Ex Amazon engineer here. The disagree and commit principle is a double edged sword.
The good: it's taken relatively seriously, it's not just some empty PR line. It allows you to prove to managers and colleagues that you know what you are doing instead of following the heard. It encourages people to prove their ideas with prototypes instead of talk and more talk. It discourage "design by committee" and blame shifting. It's refreshing to be able to disagree openly and challenge popular views.
The bad: It takes a lot of self confidence. Some people might feel insecure due to impostor syndrome, upbringing or belonging to minorities and this creates a disadvantage. Also, it's really exhausting in the long term.
Neutral: if you disagree, commit and fail it becomes a very public failure. On the bright side it teaches people not to disagree too lightheartedly.
> Neutral: if you disagree, commit and fail it becomes a very public failure.
I don't understand this part - if you publicly disagree with a decision, and then that decision results in failure, weren't you just proved right? Or does it just get assumed that the failure was your fault due to you not committing sufficiently?
Most important quote IMHO: “There are some risks related to this approach that I am concerned about but I am confident that you have heard and considered them."
Jeff Bezos makes the strong point that risk is important: "most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow."
Bezos also emphasizes that disagree-and-commit is a hard requirement: "Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting."
> Bezos also emphasizes that disagree-and-commit is a hard requirement: "Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting."
I agree on both terms. If you plan and test everything to death, you are wasting and in fact atrophying our ability to think on your feet. This is an important skill, especially during incident and emergency handling. It's a fine line to learn, and it changes with the team, and the company, and the projects, but it's important.
Challenging decisions is the best way to keep unproductive work away from the team, and unproductive work is one of the best ways to waste time and motivation of a team. Even if it exhausts me at the end of a week, it's a good thing to see 2-3 guys getting excited about a project they should do, because it doesn't contradict our values and it furthers our infrastructure.
>Jeff Bezos makes the strong point that risk is important: "most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow."
Then again Bezos wont be fired if he makes the wrong decision.
I wholeheartedly agree with this principle since my days at Amazon.
I also found that if you need to follow the principle too many times it's a good indicator the team/company goals/vision/ and yours don't align and - if circumstance permits doing so - leaving is better than keep up the fighting forever (which is extremely exhausting, from personal experience).
Don't know how it works at Amazon, but we have a similar rule to avoid teams getting paralyzed on design decisions. I've also worked at companies that didn't do this, and spent more time in design meetings than it would have taken to code a simple prototype.
Following this principle too many times isn't necessarily an indication that the team doesn't align with you, it can also be a sign your communication skills are lacking, and you need to get better in how you convey your ideas (unfortunately talking from my own experience).
A good tie-breaker is usually picking the simpler idea, to avoid perfectionism or over-engineering that engineers sometimes fall into. It seems especially common with people straight out of uni, and lessens with experience.
It's great to disagree & commit if the person on the other side of the table can explain his/her position in a organized manner.
Unfortunately the proposal can be a fait accompli. I used to have demoralizing arguments with my boss, a company VP, about his product directives that were blatantly unsupported by logic or data. In every case his response would be to shrug his shoulders and say "but it's a done deal". (Meaning his CEO wanted to do it.) I can look back & say with confidence that each change was a financial dud.
Go ahead & say that it's your option to leave the company in these situations. It's true - and not always a viable option.
It's funny how we all try to learn principles and how to be effective in the abstract, but in reality most companies promote asshole nihilist freaks and are dysfunctional, so none of it matters.
> Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly.
That sounds quite similar to Lenin's principle of democratic centralism - once upon a time communist parties allowed for a brief period of internal discussion prior to accepting policy decisions (in theory), once the decision was made every party member was committed to the 'collective' decision.
Now that one did not quite work out, because you always depend on the whims of who is heading the discussion; I wonder if the Bezos principle works any better, as there are no third party regulators that might constrain the one who is heading the discussions.
Once upon a time they had this theory of gradual convergence between a west dominated by big corporations and the Soviet Union (for example ' 2001: A Space Odyssey' made this assumption); this observation might have had a grain of truth in it.
I think, Amazon’s leadership principles are quite interesting since they represent the essence of the company’s culture. Compared to other companies these values or principles are not just empty phrases; they’re applied daily and people inside take these very serious.
I personally like the principles although I’m missing a statement about developing employees. Also, the combination of two values can have dire effects, e.g. “Insist on the Highest Standards” and “Deliver Results” was probably the reason why some amazon warehouse workers have peed in bottles, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16849520.
As mentioned, Hire & Develop. Its required for leadership positions (sr IC or people managers). May not be obvious, but also applies to yourself; continual improvement and whatnot.
There is a principle on development:
Hire and Develop the Best
Leaders raise the performance bar with every hire and promotion. They recognize exceptional talent, and willingly move them throughout the organization. Leaders develop leaders and take seriously their role in coaching others. We work on behalf of our people to invent mechanisms for development like Career Choice.
Some may have found this to be true at Amazon, but I found it to be one of the biggest deceptions of working there. It was more like Never Disagree Ever. You take major political risks with every time you exercise the idea. I've seen plenty of people's careers stagnate and effectively end because they chose to publicly question some egotistical asshole's authority.
It's strange to see this repeatedly presented as some recent Amazon or Bezos thing. It's been floating about since at least the 90s, often attributed to Intel/Grove.
agreed. in the valley you do hear it attributed to intel.
the other long-time intel—ism that has now been appropriated everywhere is the OKR system. it was really weird moving from intel to google and hearing someone from peopleops talk about “this part of google culture called OKRs.”
I've had this same though lately, that I was being seen as inattentive or disengaged by not disagreeing more with decisions I don't fully support. Maybe I'll try this out to see how that works.
The issue though is when you do bring it up and none of the leadership care and they plow ahead anyways. Headlong into another poor decision.
First, I don't think this blog should require Javascript to fulfill its function -- convey text to a user. I've tried to read the source markup to get to the essay.
On to addressing points raised in the essay:
"If you have been following Amazon at all, you have probably heard what sounds like code language when we talk about how we get our work done. As I have mentioned before, our work like a kind of short-hand for the types of qualities that make people effective here. And they aren’t just for leaders of organizations, they are for everyone at Amazon. We are all leaders."
No, everyone at Amazon.com is not a "leader". Leaders get to set the terms by which they and others will do some job. Reports of worker exploitation (see https://stallman.org/amazon.html#exploiting for links to relevant stories to back up the claim) make it clear that not everyone has the freedom to determine how their own job should be structured. Even if those changes would result in allowing workers to live in reasonable conditions, earn a living wage, work under conditions that don't make them ill, work without "spout[ing] the ideology of devotion to the company" (as Stallman rightly put it on his personal website linked above), and work a full-length career not a short-stint part-time or "contractor" job that will leave the worker to have to find another way to make ends meet all while delivering goods and services in a reasonable time-frame. I'll give you a hint as to how this could play out for boxing goods at Amazon.com: it's fine if Amazon.com's customers waited an extra day or two in order to let the "pickers" take bathroom breaks, longer working breaks, and avoid on-the-job hazards like constantly hustling and fainting during the working day.
"You may have heard that Jeff Bezos dislikes social cohesion. It’s a detriment to business success because it causes people to stifle ideas and objections for the sake of keeping the peace. I’m the kind of person who can have a concern or objection sidetrack my attention and I need to get it out; at least have it heard."
I doubt many who work under someone else believes this. This is what the manager class tell each other and tries to believe themselves while the worker class (people with the least say in the relationship) knows that stifling one's ideas and objections is conducive to helping them keep their job. This applies at every level in the hierarchy -- mid-level managers suffer from this when talking to their bosses and exploit this when talking to their subordinates. But the largest set of people always exist in the least-empowered class.
Managerial glib puffery PR like this usually downplay or ignore why people work these jobs at all: they live in societies that don't pay enough to give the worker the flexibility of choosing where to work. Capitalism pushes people to trade their skills for sustenance and tries to make it seem like that's a right and proper tradeoff, while capitalism also ridiculously over-rewards a few at the top (most notably in the case of Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos). Bezos, who might be the wealthiest person, clearly makes enough money to where he could never work again and be fine (as so could many generations of his children). But Bezos is not alone in this over-reward scheme; the gap between rich and poor is the largest it has ever been and it is accelerating.
It's ironic that any discussion of this kind would be raised in a single-point-of-censorship discussion forum such as this; it's so easy for anonymous users to score someone's post low (which affects whether other readers see the post with difficulty or at all) instead of responding. All scoring systems that affect how others see the posts are censorship, without exception. They work that way because that's precisely what they were designed to do. They are a mechanised way of implementing the reality of talking to the boss and run directly counter to the self-deluding lie of "disagree and commit".
[+] [-] ex_amazon_sde|8 years ago|reply
The good: it's taken relatively seriously, it's not just some empty PR line. It allows you to prove to managers and colleagues that you know what you are doing instead of following the heard. It encourages people to prove their ideas with prototypes instead of talk and more talk. It discourage "design by committee" and blame shifting. It's refreshing to be able to disagree openly and challenge popular views.
The bad: It takes a lot of self confidence. Some people might feel insecure due to impostor syndrome, upbringing or belonging to minorities and this creates a disadvantage. Also, it's really exhausting in the long term.
Neutral: if you disagree, commit and fail it becomes a very public failure. On the bright side it teaches people not to disagree too lightheartedly.
[+] [-] taneq|8 years ago|reply
I don't understand this part - if you publicly disagree with a decision, and then that decision results in failure, weren't you just proved right? Or does it just get assumed that the failure was your fault due to you not committing sufficiently?
[+] [-] notyourwork|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AlexCoventry|8 years ago|reply
Not quite sure what you mean, there. Can you give an example, please? How does your disagreement make the failure more public?
[+] [-] OnlyRepliesToBS|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jph|8 years ago|reply
Jeff Bezos makes the strong point that risk is important: "most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow."
Bezos also emphasizes that disagree-and-commit is a hard requirement: "Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting."
[+] [-] tetha|8 years ago|reply
I agree on both terms. If you plan and test everything to death, you are wasting and in fact atrophying our ability to think on your feet. This is an important skill, especially during incident and emergency handling. It's a fine line to learn, and it changes with the team, and the company, and the projects, but it's important.
Challenging decisions is the best way to keep unproductive work away from the team, and unproductive work is one of the best ways to waste time and motivation of a team. Even if it exhausts me at the end of a week, it's a good thing to see 2-3 guys getting excited about a project they should do, because it doesn't contradict our values and it furthers our infrastructure.
[+] [-] coldtea|8 years ago|reply
Then again Bezos wont be fired if he makes the wrong decision.
[+] [-] chronid|8 years ago|reply
I also found that if you need to follow the principle too many times it's a good indicator the team/company goals/vision/ and yours don't align and - if circumstance permits doing so - leaving is better than keep up the fighting forever (which is extremely exhausting, from personal experience).
[+] [-] guitarbill|8 years ago|reply
Following this principle too many times isn't necessarily an indication that the team doesn't align with you, it can also be a sign your communication skills are lacking, and you need to get better in how you convey your ideas (unfortunately talking from my own experience).
A good tie-breaker is usually picking the simpler idea, to avoid perfectionism or over-engineering that engineers sometimes fall into. It seems especially common with people straight out of uni, and lessens with experience.
[+] [-] mud_dauber|8 years ago|reply
Unfortunately the proposal can be a fait accompli. I used to have demoralizing arguments with my boss, a company VP, about his product directives that were blatantly unsupported by logic or data. In every case his response would be to shrug his shoulders and say "but it's a done deal". (Meaning his CEO wanted to do it.) I can look back & say with confidence that each change was a financial dud.
Go ahead & say that it's your option to leave the company in these situations. It's true - and not always a viable option.
[+] [-] purplezooey|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MichaelMoser123|8 years ago|reply
That sounds quite similar to Lenin's principle of democratic centralism - once upon a time communist parties allowed for a brief period of internal discussion prior to accepting policy decisions (in theory), once the decision was made every party member was committed to the 'collective' decision.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_centralism
Now that one did not quite work out, because you always depend on the whims of who is heading the discussion; I wonder if the Bezos principle works any better, as there are no third party regulators that might constrain the one who is heading the discussions.
Once upon a time they had this theory of gradual convergence between a west dominated by big corporations and the Soviet Union (for example ' 2001: A Space Odyssey' made this assumption); this observation might have had a grain of truth in it.
[+] [-] shanghaiaway|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baxtr|8 years ago|reply
I personally like the principles although I’m missing a statement about developing employees. Also, the combination of two values can have dire effects, e.g. “Insist on the Highest Standards” and “Deliver Results” was probably the reason why some amazon warehouse workers have peed in bottles, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16849520.
[+] [-] donavanm|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] borramakot|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saosebastiao|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emmelaich|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pvg|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aoki|8 years ago|reply
the other long-time intel—ism that has now been appropriated everywhere is the OKR system. it was really weird moving from intel to google and hearing someone from peopleops talk about “this part of google culture called OKRs.”
[+] [-] emmelaich|8 years ago|reply
It's great if everyone understands and commits to it. You must be able to make your case (and possibly acquiesce) without suffering political damage.
Of course if you keep backing the wrong horse ....
[+] [-] Cofike|8 years ago|reply
The issue though is when you do bring it up and none of the leadership care and they plow ahead anyways. Headlong into another poor decision.
[+] [-] coldtea|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Digital-Citizen|8 years ago|reply
On to addressing points raised in the essay:
"If you have been following Amazon at all, you have probably heard what sounds like code language when we talk about how we get our work done. As I have mentioned before, our work like a kind of short-hand for the types of qualities that make people effective here. And they aren’t just for leaders of organizations, they are for everyone at Amazon. We are all leaders."
No, everyone at Amazon.com is not a "leader". Leaders get to set the terms by which they and others will do some job. Reports of worker exploitation (see https://stallman.org/amazon.html#exploiting for links to relevant stories to back up the claim) make it clear that not everyone has the freedom to determine how their own job should be structured. Even if those changes would result in allowing workers to live in reasonable conditions, earn a living wage, work under conditions that don't make them ill, work without "spout[ing] the ideology of devotion to the company" (as Stallman rightly put it on his personal website linked above), and work a full-length career not a short-stint part-time or "contractor" job that will leave the worker to have to find another way to make ends meet all while delivering goods and services in a reasonable time-frame. I'll give you a hint as to how this could play out for boxing goods at Amazon.com: it's fine if Amazon.com's customers waited an extra day or two in order to let the "pickers" take bathroom breaks, longer working breaks, and avoid on-the-job hazards like constantly hustling and fainting during the working day.
"You may have heard that Jeff Bezos dislikes social cohesion. It’s a detriment to business success because it causes people to stifle ideas and objections for the sake of keeping the peace. I’m the kind of person who can have a concern or objection sidetrack my attention and I need to get it out; at least have it heard."
I doubt many who work under someone else believes this. This is what the manager class tell each other and tries to believe themselves while the worker class (people with the least say in the relationship) knows that stifling one's ideas and objections is conducive to helping them keep their job. This applies at every level in the hierarchy -- mid-level managers suffer from this when talking to their bosses and exploit this when talking to their subordinates. But the largest set of people always exist in the least-empowered class.
Managerial glib puffery PR like this usually downplay or ignore why people work these jobs at all: they live in societies that don't pay enough to give the worker the flexibility of choosing where to work. Capitalism pushes people to trade their skills for sustenance and tries to make it seem like that's a right and proper tradeoff, while capitalism also ridiculously over-rewards a few at the top (most notably in the case of Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos). Bezos, who might be the wealthiest person, clearly makes enough money to where he could never work again and be fine (as so could many generations of his children). But Bezos is not alone in this over-reward scheme; the gap between rich and poor is the largest it has ever been and it is accelerating.
It's ironic that any discussion of this kind would be raised in a single-point-of-censorship discussion forum such as this; it's so easy for anonymous users to score someone's post low (which affects whether other readers see the post with difficulty or at all) instead of responding. All scoring systems that affect how others see the posts are censorship, without exception. They work that way because that's precisely what they were designed to do. They are a mechanised way of implementing the reality of talking to the boss and run directly counter to the self-deluding lie of "disagree and commit".
[+] [-] valar_m|8 years ago|reply
I read your entire post. Is there a point besides: Amazon = capitalism, capitalism = bad, Amazon = bad?