Exporting Amazon

It's your first day on the job at Amazon, and the meeting starts in silence. You are handed a 6 page document, the famous Amazon narrative, and the clock starts. It's a race to absorb, synthesize, question and build a logical flow of information about a strategic issue in 15 mins or less. You haven't seen the document in advance and that's okay. No one else has either. It's concentration which is on display, not pre-reading or pre-aligned perspective. 

It's your first day on the job at Amazon, and the meeting starts in silence. You are handed a 6 page document, the famous Amazon narrative, and the clock starts.

Like everyone else around the table, you are preparing to have an open dialogue to ask clarifying questions - small or big in nature - and eventually engage in a session of building collective intelligence. Like detective work done together. Yet it's not about consensus. Within Amazon there is the saying, "if we have to choose between being right and being intense, we choose the latter." I'm paraphrasing because it's been a while - but you get the point. 

The purpose of a meeting at Amazon is to take any clumsy string of thought and straighten it out. Literally "clarity of thought." The masters of this are not only effective at it, they do with speed. 

It's all in the name of the customer - and the figurative empty chair. By the way, don't take it personally when questioned or corrected. Instead bring that energy to self examine and "root cause" the gap in your own logic. The best never make the same mistake again. This is personal, self reflective Kaizen in action. Such defines the culture so permeated and scaled that you can count on the same pattern in any division regarding any topic.

The results speak for themselves. We may never see a more effective machine.

There is some great content hitting the bookshelves on these practices, and you should read them if not for any other reason than to hold a mirror to how your company works. Chief amongst these is Working Backwards by @BillCarr and Colin Bryar. It's probably the definitive guide on how Amazon works.

My story builds on this. I've spent the last 8 years attempting to help companies work more like Amazon.

In doing so, I always started a big idea or strategic play with the question "what would Amazon do?" This is still a useful mental model for defining what you should do for customers (instead of building forward incrementally from what your current capabilities may be). 

For example, when I joined McDonald's as perhaps the first CDO in the history of the Fortune 500, many wondered how digital could be a material growth or business driver.

Digitization could be viewed as a way to design the experience around the customer across any dimension of what the customer is looking to accomplish. This took me no more than 30 days to conceptualize, and of course many years to bring to life.

However, in the last few years my focus has shifted from the "what" to the "how."

This is the work of transformation. And I've attempted it not once, but three times on a large Fortune 300 scale.

To start with we must understand the machine that is today's organization.

Everyone wants the systematic invention that seems to be so natural to Amazon. But how do you bridge the culture you are to the one you desire?

Incumbent Cultures

Most incumbents are high performing execution cultures, which is critical but not sufficient for continued relevance or growth.

In the execution culture, modifying a known recipe is viewed as a defect even if it holds potential. That makes sense because execution is paramount to deliver today's P&L and rewards are tied to that. But it falls short of allowing new inputs to make today's recipe better, and the growth coming out of it.

In the learning culture, the focus shifts away from knowns to unknowns. Missing an unknown is pretty big defect in the learning culture because the new idea could fall short of traction. 

Give this culture contrast some thought. The defects are viewed very differently and therefore the management practices designed around them are at odds. 

And yet these two subcultures can exist in the same organization for good reason, while they also need to find ways to collaborate and interface.

That's why to achieve cultural evolution, we cannot simply study or understand how an innovative company like Amazon or Netflix works. You can explain how Amazon works till you are blue in the face.  Trust me, I made the rounds socializing this know-how.

Is it possible to harmonize? My view is yes. The key is to meet the organization where it is today in a way that mobilizes change. We will go further into this in future issues. 

For now let me say if you sit in the middle of these worlds, and are trying to make it work, I empathize and would love to hear about it and share tips (feel free to message me privately). 

If you're taking on cultural change, you're a real Business OG in my mind.

One thing I'm excited about

Like many of you, Clubhouse has become a huge medium for me. It's raw and timely on topics I care about with no gatekeeper as of now. And it has the massive implications for the events, conference and paid content spaces. 

Connect with me there if you like. I'm @atifatif

Some exciting things in the works :)