similar, because you're living in one of many successful kingdoms, with not many successful democracies to point at.
There were some past democracies, like the Greeks, but naysayers would say, if that system worked so well, we'd see more of it.
I think it might be worth a try. It might fail.
I personally think it's a question of scale. We know from high-level politics that usually for large nation-states, democracy works better long-term than dictatorships. Dictatorships often work well in the short-term due to faster decision making, but long-term they lack the error-correction and accountability of a democracy.
A company that executes too slowly might not be successful. So I can imagine that small companies work better as dictatorships. They need fast decisions, they need a vision.
But big corporations? They move slowly anyway. They have a lot of subdivisions. One part doesn't know what another is doing. It could be that a bit more error-correction through democratic participation helps.
Democracy keeps those with power honest and in-check. Especially with technology you can enforce top-down mechanisms unlike in previous human times. Regardless of whether your policy makes sense or not.
/s
They can only allocate the resources of the company, not society. And they get selected based on their track record of effective allocation of those resources.
Democracy has never demonstrated efficient allocation.
The basic idea is that in a totalitarian society elites hoard knowledge and access to technology to support their own position, the common example is Saudi Air Force pilots are basically all princes.
democracy and openness and metritocracy leads to better people in positions of influence, and leads to organisations that are more mission focused and more flexible.
But it's a bet. There is no reason to believe that the military industrial complex of democratic mid-century USA is down to democracy or just luck.
But is "our society" defined by liberal democracy? And if so place our bets on liberal democracy
I've seen too many managers fail upwards to truly believe that is true in general. In plenty of companies connections are just as or more important than being effective at allocating resources.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
Over my 9 years there, I saw every LP used towards politics or malicious compliance. Even reading them now, it all comes across as "just so the right thing"... written in a way that sounds like there is some deeper truth.
Two-way doors are often misunderstood imo. It's not about the decision it's about the cost of reversal. If you have Option A and B, then sometimes the cost of implementing A + validating A + business cost of A being wrong + reverting A + implementing B < bikeshedding the A-vs-B decision in advance.
Everything's grey. The principle is about realizing which side of the inequality it's probably on.
That's not saying they don't serve a purpose or don't influence the culture, just that their title is a bit Orwellian and "Be Right A Lot" is a pretty shitty principle for any culture.
I think my main criticism of Amazon would be this point:
> Some companies rely on metrics which they do not quite understand. Metrics are proxies for their in-world representations, not actual factual truth indicators.
Not just in the literal sense, though I do think Amazon labors over metrics more than any other company I know, but in the corollary sense that process a means to achieve a goal, not the goal itself.
So many times with Amazon and management that comes from there they really only know the Amazon process without understanding why any of those things were done in the first place. They're the proverbial cook cutting the end off a roast because their grandmother's pan was too small 50 years ago.
This happens at all software companies but Amazon seems to be all about process over people and generate managers who know the process even if they don't know why it is the way it is.
Thing is, as all more culture realted things, they are a two-edged sword and up for interpretation. And that allows to use them in a malicious way (this cultural aspect, PIPs and the preformance review cycles, is really bad, I agree). A ls always, just how those principles are applied depends a lot on leadership, some are great other not. Amazon's problem is, the normal bell curve of leadership talent gets tranformed into a bath tub curve by their hirong and promotion standards: You either have great people at the top end or bad ones at the other wothout any mediocre ones balancing and cushioning this.
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.
Everyone reads, adds comments as they read and then the rest of the meeting can be settling debates around the comments now that everyone is on the same page.
As a bonus, this system lets the quieter voices speak up. Someone unassertive and shy can put a comment and it get heard
Of course an agenda is ideal. Of course each participant should come to a meeting understanding what it's for, where real, important, things are discussed, concensus reached, and decisions are made. I go to some of these kinds of meetings every year.
This year I've had the joy(?) of consulting in two corporate environments. Where the folks executing a project get to have regular (frequent) meetings with middle managers to "report on progress". What did we do? What do we plan to do? When will it be finished. 10 people are invited to each meeting. 3 give feedback. 1 "runs" it (and tries to keep it short). 6 (I'm sure) are working on other things while the meeting happens.
So yeah, no, I'm not spending 30 minutes preparing for your meeting. I'm barely attending your meeting. (And if my name is mentioned I'll likely ask you to repeat the question.)
Which brings me to my point. Calling every gathering the same thing (meeting), then prescribing advice for all meetings, is unhelpful because not all meetings have the same value to begin with.
I think bullet points are exactly the thing Bezos was arguing against. No lazy bullet points, but instead a well-written text with a cohesive narrative, consisting of full sentences and paragraphs.
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.
I've worked in many companies/teams that gave lip service to the truth and open/honest discussions, but it usually only took a few times ignoring these principles to kill any trust in the idea. Rebuilding that trust takes time and usually starts small -- it requires demonstrations that persons with power in the company will do their best to protect against repercussions for objective, good faith open reporting (the truth). This will take awhile from my experience, and in many cases there is a need to define 'good faith' a bit more, else truth sessions typically end up as emotionally charged finger pointing sessions.
It's possible to do all of this, and not even hard, it just means that those who are asked to lead will need likely need to deal with some emotionally charged arguments for a time if/when someone uses the same policy for emotional venting. Nothing wrong with a bit of venting, leaders should be able to handle this gracefully also, but my experience is a lot of leaders are not trained or prepared on how to handle such situations, and the tendency is to rely on the authority of their title rather than address the concerns directly.
Basically, there isn't much to it, it's just a rather awkward path that is best started in smaller groups, establish clear and unambiguous boundaries [0] for such a culture, and provide new reasons for people to trust in _this_ system which has likely failed them historically.
0 - I wouldn't read too much into what the boundaries should be, it's something that is dependent on the people you work with. For a team I was asked to lead, it was set early on that openness and objective discussion were essential -- if a project or situation turned sour, it was established that the important thing was to know and understand why it happened, not to punish, and that meant giving freedom to the team to make mistakes and that while we would review and correct mistakes, the team would also be protected from those "out for blood" over the mistake. It was probably 2 years of ugly arguments with other teams who wanted a scapegoat, but the end result was the team I was asked to lead grew very fast professionally and we got very good at self-correcting and owning mistakes when they happened. Boundaries for the team were that "sometimes" there are going to issues we must handle with a few "we really must avoid messing up here" clauses included -- being extremely judicious with the use of such clauses and ensuring they were truly the exception and not the standard helped retain the sense of importance for such clauses while maintaining the team's freedom to handle projects in the "best" way.
Weird to see these notes on the front page of HN, just literally two hours after I spoke about the exact point mentioned above.
I've watched the Lex-Bezos podcast a couple of times now, and that is the point which really resonated with me.
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".
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.
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.
I think it's always useful to treat a person's general intelligence, skill in a particular field, and personal ethics as orthogonal properties.
It’s not a zero sum game where he took all this money from someone else. As one example, AWS has been insanely good for startups and given a lot of value to people other than Jeff and Amazon.
Somewhere I read, that this was also a principle in the Prussian army's general staff.
Of course, always backed up by actual data.
This sentence seems logically inconsistent.
And focus more on negative metrics / finding and addressing anomalies instead of vanity metrics and showing "up and to the right" charts to leadership.
Wholeheartedly agree!
Phrased another way:
"Data is senior to seniority."
(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 Wisdom over a lifetime sometimes trumps Data ("What is the exactly right thing to do given this situation, given this set of circumstances?") -- so Wisdom > Data > Corporate Seniority, although in an ideal world and under normal circumstances, all of them should be in exact agreement...)
Indeed, most of the Amazon business heuristics published elsewhere pertain to rivalry within and among groups -- lessons learned from Microsoft.
Actually "building business value" means making the right decisions, and not making self-serving decisions is not good enough for that.
