Separating the myth from reality in the assessment of Amazon’s methods has taken on a new urgency, both within and outside the company, as it considers the future without Mr. Bezos at the helm. He announced this month that he will retire as CEO this summer. So it’s timely that two former Amazon executives, Colin Bryar and Bill Carr, have vowed to pull back the curtain in their new book, “Working Backwards: Insights, Stories and Secrets from Inside Amazon.”
According to the authors, they interviewed ‘many Amazons in the past and present’, and based on the glowing cover, they seem to have at least had the tacit consent of the current management. However, the fact that ‘backward work’ is much closer to an authorized company profile than a tell-all, does not necessarily detract from its importance. Mr. Bryar and mr. Carr each played important roles in the business during critical periods: the one as a kind of chief of staff for Mr. Bezos when the Kindle and Amazon Web Services got off the ground, and the others started and managed Prime Video. Their portrait of Amazon’s culture and processes is fascinating and revealing, though not always in the way they plan.
First, the authors intend to reveal the work philosophies responsible for the monumental achievements of Amazon. Instead of presenting a dull catalog of the 14 leadership principles and three implementation mechanisms, Mr. Bryar and mr. Carr concrete and accessible examples of how it is practically applied in a variety of functions, from rental and communication to organization and products. design. Mr. Bezos apparently did not make a joke when he said in his first letter to shareholders that employees at Amazon are not free to choose whether they want to work ‘long, hard or smart’. (It should be all three.)
“Working backwards” carries the company’s exhausting focus on customer satisfaction. However, many of the individual business practices described are not fundamentally original. Although it has often gained gripping Amazon labels, many are merely variations on well-known Six Sigma processes and management theories, or practices developed by other companies such as Toyota or Microsoft. As the authors put it, for example:
When Amazon teams encounter a surprise or confusing problem with data, they are ruthless until they discover the cause. Perhaps the most commonly used technique at Amazon is the Correction of Errors Process (COE) process, based on the ‘Five Whys’ method developed at Toyota and used by many companies worldwide. If you see a disorder, ask why it happened and repeat it 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 practices, replenishing them with a few of your own and then stepping on the gas. But the authors repeatedly claim that these practices individually and collectively offer a “great competitive advantage”. Defining a competitive advantage is something your competitors cannot easily copy. If, as the authors claim, Amazon’s secret sauce is just a collection of ‘learnable practices’, it can not be a competitive advantage.