As once the special counsel Lanny Davis advised President Clinton on the subject of Monika Lewinsky: tell it early, tell it all, tell it yourself.
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Category: leadership
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Bezos on decision making
From the letter to Amazon shareholders:
There are some subtle traps that even high-performing large organizations can fall into as a matter of course, and we’ll have to learn as an institution how to guard against them. One common pitfall for large organizations – one that hurts speed and inventiveness – is “one-size-fits-all” decision making.
Some decisions are consequential and irreversible or nearly irreversible – one-way doors – and these decisions must be made methodically, carefully, slowly, with great deliberation and consultation. If you walk through and don’t like what you see on the other side, you can’t get back to where you were before. We can call these Type 1 decisions. But most decisions aren’t like that – they are changeable, reversible – they’re two-way doors. If you’ve made a suboptimal Type 2 decision, you don’t have to live with the consequences for that long. You can reopen the door and go back through. Type 2 decisions can and should be made quickly by high judgment individuals or small groups.
As organizations get larger, there seems to be a tendency to use the heavy-weight Type 1 decision-making process on most decisions, including many Type 2 decisions. The end result of this is slowness, unthoughtful risk aversion, failure to experiment sufficiently, and consequently diminished invention.1 We’ll have to figure out how to fight that tendency.
Amazon Lending provided aggregate funding of over $1.5 billion to micro, small and medium businesses across the U.S., U.K. and Japan through short-term loans, with a total outstanding loan balance of about $400 million
Amazon Web Services is reaching $10 billion in annual sales
On outsized returns / risk taking: Given a ten percent chance of a 100 times payoff, you should take that bet every time
On corporate culture: The reason cultures are so stable in time is because people self-selec
http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312516530910/d168744dex991.htm
As Sir Arthur Helps, a 19th century aphorist, said: “Almost all human affairs are tedious. Everything is too long. Visits, dinners, concerts, plays, speeches, pleadings, essays, sermons, are too long.”
My equivalent list for today’s managers would be: “Everthing is too long. Business plans, board presentations, management accounts, sales reports, project updates, standup checkins, system’s architecture, code.”
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Getting Older
As Luke Johnson said: “As I get older I have less patience than ever for irrelevant stuff. My tolerance for wasting time has demonised – I want to use what I have productively.”
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Unplanned work
If you want to work hard and not have visible results to show consider tracking unplanned work. Unplanned work is the main reason for missing deadlines. Use Kanban to lay out your planned work for a week. Keep gate shut to all unplanned work.
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Constraint
As a backbencher you can speak your mind…. Leadership implies constraint.
MVP, happy path, test coverage, Devops… In practice everything is in a spectrum. Focus on building value as the primary goal.
Best way for Tech to bridge gap with the Business is to be helpful and to ensure that tech works 100% of the time.
How to be helpful? Organise knowedge sharing sessions with functional teams (finance, for example), focus on their needs and their core apps, show them how to use the tools to make their job easier. Do this to establish a baseline of Tech knowledge across organisation.
If you are a smaller business or have a developed support function, follow up with one to ones that can be between a few minutes to 30mins. Check user set up, show tools shortcuts, explain new tools use case. Use a check list to ensure consistency.
100% useful/works: Needless to say ensure that Tech works by making common tasks seamless: login, email, change password, file sharing, system updates, printing.