- Inventing AWS, Alexa, and Amazon Prime
- How do you create courage in the people who are working with you?
- 6 Distinct Phases of Leadership
- What do you think makes someone a great teacher?
- What’s Next for Jeff Wilke
James Currier · @jamescurrier · Apr 2021
“I have been lucky enough to have him as my tutor
I’ve learned so much from him, and I’m not the only one
He’s been an incredible teacher to all of us
”
– Jeff Bezos, Founder & CEO at Amazon
He built Amazon alongside Jeff Bezos for 22 years
Now he is analyzing the operations playbooks and early decisions that made Amazon so powerful
For the Founder community, there is no one better than my friend Jeff Wilke (former CEO, Amazon’s Worldwide Consumer Business) to shed light on a counter-intuitive driver behind unusual success: Focus on the inputs, not the outputs
Jeff shares the 3 drivers underlying the rise of Amazon, Prime, Alexa, and AWS, including:
- “Mechanisms”: Amazon’s definition, two failure modes, and why they’re harder to implement than it first appears
- A Single-Page Culture: How Amazon’s set of principles proved to be an inoculation against a drifting culture
- Single-Threaded Invention: How to protect your nascent business lines from the mothership
Most people think product innovation and growth are what drive $Trillion+ outcomes
In practice, operational excellence is the key driver to executing consistently for the long term
This is how you harness creativity that compounds value over time
James: So we’re in the late ‘90s and your friend is working at Amazon
He’s loving Amazon, and he loves you, so he brings you in and says, “If we don’t hire you, we’re screwed
We’ve got to hire you
Come out and visit us
”
- Jeff: Exactly
- For whatever reason, I was in a moment where I was willing to listen
- He detected this, so he said, “Why don’t you meet this guy, Joe Galli?” (Joe was our President for about a year at Amazon)
- “Why don’t you meet Joe at the hotel near Dulles?”
- So I walked into this airport and had a four-hour lunch with Joe Galli; we didn’t even eat anything
- Joe’s a super passionate guy
- He talked a lot about Amazon
- And he’s from Pittsburgh, probably two miles from where I grew up
- We talked a lot about Pittsburgh, and about the kinds of people that we knew growing up, and what we learned about leadership from those experiences
- Uncharacteristically for me at the time, I said “yes” on the spot
- I called my wife from the car and said I have to do this
- We had just bought a new house in New Jersey and we had a one year old and a three year old
- We were planning to raise our kids in this neighborhood
- To her credit she said, “I’m not happy about this, but I’ll support you if you think it’s the right thing
- ”
- And so, two days later, I flew out to Seattle, I met Jeff Bezos and Joy Covey, David Risher, and eventually Rick Dalzell
- I was just super impressed with the whole leadership team
- On the way out to Seattle, I read Jeff’s shareholder letter from 1997, the very first one he wrote
- For me, it struck a chord because I got some sense that despite being words that I’d heard others profess in business, that somehow this company meant it:
They were going to optimize for the long run, not for quarterly profits
- They were going to focus on cash, not non-cash earnings
- They were going to put customers first and try to build Earth’s most customer-centric company
And innovation was going to matter
- They were going to optimize for the long run, not for quarterly profits
- They were going to focus on cash, not non-cash earnings
- They were going to put customers first and try to build Earth’s most customer-centric company
- And innovation was going to matter
- I just believed it
- Then I met them, and I believed it more
- All around me in the world, I was seeing evidence that businesses were sub-optimizing because they were trying to hit these quarterly numbers
- Remember, this was 1999
- It was right at the height of “you can’t have a miss or your career as a CEO might be done
- ” This feeling that you can’t miss your quarter, everything’s tied to that
