6 ms·

Lessons on building business value

89 points by lockedinspace 3y ago

htmlisntoutdate 3y ago
>As a company/team, you need to seek for ways/mechanisms that enable your employees/folks to tell the truth. In my old company, we used to have team-seeking meets every week, which consisted in a stand-up 10 mins per employee. It was quite handy cause we learned to tell the truth in benefit of everyone there.
- flashgordon 3y ago
  Damn looks like you have some good lessons on how to do it without (eventual) repurcussions?
  - lockedinspace 3y ago
    Guess its a matter of acclimating your work force, on first iterations it could cause damage but over time they will gladly take it for granted.
  - csydas 3y ago
    It's about slowly demonstrating that such things are highly held principles within an organization. That is, if there's resistance to open and honest meetings within your teams, most probably it's because historically open and honest has not been a safe bet within that organization. I've worked in many companies/teams that gave lip service to the truth and open/honest discussions, but it usually only took a few times ignoring these principles to kill any trust in the idea. Rebuilding that trust takes time and usually starts small -- it requires demonstrations that persons with power in the company will do their best to protect against repercussions for objective, good faith open reporting (the truth). This will take awhile from my experience, and in many cases there is a need to define 'good faith' a bit more, else truth sessions typically end up as emotionally charged finger pointing sessions. It's possible to do all of this, and not even hard, it just means that those who are asked to lead will need likely need to deal with some emotionally charged arguments for a time if/when someone uses the same policy for emotional venting. Nothing wrong with a bit of venting, leaders should be able to handle this gracefully also, but my experience is a lot of leaders are not trained or prepared on how to handle such situations, and the tendency is to rely on the authority of their title rather than address the concerns directly. Basically, there isn't much to it, it's just a rather awkward path that is best started in smaller groups, establish clear and unambiguous boundaries [0] for such a culture, and provide new reasons for people to trust in _this_ system which has likely failed them historically. 0 - I wouldn't read too much into what the boundaries should be, it's something that is dependent on the people you work with. For a team I was asked to lead, it was set early on that openness and objective discussion were essential -- if a project or situation turned sour, it was established that the important thing was to know and understand why it happened, not to punish, and that meant giving freedom to the team to make mistakes and that while we would review and correct mistakes, the team would also be protected from those "out for blood" over the mistake. It was probably 2 years of ugly arguments with other teams who wanted a scapegoat, but the end result was the team I was asked to lead grew very fast professionally and we got very good at self-correcting and owning mistakes when they happened. Boundaries for the team were that "sometimes" there are going to issues we must handle with a few "we really must avoid messing up here" clauses included -- being extremely judicious with the use of such clauses and ensuring they were truly the exception and not the standard helped retain the sense of importance for such clauses while maintaining the team's freedom to handle projects in the "best" way.
    - lockedinspace 3y ago
      > That is, if there's resistance to open and honest meetings within your teams, most probably it's because historically open and honest has not been a safe bet within that organization. That sums it up.
    - flashgordon 3y ago
      Nice. So sharing some context. I've found that it is not just about the company but org and teams within.where it can vary a lot. Even in faangs there is a very high level of lip service and worse the amount of passive aggressiveness and gas lighting that goes on is unbelievable. It's almost like systems are in place to track this and get back to you at the right time! Very mechanized.
TheAceOfHearts 3y ago
Some of my notes on the same Lex interview: > Identify and recognize the difference between one-way doors (reversing decisions here is difficult and expensive) or two-way doors (you can make a choice and if it turns out to be wrong you can go back and pick a different door with low risk). When dealing with two-way doors it's fine and desirable to iterate quickly. > When a decision has to be made, "disagree but commit". After a discussion takes place, even if you disagree with some aspect, you eventually commit to supporting whatever plan has been made. > Another key take away was that previous generations need to set up the infrastructure that makes it possible for the next generation to innovate. Jeff talks about how Amazon wouldn't have been possible without existing mailing infrastructure and the Internet. He says that he's hoping that his rocket company can help set up the infrastructure necessary for humanity to continue growing and expanding in space.
- lockedinspace 3y ago
  Those are also some good points
- losteric 3y ago
  Two-way doors always bothered me, because reality isn't black and white. Most decisions I've seen given fall in the grey space. Invariably deciding whether a problem was a 2 or 1 way door was politicized. Managers always argued for tech tech debt "because we could walk it back later so it's a 2-way door". Of course when such decisions backfired, it was always the engineer that "didn't Have Backbone" or "failed To Be Right A Lot", with leadership concluding that was a 1-way door and now everyone just had to "Disagree And Commit" instead of paying back the debt. Over my 9 years there, I saw every LP used towards politics or malicious compliance. Even reading them now, it all comes across as "just so the right thing"... written in a way that sounds like there is some deeper truth.
  - yowlingcat 3y ago
    I think what you're getting at is that principles (and systems) are only as good as the individuals tasked to operate them. I too saw a lot of the same of what you mention during my time there -- people parroting the surface level jargon and really abusing the concept without ever cutting to the core of what the concept should have lead them to if they faithfully executed on it. Unfortunately, I don't know if there's a good way to solve for this as a company scales to Amazon's size.
AtlasBarfed 3y ago
[flagged]
- lockedinspace 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - NBJack 3y ago
    Judge the tree by its fruit. Amazon, both globally and locally, has a horrible reputation for abusing the ever loving shit out of employees at every level. Does it build value in the process? Absolutely! Forget politics; do we really want another company like Amazon?
    - lockedinspace 3y ago
      Again, lessons are outside of what Amazon brings to the world. Those lessons can be applied into almost all type of business, and that's the value which bring. Note there are no advices regarding, exploiting, abusing or not-paying extra hours.
csbartus 3y ago
[flagged]
- lockedinspace 3y ago
  Seems like your case is out of what Amazon preaches. Of course not everything is perfect, I am just listing some interesting points.
- yoyohello13 3y ago
  > Is this business value? Yes. It's more value for them, and less for you.
- wintogreen74 3y ago
  Similar experience: An order that was supposedly in an Amazon facility < 30 min from me on the 8th, was not delivered as promised by the 13th, then stated delivery between the 14-20th due to "severe bad weather" and as of today still not delivered. We haven't had snow in weeks and this is the mildest winter in several years. Now it says "if not delivered by tomorrow you can come back the next day and get a refund".
- jolmg 3y ago
  > At 18th I've received an email from Amazon, that in order to get my package I need to "share some personal details" for a 3rd party (Aramex). No refunds in the email. I did it, naively, and no answer since that. My guess is that the info is for the customs process between Aramex and your government. It hasn't been super-rare for me for customs procedures to sometimes take a bit more than a couple of days. It's not like the shipping company can rush the government; the government will probably not care for their deadlines. If you know the shipping company, you may have been given the company's tracking number by Amazon, which would probably allow you to see a bit more info on the shipping progress. Here's their tracking page: https://www.aramex.com/ro/en/track/shipments https://www.aramex.com/ro/en/track/shipments
dvt 3y ago
[dead]
mattigames 3y ago
[flagged]
- malfist 3y ago
  Here there be dragons
julianeon 3y ago
The one easily implementable item from this list that just never seems to catch on is: prepare a bullet-point agenda in advance, then make sure everyone reads it before the meeting, or in the first 10 minutes of the meeting. This one is kind of mysterious to me, since everyone who has experienced it says it’s great, yet it’s still not a common practice in startups, all these years later.
- malfist 3y ago
  It's fantastic. And if you do it digitally with some shared word processor that supports commenting, you can run a meeting very effectively. Everyone reads, adds comments as they read and then the rest of the meeting can be settling debates around the comments now that everyone is on the same page. As a bonus, this system lets the quieter voices speak up. Someone unassertive and shy can put a comment and it get heard
  - bruce511 3y ago
    I too picked up on that line. But it kinda depends on the meeting doesn't it? Of course an agenda is ideal. Of course each participant should come to a meeting understanding what it's for, where real, important, things are discussed, concensus reached, and decisions are made. I go to some of these kinds of meetings every year. This year I've had the joy(?) of consulting in two corporate environments. Where the folks executing a project get to have regular (frequent) meetings with middle managers to "report on progress". What did we do? What do we plan to do? When will it be finished. 10 people are invited to each meeting. 3 give feedback. 1 "runs" it (and tries to keep it short). 6 (I'm sure) are working on other things while the meeting happens. So yeah, no, I'm not spending 30 minutes preparing for your meeting. I'm barely attending your meeting. (And if my name is mentioned I'll likely ask you to repeat the question.) Which brings me to my point. Calling every gathering the same thing (meeting), then prescribing advice for all meetings, is unhelpful because not all meetings have the same value to begin with.
- nlitened 3y ago
  > prepare a bullet-point agenda in advance I think bullet points are exactly the thing Bezos was arguing against. No lazy bullet points, but instead a well-written text with a cohesive narrative, consisting of full sentences and paragraphs.
karim79 3y ago
> When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. Meaning that a profound analysis on data is a must. Weird to see these notes on the front page of HN, just literally two hours after I spoke about the exact point mentioned above. I've watched the Lex-Bezos podcast a couple of times now, and that is the point which really resonated with me. Perhaps a simple example: API monitoring shows no issues. Isolated reports of a specific failure type, such as a gateway timeout or something that could just be a one-off. Then more of the same type of (customer-reported) failures occur within a short time-period, say within twelve hours, and all monitoring still shows "all good". Nah, the customer is (mostly) always right, and there's very likely something bad happening somewhere in the stack. It's quite natural that the watchers would rather dismiss the whining coming from places higher up in the hierarchical chain. But when the whiner is correct, the reverence of said whiner levels up and some other telemetry gets added for better alerting improved platform robustness. EDIT: Just to be clear, I'm not a Bezos fan, and I think anyone who is fine with having accumulated that much wealth, should perhaps think a bit harder about, things, to say the least.
- wtracy 3y ago
  > Just to be clear, I'm not a Bezos fan, and I think anyone who is fine with having accumulated that much wealth, should perhaps think a bit harder about, things, to say the least. I think it's always useful to treat a person's general intelligence, skill in a particular field, and personal ethics as orthogonal properties.
- influx 3y ago
  He didn’t accumulate wealth, he built a company that successfully served customers. It’s not a zero sum game where he took all this money from someone else. As one example, AWS has been insanely good for startups and given a lot of value to people other than Jeff and Amazon.
DueDilligence 3y ago
[dead]
Archelaos 3y ago
> In your meetings, the order of voice should go from the most junior person, to the most senior person. Somewhere I read, that this was also a principle in the Prussian army's general staff.
- lockedinspace 3y ago
  Makes quite a lot of sense if you think about that. Most juniors could change their perspective cause someone in the meeting who they admire says otherwise. Of course, always backed up by actual data.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
kerp322 3y ago
I wonder if this collection of incredibly mundane observations are really among the most interesting things Bezos has to say about business.
w10-1 3y ago
Perhaps to state the obvious: all these lessons mostly pertain to making large companies with history, processes, and bureaucracy/coordination costs a little less stuck in self-serving projections. Indeed, most of the Amazon business heuristics published elsewhere pertain to rivalry within and among groups -- lessons learned from Microsoft. Actually "building business value" means making the right decisions, and not making self-serving decisions is not good enough for that.
lifeisstillgood 3y ago
I am more and more convinced that democratic decision making is necessary in companies - literally voting by employees - maybe as swiss style referendums or plain old vote for the CEO. It's such a huge change it simply does not fit in most brains, but same is true for say social democracy during the time of Watt Tyler. I think the point is politics exists no matter what the rhetoric of the elites says, so you may as well surface the politics keep it in sunshine and deal with it. Plus it's ridiculous to grant a tiny elite the power to allocate resources of society simply because they got promoted...
- WalterBright 3y ago
  > grant a tiny elite the power to allocate resources of society simply because they got promoted... They can only allocate the resources of the company, not society. And they get selected based on their track record of effective allocation of those resources. Democracy has never demonstrated efficient allocation.
  - n6242 3y ago
    > And they get selected based on their track record of effective allocation of those resources. I've seen too many managers fail upwards to truly believe that is true in general. In plenty of companies connections are just as or more important than being effective at allocating resources.
    - lifeisstillgood 3y ago
      This is what motivates me in my ... admittedly belief. Of course politics will always play a huge deciding part in resource allocation. But if the allocation is based on a small "elite" then it looks a lot like historical societies - and we think we have moved beyond that. If we believe in democracy for our civic society, if we believe in the Totalitarian Bet, why not apply democracy to the companies that are too big to fail? It is also why I suspect founder led companies do very well (if the founder is good enough) - the internicine politics just gets overwhelmed by the founder picking and choosing - but history has taught us that it's vanishingly rare to find such people, to place them in the elite and have them continue to make excellent decisions over decades. There are better solutions
tibanne 3y ago
> When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. Meaning that a profound analysis on data is a must. This sentence seems logically inconsistent.
- kthejoker2 3y ago
  As a data person, I read it as: you don't always have anecdotes. So your data needs to account for blind spots and have enough granularity to see the issues. And focus more on negative metrics / finding and addressing anomalies instead of vanity metrics and showing "up and to the right" charts to leadership.
peter_d_sherman 3y ago
>(Jeff Bezos): "Your most junior person can overrule your most senior person, if they have the data to back it up. In your meetings, the order of voice should go from the most junior person, to the most senior person." Wholeheartedly agree! Phrased another way: "Data is senior to seniority." (At least, let's presume that it is, or should be, 99 times out of 100 -- 99% of the time -- barring exceptionally rare and unusual situations and circumstances. Accumulated Wisdom over a lifetime sometimes trumps Data ("What is the exactly right thing to do given this situation, given this set of circumstances?") -- so Wisdom > Data > Corporate Seniority, although in an ideal world and under normal circumstances, all of them should be in exact agreement...)

89 points by lockedinspace 3y ago

>As a company/team, you need to seek for ways/mechanisms that enable your employees/folks to tell the truth. In my old company, we used to have team-seeking meets every week, which consisted in a stand-up 10 mins per employee. It was quite handy cause we learned to tell the truth in benefit of everyone there.

flashgordon 3y ago
Damn looks like you have some good lessons on how to do it without (eventual) repurcussions?
- lockedinspace 3y ago
  Guess its a matter of acclimating your work force, on first iterations it could cause damage but over time they will gladly take it for granted.
- csydas 3y ago
  It's about slowly demonstrating that such things are highly held principles within an organization. That is, if there's resistance to open and honest meetings within your teams, most probably it's because historically open and honest has not been a safe bet within that organization. I've worked in many companies/teams that gave lip service to the truth and open/honest discussions, but it usually only took a few times ignoring these principles to kill any trust in the idea. Rebuilding that trust takes time and usually starts small -- it requires demonstrations that persons with power in the company will do their best to protect against repercussions for objective, good faith open reporting (the truth). This will take awhile from my experience, and in many cases there is a need to define 'good faith' a bit more, else truth sessions typically end up as emotionally charged finger pointing sessions. It's possible to do all of this, and not even hard, it just means that those who are asked to lead will need likely need to deal with some emotionally charged arguments for a time if/when someone uses the same policy for emotional venting. Nothing wrong with a bit of venting, leaders should be able to handle this gracefully also, but my experience is a lot of leaders are not trained or prepared on how to handle such situations, and the tendency is to rely on the authority of their title rather than address the concerns directly. Basically, there isn't much to it, it's just a rather awkward path that is best started in smaller groups, establish clear and unambiguous boundaries [0] for such a culture, and provide new reasons for people to trust in _this_ system which has likely failed them historically. 0 - I wouldn't read too much into what the boundaries should be, it's something that is dependent on the people you work with. For a team I was asked to lead, it was set early on that openness and objective discussion were essential -- if a project or situation turned sour, it was established that the important thing was to know and understand why it happened, not to punish, and that meant giving freedom to the team to make mistakes and that while we would review and correct mistakes, the team would also be protected from those "out for blood" over the mistake. It was probably 2 years of ugly arguments with other teams who wanted a scapegoat, but the end result was the team I was asked to lead grew very fast professionally and we got very good at self-correcting and owning mistakes when they happened. Boundaries for the team were that "sometimes" there are going to issues we must handle with a few "we really must avoid messing up here" clauses included -- being extremely judicious with the use of such clauses and ensuring they were truly the exception and not the standard helped retain the sense of importance for such clauses while maintaining the team's freedom to handle projects in the "best" way.
  - lockedinspace 3y ago
    > That is, if there's resistance to open and honest meetings within your teams, most probably it's because historically open and honest has not been a safe bet within that organization. That sums it up.
  - flashgordon 3y ago
    Nice. So sharing some context. I've found that it is not just about the company but org and teams within.where it can vary a lot. Even in faangs there is a very high level of lip service and worse the amount of passive aggressiveness and gas lighting that goes on is unbelievable. It's almost like systems are in place to track this and get back to you at the right time! Very mechanized.

TheAceOfHearts 3y ago

Some of my notes on the same Lex interview: > Identify and recognize the difference between one-way doors (reversing decisions here is difficult and expensive) or two-way doors (you can make a choice and if it turns out to be wrong you can go back and pick a different door with low risk). When dealing with two-way doors it's fine and desirable to iterate quickly. > When a decision has to be made, "disagree but commit". After a discussion takes place, even if you disagree with some aspect, you eventually commit to supporting whatever plan has been made. > Another key take away was that previous generations need to set up the infrastructure that makes it possible for the next generation to innovate. Jeff talks about how Amazon wouldn't have been possible without existing mailing infrastructure and the Internet. He says that he's hoping that his rocket company can help set up the infrastructure necessary for humanity to continue growing and expanding in space.

lockedinspace 3y ago
Those are also some good points
losteric 3y ago
Two-way doors always bothered me, because reality isn't black and white. Most decisions I've seen given fall in the grey space. Invariably deciding whether a problem was a 2 or 1 way door was politicized. Managers always argued for tech tech debt "because we could walk it back later so it's a 2-way door". Of course when such decisions backfired, it was always the engineer that "didn't Have Backbone" or "failed To Be Right A Lot", with leadership concluding that was a 1-way door and now everyone just had to "Disagree And Commit" instead of paying back the debt. Over my 9 years there, I saw every LP used towards politics or malicious compliance. Even reading them now, it all comes across as "just so the right thing"... written in a way that sounds like there is some deeper truth.
- yowlingcat 3y ago
  I think what you're getting at is that principles (and systems) are only as good as the individuals tasked to operate them. I too saw a lot of the same of what you mention during my time there -- people parroting the surface level jargon and really abusing the concept without ever cutting to the core of what the concept should have lead them to if they faithfully executed on it. Unfortunately, I don't know if there's a good way to solve for this as a company scales to Amazon's size.

AtlasBarfed 3y ago

[flagged]

lockedinspace 3y ago
[flagged]
- NBJack 3y ago
  Judge the tree by its fruit. Amazon, both globally and locally, has a horrible reputation for abusing the ever loving shit out of employees at every level. Does it build value in the process? Absolutely! Forget politics; do we really want another company like Amazon?
  - lockedinspace 3y ago
    Again, lessons are outside of what Amazon brings to the world. Those lessons can be applied into almost all type of business, and that's the value which bring. Note there are no advices regarding, exploiting, abusing or not-paying extra hours.

csbartus 3y ago

[flagged]

lockedinspace 3y ago
Seems like your case is out of what Amazon preaches. Of course not everything is perfect, I am just listing some interesting points.
yoyohello13 3y ago
> Is this business value? Yes. It's more value for them, and less for you.
wintogreen74 3y ago
Similar experience: An order that was supposedly in an Amazon facility < 30 min from me on the 8th, was not delivered as promised by the 13th, then stated delivery between the 14-20th due to "severe bad weather" and as of today still not delivered. We haven't had snow in weeks and this is the mildest winter in several years. Now it says "if not delivered by tomorrow you can come back the next day and get a refund".
jolmg 3y ago
> At 18th I've received an email from Amazon, that in order to get my package I need to "share some personal details" for a 3rd party (Aramex). No refunds in the email. I did it, naively, and no answer since that. My guess is that the info is for the customs process between Aramex and your government. It hasn't been super-rare for me for customs procedures to sometimes take a bit more than a couple of days. It's not like the shipping company can rush the government; the government will probably not care for their deadlines. If you know the shipping company, you may have been given the company's tracking number by Amazon, which would probably allow you to see a bit more info on the shipping progress. Here's their tracking page: https://www.aramex.com/ro/en/track/shipments https://www.aramex.com/ro/en/track/shipments

dvt 3y ago

[dead]

mattigames 3y ago

[flagged]

malfist 3y ago
Here there be dragons

julianeon 3y ago

The one easily implementable item from this list that just never seems to catch on is: prepare a bullet-point agenda in advance, then make sure everyone reads it before the meeting, or in the first 10 minutes of the meeting. This one is kind of mysterious to me, since everyone who has experienced it says it’s great, yet it’s still not a common practice in startups, all these years later.

malfist 3y ago
It's fantastic. And if you do it digitally with some shared word processor that supports commenting, you can run a meeting very effectively. Everyone reads, adds comments as they read and then the rest of the meeting can be settling debates around the comments now that everyone is on the same page. As a bonus, this system lets the quieter voices speak up. Someone unassertive and shy can put a comment and it get heard
- bruce511 3y ago
  I too picked up on that line. But it kinda depends on the meeting doesn't it? Of course an agenda is ideal. Of course each participant should come to a meeting understanding what it's for, where real, important, things are discussed, concensus reached, and decisions are made. I go to some of these kinds of meetings every year. This year I've had the joy(?) of consulting in two corporate environments. Where the folks executing a project get to have regular (frequent) meetings with middle managers to "report on progress". What did we do? What do we plan to do? When will it be finished. 10 people are invited to each meeting. 3 give feedback. 1 "runs" it (and tries to keep it short). 6 (I'm sure) are working on other things while the meeting happens. So yeah, no, I'm not spending 30 minutes preparing for your meeting. I'm barely attending your meeting. (And if my name is mentioned I'll likely ask you to repeat the question.) Which brings me to my point. Calling every gathering the same thing (meeting), then prescribing advice for all meetings, is unhelpful because not all meetings have the same value to begin with.
nlitened 3y ago
> prepare a bullet-point agenda in advance I think bullet points are exactly the thing Bezos was arguing against. No lazy bullet points, but instead a well-written text with a cohesive narrative, consisting of full sentences and paragraphs.

karim79 3y ago

> When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. Meaning that a profound analysis on data is a must. Weird to see these notes on the front page of HN, just literally two hours after I spoke about the exact point mentioned above. I've watched the Lex-Bezos podcast a couple of times now, and that is the point which really resonated with me. Perhaps a simple example: API monitoring shows no issues. Isolated reports of a specific failure type, such as a gateway timeout or something that could just be a one-off. Then more of the same type of (customer-reported) failures occur within a short time-period, say within twelve hours, and all monitoring still shows "all good". Nah, the customer is (mostly) always right, and there's very likely something bad happening somewhere in the stack. It's quite natural that the watchers would rather dismiss the whining coming from places higher up in the hierarchical chain. But when the whiner is correct, the reverence of said whiner levels up and some other telemetry gets added for better alerting improved platform robustness. EDIT: Just to be clear, I'm not a Bezos fan, and I think anyone who is fine with having accumulated that much wealth, should perhaps think a bit harder about, things, to say the least.

wtracy 3y ago
> Just to be clear, I'm not a Bezos fan, and I think anyone who is fine with having accumulated that much wealth, should perhaps think a bit harder about, things, to say the least. I think it's always useful to treat a person's general intelligence, skill in a particular field, and personal ethics as orthogonal properties.
influx 3y ago
He didn’t accumulate wealth, he built a company that successfully served customers. It’s not a zero sum game where he took all this money from someone else. As one example, AWS has been insanely good for startups and given a lot of value to people other than Jeff and Amazon.

DueDilligence 3y ago

[dead]

Archelaos 3y ago

> In your meetings, the order of voice should go from the most junior person, to the most senior person. Somewhere I read, that this was also a principle in the Prussian army's general staff.

lockedinspace 3y ago
Makes quite a lot of sense if you think about that. Most juniors could change their perspective cause someone in the meeting who they admire says otherwise. Of course, always backed up by actual data.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

kerp322 3y ago

I wonder if this collection of incredibly mundane observations are really among the most interesting things Bezos has to say about business.

w10-1 3y ago

Perhaps to state the obvious: all these lessons mostly pertain to making large companies with history, processes, and bureaucracy/coordination costs a little less stuck in self-serving projections. Indeed, most of the Amazon business heuristics published elsewhere pertain to rivalry within and among groups -- lessons learned from Microsoft. Actually "building business value" means making the right decisions, and not making self-serving decisions is not good enough for that.

lifeisstillgood 3y ago

I am more and more convinced that democratic decision making is necessary in companies - literally voting by employees - maybe as swiss style referendums or plain old vote for the CEO. It's such a huge change it simply does not fit in most brains, but same is true for say social democracy during the time of Watt Tyler. I think the point is politics exists no matter what the rhetoric of the elites says, so you may as well surface the politics keep it in sunshine and deal with it. Plus it's ridiculous to grant a tiny elite the power to allocate resources of society simply because they got promoted...

WalterBright 3y ago
> grant a tiny elite the power to allocate resources of society simply because they got promoted... They can only allocate the resources of the company, not society. And they get selected based on their track record of effective allocation of those resources. Democracy has never demonstrated efficient allocation.
- n6242 3y ago
  > And they get selected based on their track record of effective allocation of those resources. I've seen too many managers fail upwards to truly believe that is true in general. In plenty of companies connections are just as or more important than being effective at allocating resources.
  - lifeisstillgood 3y ago
    This is what motivates me in my ... admittedly belief. Of course politics will always play a huge deciding part in resource allocation. But if the allocation is based on a small "elite" then it looks a lot like historical societies - and we think we have moved beyond that. If we believe in democracy for our civic society, if we believe in the Totalitarian Bet, why not apply democracy to the companies that are too big to fail? It is also why I suspect founder led companies do very well (if the founder is good enough) - the internicine politics just gets overwhelmed by the founder picking and choosing - but history has taught us that it's vanishingly rare to find such people, to place them in the elite and have them continue to make excellent decisions over decades. There are better solutions

tibanne 3y ago

> When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. Meaning that a profound analysis on data is a must. This sentence seems logically inconsistent.

kthejoker2 3y ago
As a data person, I read it as: you don't always have anecdotes. So your data needs to account for blind spots and have enough granularity to see the issues. And focus more on negative metrics / finding and addressing anomalies instead of vanity metrics and showing "up and to the right" charts to leadership.

peter_d_sherman 3y ago

>(Jeff Bezos): "Your most junior person can overrule your most senior person, if they have the data to back it up. In your meetings, the order of voice should go from the most junior person, to the most senior person." Wholeheartedly agree! Phrased another way: "Data is senior to seniority." (At least, let's presume that it is, or should be, 99 times out of 100 -- 99% of the time -- barring exceptionally rare and unusual situations and circumstances. Accumulated Wisdom over a lifetime sometimes trumps Data ("What is the exactly right thing to do given this situation, given this set of circumstances?") -- so Wisdom > Data > Corporate Seniority, although in an ideal world and under normal circumstances, all of them should be in exact agreement...)