Separating myth from reality in evaluating Amazon’s methods has taken on a new urgency, both inside and outside the company, as it looks to the future without Mr. Bezos at the helm. He announced this month that he would step down as chief executive this summer. Therefore, it is fitting that two former Amazon executives, Colin Bryar and Bill Carr, have promised to open the curtain on their new book, “Working Backwards: Insights, Stories and Secrets from Inside Amazon”.
The authors say that they interviewed “many Amazonians from the past and the present” and, based on the brilliant coverage of the cover, appear to have had at least the tacit consent of the current administration. The fact that “Working backwards” is much closer to an authorized corporate profile than to saying it all, however, does not necessarily diminish your interest. Mr. Bryar and Mr. Carr played important roles in the company during critical periods: one as a kind of team leader for Mr. Bezos when the Kindle and Amazon Web Services were taking off, and the other started and ran Prime Video. His portrait of Amazonian culture and processes is fascinating and revealing, although not always in the way they intend.
First, the authors intend to reveal the operational philosophies responsible for Amazon’s monumental achievements. Instead of offering a boring catalog of the company’s 14 leadership principles and three implementation mechanisms, Mr. Bryar and Mr. Carr provide concrete and accessible examples of how they are put into practice in a range of roles, from hiring and communication to organization and product Project. Mr Bezos was clearly not kidding when, in his first letter to shareholders, he said that at Amazon, employees are not free to choose whether they want to work “for a long time, a lot or with intelligence”. (It has to be all three.)
“Working backwards” conveys the company’s exhaustive focus on customer satisfaction. Many of the individual business practices described, however, are not fundamentally original. While they often acquire specific labels from Amazon, many are simply variations on known Six Sigma processes and management theories, or practices developed by other companies like Toyota or Microsoft. For example, as the authors put it:
When Amazon teams find a surprise or a disconcerting problem with the data, they are relentless until they discover the root cause. Perhaps the most used technique at Amazon is the Error Correction (COE) process, based on the ‘Five Whys’ method developed at Toyota and used by many companies worldwide. When you see an anomaly, ask why it happened and repeat with another ‘Why?’ until you get to the underlying factor that was the real culprit.
There is nothing wrong with adapting a portfolio of existing best practices, complementing them with some of your own and then stepping on the gas. But the authors repeatedly claim that these practices, both individually and collectively, confer an “enormous competitive advantage”. The very definition of competitive advantage is something that your competitors cannot easily copy. If, as the authors claim, Amazon’s secret sauce is just a collection of “teachable operating practices”, they cannot be a competitive advantage.