Obsessional Ideas Part 2: Control and Leverage
Unlike scrappy, frugality, Day One, and working backward, “control” is not one of Amazon’s high-profile buzzwords. Nonetheless, the principle of control emphatically resonates through the corridors and meeting rooms of Amazon’s corporate offices.
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As John Rossman, a former Amazon executive who now works as a consultant to businesses, articulates in his book Think Like an Amazon:
It (Amazon) is a company of control freaks run by control freaks and lorded over by the king of control freaks.1
But the devil, or “God,” as you are inclined to think, is in the details.
Lots of companies have policies, principles and tenets. Amazon has “mechanisms.”
A mechanism is a widget to control the behavior of employees. In an internal Amazon video series on the company’s culture called Escape Velocity, Amazon GO store innovation team member Brian Knapp (at the time) opines that mechanisms are “complete processes which convert inputs into outputs,” i.e., desired ones, via internal “levers.” At Amazon there is always a lever.
As Amazon grew rapidly and the company culture took shape in a set of Leadership Principles (LPs), one of the renowned episodes of Amazonian lore, which appeared to give formal birth to the concept of a mechanism, is the story of the broken table. On one of Jeff’s sit-ins on customer service calls (when Amazon was still in the trenches on its mission to become “the everything store”) a service associate forewarned him that a customer on an incoming call would be upset and referencing the return of a defective product. When Jeff later inquired how she knew, she replied because the product in question, a table, always arrived broken.
In the Amazon video in which Jeff narrates the anecdote before an audience of employees, he pauses here, seemingly so distraught he struggles to compose himself. Therein arose the source of the famous Bezos beatdown “good intentions don’t work,” which in turn gave birth to a mechanism modeled on an idea borrowed from Toyota—the “Andon Cord”. The Andon Cord, an actual cord, is installed on Toyota’s car assembly lines, and, when pulled, allows any worker to stop production if something goes wrong. At Amazon, this mechanism is incorporated as a tool on the company’s website permitting any salesperson to remove the “Buy Box” of merchandise reported as defective. The mechanism neutralizes an employee’s passive “good intentions,” and replaces it with leverage over an employee’s action: If you know of a problem, you now have the means to fix it.
It is through mechanisms, and its flipside, metrics, that Amazon holds its knowledge workers’ feet to the fire and achieves consistently high levels of execution and innovation. While this type of control can, in some cases, be deceptively simple, it can also represent “complete processes,” generating ingenious solutions to complex problems that played out over the course of years. The philosophical driving force was the original, meticulously crafted 14 (now 16) LPs; the mechanisms were the teachable, repeatable processes embedded in them to ensure they were followed and worked.
Some of the more innovative and intricate mechanisms supported execution of the LP, Deliver Results, which many Amazon employees believe to be, in practice, the most important LP, exceeding even hallowed Customer Obsession. The idea behind all the mechanisms was to “debone” growing bureaucracy, and speed-up execution and innovation, which became especially important after the February, 2005, launch of Prime and promise of two-day delivery. The lift, a monumental one, entailed an inter-related, three-pronged mechanism; namely the two-pizza team (10 or fewer people), the single-threaded leader (STL), and “eliminating dependencies.”
It’s important to note, as documented in Colin Bryar and Bill Carr’s book Working Backwards, the effort was solely directed at accelerating the speed which software development engineers (SDEs) could build—although it since has become a general model for organizing teams and projects across all of the company’s business units (I was the STL for a collaborative effort to define and write 14 road logistics compliance procedures pertaining to Amazon drivers with a commercial driver’s license—which we successfully did in less than six months, in time for an audit by the governmental regulatory agency, which proved the efficacy of the process in our humble, non-SDE corner of the world 😊). Of the three mechanisms, eliminating dependencies—i.e., bottlenecks and organizational drag created by overlaps in code base—was by far the most technical, and arguably one of Amazon’s most under-the-radar, customer-enhancing innovations ever. The notion of owning dependencies (to eliminate them) also sets the tenor of Amazon’s “no excuses” culture, and the tale of many an executive who went down in flames for failing to live by the letter of it.
In each of the LPs, practices inform preaching.
Working Backward precisely defines the context of the customer experience in relation to a product; and the concept of supplanting a PowerPoint presentation with a six-page narrative for pitching ideas (a non-tech, fuddy-duddy idea which Bezos got from Edward Tufte, a professor of statistics and political science at Yale University) is to provide a seven- to ten-fold increase in the quantity and quality of information, both of which provide intellectual succor to the LP, Are Right, A Lot—interestingly, the LP which, at one employee Q&A session, Jeff identified as most aligning with his “superpower.” With few exceptions, these two mechanisms are intimately integrated with every product the company launched.
Amazon’s salaried compensation structure, with its upper limit on salary and its emphasis on stock options vested over time, is a mechanism enforcing the long-term outlook advocated in the LP Invent and Simplify.
“Raise the bar,” the driving force powering the LP Hire and Develop the Best, comprises an eight-step process that cannot be short-circuited. The critical enforcing mechanisms are behavioral interviewing (STAR questions) and the Bar Raiser—one or two people outside the department with the power to veto any hiring decision and override the manager. The method undermines hiring practices based on urgency, “gut-feel,” and biases.
And, at Amazon, so it goes. Closing one oversight, one gap, one nuance of foolishness at a time, hour-by-hour, day-by-day, year-by-year. It is rational, objective, truth-seeking and hugely, wildly successful. In this way Jeff Bezos and Amazon have perfected the art of control, far exceeding in scope and complexity of logic what Sun Tzu did for war, and Trump for the deal.
The obsessional qualities it circumscribes—the abstraction of customer desires in the design of processes, the ruthless pursuit of self interest as an ethical and benign force, a disregard of the public’s hostility for the company’s contemptuous treatment of employees and contractors, and a capacity for endless, grinding work—is jaw-dropping, stupefying. The danger here is that it tempts one to wrap it in a bow, put it on a shelf, and pronounce, “that’s it, that’s all we need to know about how Amazon did it. Pure, simple, mob-like, pedal-to-the-metal control.”
Yet control, it seems to me, is half the story. The other half is something as natural to Amazon as cardboard—chaos, and the challenge of understanding how chaos feeds control, and control feeds chaos.
The next, and final, episode of Obsessional Ideas, Part 3, will investigate how chaos and control form the yin and yang of Amazon’s culture.
J. Rossman, 2019. Think Like an Amazon. McGraw-Hill (New York), p. 29