5 • 610 Ratings
🗓️ 17 May 2021
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
There's a saying at Amazon: "Good intentions don't work. Mechanisms do." For well over a decade, Colin Bryar and Bill Carr worked in tandem with Jeff Bezos, building out the mechanisms and leadership principles that shaped the company into what it is today. How'd they do it? They started with a relentless focus on the customer – and worked backwards from there.
Colin and Bill were in the trenches for the creation of some of Amazon's most innovative products and services including Kindle, Amazon Prime, Amazon Studios, and Amazon Web Services. And on today's episode of Seeking Wisdom, they sit down with DC and talk about what Amazon was really like in the early days, the development of critical processes like the PR FAQ, single-threaded teams, and their best practices for hiring the right talent.
Buy a copy of Working Backwards here: https://www.amazon.com/Working-Backwards-Insights-Stories-Secrets/dp/1250267595
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0:00.0 | Before we get to the show, did you know you can get more insights just like the ones you're listening to right here on seeking wisdom, deliver right to your inbox. |
0:14.1 | Sign up to get my weekly newsletter. |
0:16.2 | It's called The One Thing at drift.com slash DC. |
0:28.6 | Thank you. one thing at drift.com slash DC. All right, we're back with another episode of Seeking Wisdom. |
0:32.6 | This is going to be an uncomfortable episode because I am a fanboy of the two people that we have as guests here. |
0:39.7 | They're going to feel like they're rock stars. |
0:42.3 | And I'm a young teenage fan boy right here. |
0:44.9 | And so I want to welcome Colin and Bill, authors of Working Backwards. |
0:49.5 | And if you listen to this podcast, you know I've been singing the praises of this book. |
0:53.2 | I've been waiting for this book for a very long time. And so welcome to the show, guys know I've been singing the praises of this book. I've been waiting for this book |
0:54.4 | for a very long time. And so welcome to the show, guys. Oh, thank you for inviting us. Thanks for |
0:59.7 | having us. We're excited. So before I introduce you formally, Bo, to the show with your backgrounds, |
1:05.5 | is there any coincidence with the timing of this book and Bezos's retirement. |
1:17.4 | Oh, absolutely. We were discussing with him about when he should change his role for the last couple of years. And he was a little reluctant on the date, but eventually he agreed that it |
1:21.7 | needed to correspond with our book release. Yeah, to celebrate your book. I just thought it was |
1:26.2 | funny because for so many years, I have been trying to scour and piece together different legends of how Amazon worked internally and nothing had come out. And it was very hard to find information. And then all of a sudden, Bezos announcer has moved to executive chair. Your book comes out. wilkie's on lots of podcasts i'm like what's |
1:45.1 | going like everything's coming out all of a sudden obviously coincidences but i thought it was it was funny |
1:49.6 | so i'm just going to formally introduce both of you so the audience knows first is colin brier |
1:55.1 | and so colin joined amazon and i'm reading this which i usually don't, but Amazon in 1998 and four years |
2:03.5 | after its founding, spent 12 years as part of Amazon's senior leadership team, and was famously |
2:09.0 | known as Bezos's Shadow, aka Jeff Shadow, which we'll get into, and ran many different things |
2:14.8 | including IMDB, which I was a huge fan of IMDB for many, many years, still am. |
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