Jeff Bezos shares his management style and philosophy

you have a very unique management style and I hope you you'd share a little bit about some of the thoughts of some of the guidance that you've given uh the Young Folks yeah well this first quote you guys chose um you know you don't choose your passions your passions choose you and I would always advise young people actually anyone you know to get in touch with what you're really passionate about and U it's a gift to have a passion some people are lucky they have more than one passion they have two or three and that gives you energy um you can't force the passion on yourself it just doesn't work you can try but it's unlikely to succeed um take pride of your choices at your gifts this is something that um I would I think uh is super important for young people to understand and for parents to preach to young people it's really easy for a talented young person to take pride in their gifts they can say you know I'm really athletic or I'm really smart or I'm really good at math and that's fine you should celebrate your gifts you should be happy but you can't be proud of them because they're gifts after all they were given to you what you can be proud of is your choices how did you decide to use your gifts did you study hard did you work hard did you practice the people who really Excel combine Gift gifts and hard work and the hard work part is a choice you get to decide that and that is something when you're looking back on your life you will be very proud of uh oh be right be right a lot this is one of Amazon has 14 leadership principles and this is the one that often catches people a little by surprise um because one of our leadership principles is that good leaders are write a lot and um it sounds kind of like well great but is there some way that I can practice being right a lot and you're not going to be right all the time but I do think think you with practice you can be right more often and I've observed people who are write a lot and I notic a few things about them the first is that people who are right a lot they listen a lot and people who are right a lot change their mind a lot and uh people who are write a lot they seek to disconfirm their most profoundly held convictions which is very unnatural for humans so humans mostly as we go about life we're very selective in the evidence that we let seep into us and we like to observe the evidence that confirms our pre-existing beliefs and people who are write a lot work very hard to do that unnatural thing of trying to disconfirm their beliefs uh and by the way changing your mind a lot is so important you should never let anybody trap you with anything you've said in the past because that is uh just a you know it life is complicated the world is complicated and sometimes you get new data and when you get new data you should change your mind by the way sometimes you don't get new data and you just reanalyze the situation and you realize it's more complicated than you initially thought it was and you change your mind this is uh something you know uh it's frustrating to watch and I will not get into politics here tonight but it's frustrating to watch politicians because they're almost not allowed to change their mind as soon as they change their mind they get accused of being flip-floppers when reality is anybody who doesn't change their mind a lot is dramatically underestimating the complexity of the world that we live in more yeah our interns pick those two up okay be stubborn on vision and flexible on details the um you really can't accomplish anything important if you're not stubborn on Vision because things that are important take a long time they take teams you can't do it by yourself and so you really need to you have need to have a crisp idea of the vision and need to stay incredibly relentless on that Vision but you need to be flexible on the details because you got to be experimental to accomplish anything important and that means you're going to be wrong a lot and so you're going to try something on your way to that vision and that's going to be the wrong thing the wrong decision you're going to have to back up take a little course correction and try again and so you cannot be stubborn on the details you have to be flexible on the details and then the last one there is failure and invention yeah failure and invention or Inseparable twins um you know it's everybody wants to uh be inventive you know if you go talk to Corporate America or uh any any institution actually uh government agencies and so on Innovation is something to be proud of people like invention but the problem is they don't like failure and you cannot have invention without failure um if you uh to know where if you already know it's going to work it's not an experiment and only through experimentation can you get real invention the most important inventions come from trial and error with lots of failure and and the failure is critical um and it's also embarrassing and so that's why people and when we're kids we always are doing trial and error and we're never embarrassed you know you watch a little toddler and they will try for hours to put a square peg in a round hole and it never works but it doesn't keep them from trying and they try things like that and that's how they learn and uh and and and we all have that when we're little and then as we get older somehow it's not as cool as you get older to fail and to fall down it looks clumsy uh and so we get in our grooves we have a set of expertise and skills it's kind of a comfort zone and you have to constantly push yourself to say no I don't care about failure in fact if you're I say at Amazon we have to grow the size of our failures as the size of our company grows we have to make bigger and bigger failures because otherwise none of our failures will be needle movers and so I would see it as a very bad sign over the long run if Amazon wasn't making larger and larger failures and if you do that all along the way that is uh going to protect you from ever having to make that big you know kind of hail marry bet that you sometimes see companies make right before they fail and go out of existence terrific I I have one more of these and I as a boing guy I have to oh yeah comment on two Pizza teams yeah well two Pizza teams is something that we've been preaching in Amazon almost from the very beginning and it's a simple idea which is no team should be uh soar that it cannot be fed with just two pizzas and uh and so obviously to do great things you need big teams but you need to subdivide them and the reason that it's so helpful is because there's a natural we humans grew up around campfires and telling each other's stories and you're sitting at tables tonight that have about 10 people at each table 10 people maybe 12 people is the perfect size to have a natural uh human coordination without a lot of structure and if you want to have a big group of 100 people or 500 people uh organized you have to have a lot of structure to make that work and so if you can arrange to do big things with a multitude of small teams and that takes a lot of effort to organize that way but if you can figure that out the communication on those small teams will be very natural and easy and then six page memos in L of PowerPoints uh many many years ago now we uh outlawed PowerPoint presentations that Amazon was probably the smartest thing we ever did and um it uh it's incredibly effective we replaced them with six-page narratively structured memos and so we have the weirdest meetings at Amazon when we hire new Executives they are shocked by how we run our meetings because they come in and we all sit around the conference room table maybe a dozen people in the meeting and we do half an hour of study hall and all the executives are just quiet we just quietly read the six-page memo together in the same room taking margin notes and then after half an hour we discussed the memo and it's so much better the before we started doing this we were doing the more traditional thing you know Junior executive comes in they put a huge amount of effort into developing a PowerPoint presentation they put the third slide up and whoever is the most senior executive in the room has already interrupted them throwing them off their game they're asking questions about what's going to be presented on slide six if they would just be quiet for a moment plus the slides obscure information because when you take the great thing about memos and you know English language memos is they have verbs and sentences and topic sentences and complete paragraphs and by the way that is harder for the author um but it so forces the author to clarify their own thinking and so it totally revolutionized the way we do meetings at Amazon um and it's been very very helpful to us I would recommend to anyone we we we're adopting and have almost uh adopted that practice uh at Blue origin as well there's still a few PowerPoints that sneak in at Blue origin but I'm working on it with that in mind let's get back to our PowerPoint yeah by the way PowerPoint is great for slideshows this is what PowerPoint is good for [Music]

Channel: GeekWire

Views: 261,075

Keywords: Jeff Bezos, Amazon, Museum of Flight

Id: F7JMMy-yHSU

Length: 10min 13sec (613 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 28 2016