The Most Important Trait in Business
Without this one trait, your business is destined to die a quick death
I saw a post about the first job ad that Jeff Bezos posted for Amazon. The post is for a developer who Bezos says should be able to build and maintain complex systems "in about one-third the time that most competent people think possible."
Sounds like Bezos needed some 10x engineers. In all seriousness though, the thinking was sound. By hiring a developer that could work much faster than other developers would allow Bezos to get ahead of his competitors and maintain a healthy distance in the market race to become the dominant online book seller.
One of the things that has surprised me about being at as large of a company as Amazon is that working fast is the norm. What I liked most about working in startups was how fast we could do things. This would be reinforced whenever I engaged with large enterprises on behalf of the startups I worked for. It would take ages to arrange a meeting with stakeholders, to get answers to questions, to be approved as a vendor, to negotiate contracts, or to get paid.
What I realized is something Bezos understood way back when he started Amazon. Speed matters in business. While this may seem obvious, the history of modern day corporations is littered with companies that died miserable deaths because they simply could not move fast enough. They were out marketed, out innovated, and out hustled.
This concept of speed is inherent in what we call our Day 1 culture. When Bezos first shared this in his 1997 Shareholder Letter, he declared that it was day one for the Internet and for Amazon. Maybe the best way to understand and visualize Day 1 though is to look at the opposite of Day 1 culture:
“Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death.”
At a 2017 company town hall, Bezos answered the question, what is Day 2? Most companies epitomize Day 2 culture, overloaded by process, removed from the customer, and reacting slowly to the market. In short, they simply move too slow to adequately serve the needs of customers, to drive innovation, and to adopt modern ways of operating.
It is not always Day 2 for companies. In their infancy, these were companies that lived and breathed the Day 1 ideals. They closely listened to their customers and rapidly innovated to serve their needs. They moved quickly to operate at scale and lead the market. That is how companies become the leaders in their markets and beloved brands to consumers.
Then Day 2 mentality slowly creeps into the organization. Some people and teams want to maximize profit and margins. Some want to mitigate risks and avoid mistakes. Others want to focus more energy on optimizing than serving customers. Instead of being focused first on the customer and their needs, they turn inwards and focus on serving themselves.
Much of this Day 2 thinking comes from the fear of failure. This is the corporate “F” word that brings executives to tears. To be branded a failure is to set your career on a crash and burn trajectory. Therefore everything that rolls up to leadership is never about the things that do not work, they only hear about the successes.
There is a reason the saying “move fast and break things” has become a mantra for Silicon Valley and the startup world. At the extreme, this idea can have costly and dangerous repercussions. Most failure however is positive. Failure can be thought of as a scale from destructive failure through negligence or malfeasance to generative failure which encapsulates the culture of experimentation.
Every massive success of the modern startup era has operated by embracing the spirit of failure. The faster they moved, the faster they broke things. This also meant that these startups learned faster and iterated faster to deliver a better product or service to customers. Speed is not just a buzzword or a theory, it is baked into the culture and the operating model.
At Amazon , we have weaved the spirit of experimentation and moving fast into how we operate through our Leadership Principles. These are a set of principles which guide our culture and how we do things. We are encouraged to “think big” to serve customers with bolder ideas. We show “bias for action” and do not let the lack of exhaustive evidence or data inhibit us from trying something new. And then we will “invent and simplify” when we encounter roadblocks that slow our ability to innovate.
Roadblocks are a massive drag on moving fast. They are inertia that adds unnecessary friction into even the most simple or straightforward process. Bezos agreed, saying:
“If you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing. You stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you’re doing the process right. The process is not the thing. It’s always worth asking, do we own the process or does the process own us? In a Day 2 company, you might find it’s the second.”
Removing roadblocks is not enough however when it comes to operating at startup speed. You also need to make decisions quickly. I remember one large bank I was working with a few years ago saying that code reviews sometimes took weeks because the audit and compliance teams were backed up.
The shape of your architecture and systems you employ will often take the shape of your organization. This is Conway’s Law and often this relationship has implications for how quickly an organization can move. This was the case at Amazon in the early 2000’s when they made the painful move to decouple their sagging monolithic retail site to embrace a services based architecture.
This change in architecture and the changes that were reflecting in the teams led to much faster decision making. Fewer dependencies meant fewer decision makers making less consequential decisions. We often say that most decisions you make will be of the two-door variety, you can always backtrack and try again if a decision turns out not to be the right path.
Over the coming weeks, I will dive deeper into more of the peculiar cultural traits of Amazon as a means of understanding how to build better teams and companies. If you have things that you are curious about in terms of how Amazon operates, I am glad to dive into those as well. In the meantime, consider how your company culture shapes the ability to move fast. What does your company prioritize from a culture standpoint and how does that enable you to operate at speed?
Mark Birch, Editor & Founder of DEV.BIZ.OPS
Will you be going to AWS re:Invent 2021 in Las Vegas? This is the annual mega conference AWS hosts to showcase the new product launches, to schmooze with customers, connect with partners, and to get hands-on with the latest tech. That is what makes re:Invent unique in that way, because for as big and high-profile of an event that it is, the core purpose is always to serve builders first with plenty of workshops, the hackathon, builders sessions, GameDays, and more!
I am excited to be there in person. While I will not be giving any of the keynotes 😂, I will be hosting Clubhouse rooms and running an AWS re:Invent Daily Startups Show to recap all the fun things I am hearing at re:Invent relevant to startups. I will also invite customers and AWS colleagues to join me as guests to share their insights.
If you are also attending in person, let’s meet up next week! Just ping me over email or LinkedIn ot Twitter. And if you are not attending in person but still interested in checking out the content, you can still view the content virtually.
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