The CEO That Jeff Bezos Called “His Teacher” with Jeff Wilke & James Currier
Jeff Wilke (former CEO, Amazon's Worldwide Consumer Business) sheds light on a counter-intuitive driver behind unusual success: Focus on the inputs, not the outputs. Jeff shares the 3 drivers underlying the rise of Amazon, Prime, Alexa, and AWS, including:
1. "Mechanisms": Amazon's definition, two failure modes, and why they're harder to implement than it first appears
2. A Single-Page Culture: How Amazon's set of principles proved to be an inoculation against a drifting culture
3. Single-Threaded Invention
In practice, operational excellence is the key driver to executing consistently for the long term. It is the secret for harnessing creativity that compounds value over time.
(0:00) Introduction and personal catch-up (0:17) Discussing the Amazon "s team" and its role (2:34) Amazon's leadership principles and writing culture (9:31) Individuality in leadership and explanation of "mechanisms" (12:19) Revisiting past insights, single-threaded leadership and the role of software architecture (15:08) Protecting nascent businesses and creating courage in a team (18:30) The phases of leadership and the power of authenticity in communication (23:16) The importance of teaching in leadership and reflections on the journey at Amazon (24:42) Introduction to Jeff Wilke's new venture: Rebuild Manufacturing (28:06) Conclusion and outro: You've been listening to the NFX podcast
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