The Empty Chair Theory and the secret of Amazon's success
Jeff Bezos, the founder of?Amazon, widely regarded as an innovator, was fond of applying the empty chair method in all his meetings.
Amazon is a retail giant, a technology leader, and one of the world's top brands. But there's something missing at every single meeting in the company.
Amazon CEO Jeff?Bezos?is famously obsessed with customers. He's known for saying, "Start with the customer and work backward," and that's the reason that every project or product at Amazon starts with a press release that features sample customer quotes. It's something that has stood the 20-year-old "startup" in good stead.
"Obsessing over customer experience is the only long-term defensible competitive advantage,"?Bezos has said.
That can be challenging to remember, however. So Amazon makes it impossible to forget.
"One problem is that?the customer isn't really there at every meeting," an Amazon insider told me recently. "So what we like to do at every meeting is we reserve a seat for the customer."
It sounds cheesy, and it probably feels that way sometimes for insiders.
But it is a way of visually compelling every meeting participant and every discussion to reference Amazon's customers. And it'd be hard to argue that the company's single-minded obsession with customers hasn't stood it in good stead.
In the early 1990s, at the dawn of the internet revolution,?Jeff Bezos?observed something peculiar. He was nearly 30 years old, and the web was nowhere near what it is today, but what caught Bezos’s attention was that its usage was increasing at a rate of 2,300% per year.
Not wanting to be left behind, he quickly compiled a list of 20 possible products to sell online and ultimately decided to ship books due to their low cost and universal demand.
While?Amazon?may have had a humble beginning, today, this bookstore is something much more. Since its inception in 1994, it has come to dominate not only retail but various other sectors as well.
Nowadays, people search for products first on Amazon before turning to Google!
And Amazon, like thousands of other large companies, holds millions of meetings. But they do something different — they always include an empty chair.
The Empty Chair Theory
In reality, the empty chair is a technique invented by Sears (at a time when the company was a retail pioneer) and adopted by the current retail powerhouse, Amazon, where it is the key to transforming engagement in the organization.
At Amazon, the chair is about the customer.
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The two-pizza rule
In the early days of Amazon, Jeff Bezos instituted a rule: every internal team should be small enough that it can be fed with two pizzas. The goal wasn’t to cut down on the catering bill. It was, like almost everything Amazon does, focused on two aims: efficiency and scalability. The former is obvious. A smaller team spends less time managing timetables and keeping people up to date, and more time doing what needs to be done. But it’s the latter that really matters for Amazon.
The thing about having lots of small teams is that they all need to be able to work together, and to be able to access the common resources of the company, in order to achieve their larger goals.
Amazon is good at being an e-commerce company that sells things, but what it’s great at is making new e-commerce companies that sell new things.
5 inspirational quotes from Jeff Bezos
"The thing that motivates me is a very common form of motivation. And that is, with other folks counting on me, it's so easy to be motivated."
"One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out."
"Be stubborn on vision, but flexible on details."
"What we need to do is always lean into the future; when the world changes around you and when it changes against you - what used to be a tail wind is now a head wind - you have to lean into that and figure out what to do because complaining isn't a strategy."
"Life's too short to hang out with people who aren't resourceful."