Jeff Bezos discovered a couple of issues about management and human nature whereas remodeling Amazon from a startup he based almost 30 years in the past into the tech juggernaut it’s in the present day, with a market cap of $1.5 trillion.
Folks, he got here to comprehend, are “not really truth-seeking animals.” As a substitute, “we are social animals,” he stated. That elementary perception has implications for the way corporations and certainly any group needs to be structured, he believes.
Bezos made the feedback on an episode the Lex Fridman Podcast posted this week. He famous that all through human historical past, telling the reality may typically land one in hassle.
“Take you back in time 10,000 years and you’re in a small village,” he stated. “If you go along to get along, you can survive, you can procreate. If you’re the village truth-teller, you might get clubbed to death in the middle of the night.”
The explanation, he continued, is that “important truths can be uncomfortable, they can be awkward, they can be exhausting…They can make people defensive even if that’s not the intent.”
And but they will also be the distinction between an organization succeeding or failing, which is why Bezos believes “any high-performing organization has to have mechanisms and a culture that supports truth-telling.” That features his area enterprise Blue Origin, to which he’s applying his hard-won lesson from Amazon, the place he resigned as CEO a couple of years in the past.
One technique he suggests is for conferences: having essentially the most senior particular person converse final and most junior ones go first in an effort to hear everybody’s opinion in an unfiltered method.
“I know from experience,” he stated, “that if I speak first, even very strong-willed, highly-intelligent, high-judgment participants in that meeting will wonder, ‘’Well if Jeff thinks that, I came in this meeting thinking one thing, but maybe I’m not right.’”
He additionally believes leaders ought to overtly talk about the problem of truth-telling with their groups. “You have to remind people it’s okay that it’s uncomfortable…that it’s not what we’re designed to do as humans…We mostly survive by being social animals and being cordial and cooperative.”
He famous that even in science, which is “all about truth-telling” and “has very formal mechanisms for it,” there are senior and junior scientists, so “there’s a hierarchy of humans where somehow seniority matters.”
He recollects a second in Amazon’s historical past when clients had been complaining about lengthy wait occasions after they known as the corporate’s 1-800 quantity, but the metrics introduced in conferences steered these wait occasions had been lower than 60 seconds.
At one assembly, Bezos merely known as the quantity himself, with the pinnacle of customer support current. The wait time was greater than 10 minutes on that decision.
“It dramatically made the point that something was wrong with the data collection,” he stated. “We weren’t measuring the right thing. And that, you know, set off a whole chain of events where we started measuring it right.”
He additionally warned about two issues that get in method of reaching the reality: compromise and stubbornness. With the previous, disagreeing events decide on one thing that isn’t true in an effort to transfer on. With the latter, “they just have a war of attrition, and whichever one gets exhausted first capitulates to the other one.”
Navigating round such pitfalls requires a proactive method, he stated.
“You have to seek truth even when it’s uncomfortable,” he stated. “You have to get people’s attention, and they have to buy into it, and they have to get energized around really fixing things.”
