Leadership Principles that Make Amazon Unique with Chaim Landau - PART ll

we make mistakes all the time we pick on projects but there isn't that culture of blaming and we just go to the next thing we move on from it we do what we do a lot is we do retrospectives that's a very important part of our process also where we sit down and we ask ourselves inside of the project and when the projects are done what worked what didn't work what should we do [Music] differently let me address what you were saying about customer Obsession the first and the most important leadership principle at Amazon is customer Obsession and you know when I joined I will be honest I saw it and I said okay CER what are you telling me here that you care about your customer everybody says that they care about the C we should at least hope so yeah exactly otherwise would right but it took time eventually I started realizing what it means and it takes also time to embody these ideas like you you don't get to this de side to accept or adopt the culture eventually I learned what customer obsession is and and I will start with what it's not it's not altruism it's not selflessness it's not Amazon saying we care so much about about our customer that we don't care about ourselves I think if you look at the recent layoffs in Amazon you see of course they care by themselves in fact they care by themselves first if they don't care by themselves first then then they can't survive you must care about yourself ultimately first but I think the message they're saying is that they think of the customer first and they trust that if you think of the customer first it'll pay off if you obsess over your customer they will obsess over you in return and there's a there's a story told of Bezos when he first started amazon.com and he was selling books online and he was allowing people to do reviews today everybody's accustomed to everything has review and we all look at it like like Monday morning quarterbacks and saying of course you need reviews but at the time nobody knew that idea in the publisher called Bezos and and said one of the Publishers and said what do you mean you're going to let them review books they're going to write bad reviews why would you let that why would you let them do that and his response was write better books that is cust and I think the way I see it is if you think of yourself first and I've seen it firsthand with so many projects I I get pulled into a project and the first question I always ask I ask very simple questions but they sound simple like why are you moving to the cloud and and sometimes the sales people look at me like what are you you crazy or something like why would you ask that question we're excited that they're moving to the cloud but I've seen when customers when account Executives get aggressive and and they sell something to the customer because they were trying to get their quoda filled right it always comes back to buy them because selling them something that they don't need so this to me is customer Obsession think of your customer first and trust that that will pay off so let me ask you just a followup question to that is do you hold each other accountable based on the leadership principles is that a talking point in everyday activity in the company it's a fantastic question in the pockets of Amazon where there is true Amazonian energy because you got to understand like Amazon was built in Seattle then it expanded to New York and all the other cities so I think further away you move from from sort of the core you sometimes lose some of that so yes in in some of these circles you constantly hear customer Obsession or frugality and many of the leadership principles are are misunderstood but I would say the answer is yes in the strong areas of Amazon it is a constant because people really believe in it it's not a virtue it's something that they believe this is how you are successful at what you do so the answer is yes and I think uh you're touching is something important because I think it's a good indication that you're influencing your culture that your culture is working when you hear people say that back to you you know exactly and we have a you know we're a small company compared to Amazon obviously but we have our core values and it could be a a very you know obsession over detail so to speak yeah and we would go through a project and the details will be missing we would hold each other accountable saying where is the obsession of a detail or Partners not service providers like if this would be your company would you advise them to Rebrand or do something these are conversations we're having internally before giving a proposal to a client to understand okay do we Rebrand them just because they asked us for a price or do we Rebrand them because we also believe this would to be our company that will move the needle to their you know creating their next stage in their business and I think you know just reminded me I do some leadership training in in our office we do like lead leaders forums for like 10 business owners at a time every few months and at one point we spoke about culture and we spoke about core values and I the screen was the the PEX core values and one of the people said this is great could I use exactly what you have like could I use this all for my company I said well if you're willing to live by it then by all means but if if just because it's a it makes good sense on paper but you're not willing to to hire and fire because of the core values ultimately it's not it's not going to be ingrained in your culture that's a a very strong point you know I one of the principles that Amazon is hire and develop the best okay which basically says it's an interesting everybody has their way of interpreting it but it basically says hire and develop the best don't necessarily hire somebody for for their skills just hire really good people people that fit the culture you can have somebody that has all the skills in the world if they don't fit the culture don't hire them and I've seen people not respect that as in you know hired guy like seeing it more as almost like a bureaucracy see I agree with you you need to be willing to hire and fire and so whoever asked you to adopt your principles they not only can just they can't copy and paste it they really need to buy into it and be able to sell it to others also exactly I'll just also add because I've been asked that in the past I remember being years ago in an event of a SAS company A S software is a service yeah that's it that's it and there was was speaking about culture and then somebody asked a question that if you could hire now a great developer but he might not fit the culture but he's the best developer out there why do you and you going to turn them down because he he's not you know he doesn't align with your culture and the CEO beautifully answered he says the following let's say they're Obsession of you know customer Obsession yeah or they were they were small business Obsession like they were crazy going wild for the small business owner to success to be successful says if we have a problem that a small business owner cannot transact on our software and they cannot close out the day and chances are that the software developer has the solution and they can fix it there's two ways we could have somebody that is Obsession about the same Target which means they're Obsession about the they'll go above and beyond to fix that bug to fix that because they believe that they have a duty in life to make sure the small business owner is taken care of if they're just just there because of the skill they could say we'll fix it there's a ton of stuff we have to get to we'll do that in three days from now so it changes the way they react to response to anything in the company so that's why if you have a strong culture it has to be bought in by everybody in the company regardless which role they are people think it's just a leadership type of lingo it's across the organization to anybody that's interacting with the company yeah and it's crucial because really you know the way I imagine it is and I've tried to use I've been using a lot of images to to tell stories and and I've created an image of a giant warship okay and then put a bunch of AWS services on it to illustrate to my customers that you're out in the sea okay like I can give you I can give you the most the newest ship out there military ship and give you the the best crew in the world so you have the best technology you have the best crew I can write you a perfect RNR roles and responsibility who was supposed to do what can I send you out to see I cannot because you need a culture for people to speak the same language and so they they you need that strong culture otherwise you can deliver what you're setting yourself out to deliver exactly want to touch another very important point which a lot of leaders suffer with and I think you've mentioned it before and I've also seen some of the post about it which is the quick to decision making and we know a lot of leaders that's one of their bottlenecks where they need to make a decision right or wrong cut a ser Serv add a service and so on and so forth let a person go hire another person and the decision making process is so hard for them and then you see companies like Amazon and again some of it has to do with a lot of money so they can make those decisions take the risk but it's also a cultural way how the company was developed what could you share publicly about their decision process when it comes to making a decision how fast these decisions are being made what are the like what is a method of they teach leaders like you and everybody else as far as how to go about making decisions I think it's it's one of their major keys to success is their fast decision-making they have a very fast decision-making process and also encourage risk taking not to be afraid because very often when you see people are are not making decisions that's because they're afraid they don't have the courage to make and I see it with serious leadership like people at very high levels and in fact I would say the higher you are the more impact your decisions have and so I would go to their leadership principle of bias for Action okay so one that's one of Amazon's leadership principles and on the surface it means have a bias for taking action almost like B step in if don't say this is not my job do you you know take on anything that's in front of you and it's true that is what bias for Action really means but there's also a decisionmaking framework that came up with himself which is truly brilliant and he basically said you need to split decisions in two there are oneway door decisions and a one-way door decision is a decision where if you make that decision it's going to be very difficult very costly to come back it could be costly because of money it could be costly because you're missing a very important deadline and then there are two-way door decisions where if you make the wrong decision you have a very quick way back so what he saying saying is if you're facing a one-way door decision you need to take more time to deliberate and you need to take less risk and collect more data and recently I went through something like that and I assembled a big team of people and we spent four days collecting data more and more data and then we had enough data and that's the key here enough data not all the data remember bezos's one saying when you get to 60% of the data you need to make an instinctive decision and and it makes a lot of sense but then I was thinking to myself how do you know you're at 60% if you're still collecting data in and of itself as an instinct yeah exactly done it enough so that's how you do one-way door decisions if you are facing a two-way door decision what you're supposed to do is you need to make decisions faster and take more risk and the idea is and someone here at work asked me so how do you get out of the decision fast also right what if you made a mistake and the the answer is if you make fast decisions you will inevitably make fast decisions in and fast decisions out you know I saw I saw Amazon spend about a year in millions and millions of dollars looking at New York City as a second headquarter okay yes then they got into some kind of political trouble and it took him two weeks to drop that idea two weeks most companies would have tried to throw good money after bad to try to save that deal they were so quick and backing out I also remember Bezos speaking to the shareholders once a year he speaks he used to write a share maybe he still does and he said something very interesting he said he said I've seen you I've seen you spend billions of dollars on on technology and be in being successful on ideas and being successful I've seen you spend hundreds of millions of dollars and be successful I've seen you lose hundreds of millions of dollars I have not seen you lose in the billion dollar range and he was basically telling them you are not taking enough risk not that I want you to go out and lose me a billion dollars but if you have not taken that kind of risk if you haven't lost that kind of money that you're not taking enough risk so the concept of the two-way door is to take more risk and really one of the things that is part of our culture here is fail often and fail fast you need to fail because if you don't fail you will not your experience will not grow you know Andy Andy Jesse who's the CEO of Amazon today was the CEO of AWS he famously said said there is no compression algorithm for experience which basically says You must live experience uh and he says it all the time when he was trying to say that you know we're more advanced than our competitors um from the cloud perspective because we've been there longer so he said there's no compression algorithm for experience and I believe that you must learn from leave experience but you can accelerate your experience and one of the ways you accelerate your experience is by taking more risk failing more and failing fast because every time you fail every error message is a learning opportunity you learn from it and you build on top of that so back to decisions it is one of the key successes here we're encouraged to make fast decisions you do not get penalized for for making mistakes exactly that I wanted to ask you do you see this in action that people do not get penalized even they made a mistake on this principle 100% all the time it's hard to show exactly how but quantifi it correct we make we make mistakes all the time we pick on projects but there isn't that culture of blaming and we just go to the next thing we move on from it we do what we do a lot is we do retrospectives that's a very important part of our process also where we sit down and we ask ourselves inside of the project and when the projects are done what worked what didn't work what should we do differently just a process of from mistakes what could you share with us about the rituals about meetings I know certain companies in especially in the larger companies are all about meetings and every day there's meetings I know Amazon was pretty you know some of the stuff I've read is they have the principles about the length of meetings or presentations of meetings or stuff like that what are some one or two things that come to mind that is very unique to the culture of Amazon that you could share I would say first of all I I have a lot to say about meetings because I spend my higher day like I could spend 6 hours a day and sometimes I have meetings that literally are 6 hours I've been in 13 hours meetings that these are long brainstorming sessions I would say you know there's a leadership principle of frugality which I feel has been very much misunderstood even by people inside of Amazon they think it's all about saving money and it it doesn't really make sense like that's not really the concept here it's about being Frugal with everything that you do being efficient so what you see in meetings is we don't invite people that don't need to be there so if you don't have something to directly to contribute don't invite don't don't over invite people it's one of the first things I do with customers I you know I get invited to a zoom and I see 12 people right away right away I ask myself who's important who's not and you go through the whole meeting and you see most of them are not speaking and you bring it they bring it to your customers attention and tell them that this is something that you need to cut and so Amazon has some interesting ways of approaching meetings especially when it comes to communicating ideas and what they are is they're called narratives write a narrative uh or a one-pager or a six pager and you take like the first 10 minute of the meeting and you have everybody sit quietly and read through what you've written and the reason Amazon is very big on writing because the concept is that if you're unable to write it down articulate it into words chances are you don't fully understand what you're trying to say also it forces you to really understand is like you know to educate someone you really need to to be a good student also so that's one of the way ways of managing meetings is you know everybody reads through it and then everybody asks questions in other words you don't have a lot of PowerPoint slides and that what that does is and I do it in most of my meetings like I hardly ever present Dex hardly ever I right away we'll stand up at a whiteboard and just if we want to talk about challenges let's just put it on the on the board I always start with goals what are the goals for the meeting itself why are we here and 10 minutes into the meeting if you feel things are not going well you stop and talk about the meeting itself you don't let it go off off track you say what's the goal of this meeting are we should we talk about this if that's not really the goal of the meeting so I can't say that I see that kind of efficiency everywhere I wish I I was seeing more of that but conceptually that's the approach I want to get to another part of the conversation that I prepared some questions I I know that we're hitting an hour and in a few minutes but maybe we'll have to cut this episode and two which we rarely do but the conversation is going which is the part of personal development and I think I've seen some of the post about it I've seen obviously going through this process that you went through as far as the different roles and learning it and ultimately getting to a stage where you could join such a large company it takes a lot of personal development and your discipline understanding where you want to go what you want to do and becoming a better version of yourself I think you also mentioned it in the mentoring ship that you do for others in company and have seen some some of the stuff you've done for you know K people outside of the Amazon ecosystem just to giv giving them the advice how important is it in being able to be successful in your professional life your own personal development I think it's you mean outside of outside of work correct I think if if you're developing yourself as a person in general it reaches all areas of life it makes you a happier person it makes you a richer person stronger so I would say both sides are really crucial like what we do is very important it's it's a very serious part of what we do of who we are and you know I have personally picked up things inside of Amazon that has really affected me personally and vice versa like I for example one of the big things at Amazon is everything we do here we ask ourselves what is the impact of what you're doing like if if you want to go to promotion here at Amazon you could work very hard you don't get promoted you have to show your impact what was your impact Downstream impact not I built this for a company what did they do with you built okay and then the next question is scaling you always ask yourself is what you're building scaling right and so I have instinctively adopted that in my personal life as in what is my impact on the world am I scaling myself and you know this is an opportunity here which I appreciate very much of you're giving me an opportunity to scale instead of mentoring someone oneon-one I'm able to scale and then I've had personal experiences in my life where I have done certain things that have deeply impacted me in a good way and then it was hard like you go through something in life where you do something that you feel that you've really elevated yourself and then there's the crash as in you always feel like punished I did something so amazing and now I feel that big void because that thing is no longer active but then I took that and I took that to work and when I work with a customer who I know what they do I know my work I know how it impacts them like if it's a pharmaceutical company or or all the other things that I do here in Israel that impact human lives every day that comes from that passion as in you want you want to do good things for people you want you want to leave strong impact of the world at the end of the day what we leave here what we leave behind us is really what matters uh so I think both sides are really important you need to allow both sides to really impact you so personal from personal growth perspective beautiful so let's dive a little deeper so what type of mechanism could you share and let's say you would Mentor someone there's a lot of leaders that have these small businesses there's Crossroad with their own personal growth they don't know what could they demand from themselves so to speak what kind of mechanism to make sure that they are making an impact or they are growing what have you seen working for you on the personal side or from from what you have seen in the Amazon ecosystem that these are benchmarks this is how we measure success and making sure that it's not just we're fooling ourselves with the progress we're actually seeing the progress yeah so I mean I have first of all I have a mentor myself somebody who mentors me and and enourage everyone to have a mentor I don't care how skilled you are I don't care how amazing you are you should have a mentor and that Mentor should be someone that's not exact doing exactly what you do it should be somebody that's in a little bit of a different domain and the person that mentors me said to me a few weeks ago and it really reach me but it's it's something I was living as well but he articulated into worse he said make everyone around you better that should be your focus not make this guy better or that everyone make sure that you're like I always try my impact to be like I I'm with within a team here in Israel and I try very hard that my impact crosses walls and break ceilings I want to be able to impact up and sideways so I always hyper focused on that and when I speak to the people uh that I Mentor I tell them all these things that I would tell myself as in make sure you scale yourself don't do things that others can do if somebody else can do it then why should you do it you go do things that someone else cannot do it be comfortable being uncomfortable so my message to these people is make everyone around you better that should be your focus not just at work always it becomes becomes second nature it becomes you give of yourself and it's not a selflessness it's it's a selfishness you feel good when you give and that's okay so exactly ask any Mentor that's doing mentorship and most of the time the response will be the same why are you doing it because I become better because the the feeling that you're able to sit with someone for half an hour and clar and give them clarity as far as where they want to go in life and so on and so forth or the business whatever it is it feels so good and you become stronger as a person I personally I've shared it on the podcast I have voluntary slots in my own calendar which you know I give away for young entrepreneurs to meet with on a regular basis and people ask me you do this sometimes for a living like why are you giving away volunteers SL it says because I also need to grow and I need to become stronger in these voluntary slots and seeing somebody go through something in in personal life or in business or and through a transition it makes you stronger as well so I encourage listeners on both sides of the aisle if you're able to share your skills with someone and Mentor someone be out there and do this if you are in business or in the personal life and you're looking for a mentor those people are around you people think oh these people are not they're never going to do it they're not going to not able to be reaching reaching them and so on and so forth guess what they are reachable and they are willing to do it maybe not the first try because they want to see if you're serious or not maybe not the first person you're reaching at but if you're serious about it finding a mentor you'll be able to find mentors and I think it's a very very important point and I don't think that it gets enough credit because people think oh it doesn't mean that I'm not strong enough if I need a mentor does it does it mean that I'm not Savvy enough so to speak speak guess what the strong people The Savvy people those are the people that have mentors yeah and in mentoring someone I I would say it's it's food for your soul and I tell the people that I Mentor all the time I said this is not a one a one directional process this is not me talking down to you and teaching you things you will be teaching me things too first of all I will need to explain things to you and then I will learn like one of the people that I mentored here he told me after working here for a year he was telling me for years I've been working you completely shifted how I approach problems how I think about my skills and and my my job and when I hear things like that and when I see the results it gives me so much that I ask myself who is getting more out of this relationship me or him beautiful where could people find out more about you we discussed about the LinkedIn what is your profile if you just want to share it with the audience so people could follow a little bit more about what you post so my name is landow so it's easy enough to find on LinkedIn uh you can typee in kando I guess AWS it will come right up I don't know how much I have to offer over I don't really post that much if they want to look me up that's fine I'm not really a public Persona to be very honest and I was I was kind of hesit uh hesitating doing this but I felt because I I was asked before also because people find it interesting you work for Amazon you're you know sish like it' be interesting to talk to but I always ask okay like there's the ego to feed of course but if that's all it is then I don't want to do it but this is an opportunity for me to Mentor a bunch of other people and if I can impact other people and and maybe if we do a second podcast I would love to talk about I said the the course that I I launched here A Course in I would love to talk about that but yeah so if you just look me up on LinkedIn you'll see me beautiful for the links resources mentioned this episode check out the show notes at www.pg.com podcast we will link to follow your LinkedIn because there is a lot of good stuff that I've personally found very valuable let's close with a four rapid fire questions are you ready sure number one a book that changed your life a book that changed my life Wow uh I would say any book that cames to mind that you learned a lot from maybe um yal Noah Harari sapiens it's not the only one but definitely yeah yeah number two a piece of advice you got that you'll never forget I worked for this guy K Feelin from Gotham technology and and he told me he's like don't hire for skills hire for potential beautiful number three anything you wish you could go back and do differently oh there are way too many some jobs I I wish I had left a little sooner I overstay that when I I realized I was doing U projects and I was doing it half the time that I was alloc it I should have known okay I think it's time to go do the next thing and last and final question what's still on your bucket list to achieve I want my impact to be Global beautiful beautiful K thank you so much for joining us I know your time is valuable that is why in the name of our listeners will forever be grateful for sharing some of your time with us today it's been a blast thank you so much my [Music] pleasure