#BiasforAction

I’ve had (mostly!) the pleasure of working for the past 25+ years in a variety of companies and teams. Some small, some medium, some large, and then Amazon large. Companies are a curious human creation that have yet to replaced by anything coming close to decentralization. And they are all, at the end of the day shockingly similar. They exist to bring people together (team) to build and provide something (products and services).

At any company or team I’ve been part of there has been either an unstated, or weakly stated attempt at “culture”. Also called “values”, “common behaviors”, etc. They are part of some sort of onboarding training, provided as some kind of thing to hang in your office or cube and posted on the corporate intranet. Then, when the “real” work gets done they are ignored to be looked at during a long call or glanced at while getting up from one’s desk on a random Tuesday.

Amazon is different. Very different. And while I spent only 16 months there (and regret not staying longer to learn more) my experience of the Leadership Principles was profound.

You see, anywhere else I’ve worked value and behaviors and principles were, at best, a background. At Amazon they are the operating system for the company.

Check them out here (and come back!)

These leadership principles are how you are hired, how you are managed, how you promoted, how you fired, and how you work.

I experienced this is in my rigorous interview (I have never seen a better interview process than Amazon, it blows any other process out of the water both as a prospect and hiring manager). I’ll write separately about that process, but the interview is largely a behavioral inquiry based on the LPs.

I want to talk about one LP here in depth, #biasforaction. This one humbled me, and I believe you can tell how functional (or dysfunctional) you are, your team is, or your company is based on this one principle.

Bias for Action

Speed matters in business. Many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study. We value calculated risk taking.

As it reads this LP is big! It talks about how quick decision making is essential. At Amazon another metaphor that is used are One Way Doors and Two Way Doors (decisions that are largely reversable vs. those that aren’t).

I experienced this LP through my day and week and used the door metaphor a lot. But perhaps a greater experience of me for Bias for Action came from a Slack exchange with someone on my onboarding buddy on the Innovation Advisory Team I was a part of. I was onboarding and had a slew of questions and needed to find an answer to a question. And while Amazon is notorious for being a self-service environment—meaning knowledge is documented and available on an internal instance of Media Wiki and individuals and teams are expected to keep things updated—I was lost.?

In my first days and weeks, my onboarding mentor was patient with me as I asked questions and she pointed towards various internal resources that answered my questions.

Then on day three she stopped, and politely suggested I find the answer myself. I was kind of stunned. Wasn’t she there to help me onboard, why wouldn’t she help? For a moment I was a bit insulted.

Then I paused, spent 15 minutes searching and looking for the resource I was looking for and found it. It felt good (even though it was a minor piece of knowledge in the grand scheme of things).

I opened slack and proudly shared my finding. Her response? “Good #biasforaction, Hadley.”

And that’s when one piece of the leadership principle puzzle sunk in. At Amazon team members were always there to help, but a lot of what we seek to solve (even small things!) can be done by just taking action.

You are probably thinking so what, such a small example of something! I didn’t build a business, start a product, my action was simply answering a question for myself. True. But this small behavioral difference between an Amazionian and any other company is huge and reflected throughout individuals and teams globally. Importantly this reflected not only in the way I worked, but also how everyone at Amazon worked; if someone said they were going to follow up, they always did. And if someone had a way to do something more quickly where you could learn something more quickly they suggested it and did it.

How do you think about #biasforaction in either in how you live your live or work as part of a team?