That’s an interesting observation because Jeff Bezos also seemed to delegate a lot. It seemed that the S-team (Amazon’s term for their top executives) basically ran the entire company, which admittedly frees up a lot of Jeff’s time to focus on whatever seems most important to him.
I also hadn’t heard about him sending fixers in; was that an escalation to sending a question mark email or was it part of the normal process? I know you’re probably aware of this but for other people reading this discussion I feel I should elaborate: if some problem at Amazon, usually customer-facing and often a complaint from an actual customer, landed in Jeff’s inbox and caught his attention, he would forward the email to whoever was responsible for the situation, adding “?” as his sole commentary. I think he just forwarded the email to one of the S-team and it would get passed down the org chart until it reached the relevant manager but everyone in that chain would keep the issue at front of mind until it was resolved. And if you were the manager that actually owned the issue, it was now your top priority. The expectation was that not only would you address the customer’s immediate problem but that you would root-cause the problem and address it as categorically as possible.
Come to think of it, maybe this is a good example of founder mode.
Bezos delegated, but he also followed up aggressively, and the whole company reporting structure was designed to enable that.
When I worked there, Bezos held a weekly S-team meeting where the execs all came fully briefed to answer any questions about ongoing issues in their departments. That flowed on down the chain: Andy Jassy had an AWS-wide meeting the day before to gather the relevant data from each of his teams, and that meant that every major AWS team had an internal rollup meeting on Mondays to prepare for Jassy's meeting...
Most of the question mark emails seemed to target more specific issues (mostly customer pain points). The fixers were more for big organisational or tech problems. If your division was significantly behind schedule on a product launch, or your production system had significant failure rates, you were liable to have a Senior Principal engineer and/or a new VP airdropped into your org, with significant leeway to get shit done
well, then founder mode is a meaningless thing because the essay seemed to suggest doing the opposite of "think he just forwarded the email to one of the S-team and it would get passed down the org chart until it reached the relevant manager"
Yeah, the key bit here is that you would remain under the microscope till you could demonstrate to the entire management chain that the problem was actually solved - and with the Bezos question mark came an implicit guarantee that the resources/authority to actually solve issue would be made available.
all this implies trust in the management team, right? to tell Bezos that it's really solved. The opposite of what the essay is arguing, that these managers tend to be fakers and can't be trusted.
Except it doesn't sound like his style was to "trust the management team to tell him that it's really solved". It sounds like his style was to "dive deep" and make sure the problem was solved. If you put in the work and understand the business deeply enough, nobody's going to successfully bullshit you.
Come on. There is no way CEO of a huge company like Amazon can really know every detail. At some point he’s gonna just have to trust someone at the company.
You’d be surprised—the founder of a huge company like Amazon is likely to be an outlier in terms of how many details he actually can know. The more you learn about the biographies of exceptional leaders the more you realize that many of them actually had a hard, concrete understanding of what their organizations did that often exceeded that of the people who actually did the work on a day to day basis. But part of being a founder is that by the time the company outgrows what you can personally keep track of, you’ve cultivated a core of people around you whom you’ve thoroughly vetted as trustworthy.
Besides, the goal here is not that Bezos knows every detail; it’s that he knows enough of the details that a subordinate isn’t going to be able to bullshit him. And once he has trusted subordinates with a long history of not bullshitting him, he can offload some of the “understanding details” to them, so however difficult it was to try and bullshit Bezos, it’s going to be even harder to bullshit a team of Bezos and a trusted lieutenant.
And ultimately you can develop a skill or a technique for not being bullshitted even without knowing any of the relevant details ahead of time. Just as there are techniques to bullshitting a person, like handwaving and glossing over inconsistent or inconvenient details, there are also counter-techniques for not letting people bullshit you, like demanding all of the inconvenient details that people seem to be glossing over or trying to hide.
I disagree.
Some things are just complex and inherently outside of the CEOs competency.
They have to be able to build a management team of properly incentivized highly skilled professionals. Time in the day is limited, if you are delving into details on X and Y, that means at that same time you are not spending time on Z.
> Some things are just complex and inherently outside of the CEOs competency.
That’s the mentality that gets you with a Boeing CEO who doesn’t know that airplanes need redundancies. I think you can expect more from a great founder. In particular, people who have worked with Jeff Bezos have said that he is incredibly smart and broadly competent.
Probably more important is an intrinsic curiosity. Jeff Bezos seems like the kind of guy who really enjoys learning about aerospace manufacturing techniques or rocket engine design or distributed systems or supply chain management. If you’re smart and intrinsically curious, these deep dives aren’t really that much time and effort. If you’re the stereotypical MBA midwit, it’s outside your comfort zone and what you enjoy and it will be an ordeal.
> They have to be able to build a management team of properly incentivized highly skilled professionals.
It helps to remain involved with the details until you can tell who’s trustworthy. Once you have other trustworthy people to help you manage the details, of course you can delegate more and more of the work to them, and enlist them to help you with the deep dives.
> Time in the day is limited, if you are delving into details on X and Y, that means at that same time you are not spending time on Z.
Right. The flip side is that Jeff Bezos delegated a lot of the day to day operational management to the S-team so he had more time for deep dives. In other words, rather than focusing his attention broadly on the top level big picture, he scanned for problems and when he found one and spent his attention narrowly examining them one by one. Which, again, sounds like exactly what a curious person would do! Spending all of your time focusing on the exact same high-level overview over and over again sounds really boring because you never get to learn anything, and it’s the learning that’s the fun part.
Some CEOs are bad at running companies and some founders are also bad. Boeing example is weak for that reason. I just don't think this statement is empirically true at all "if you’re smart and intrinsically curious, these deep dives aren’t really that much time and effort"
You don't have to know every detail. You just need a list of things to follow up on, and be somewhat decent at identifying when a subordinate is feeding you a line of bullshit
Indeed. And I think the essay comes with the implicit assumption that founders are bad at spotting snake-oil execs (which may be warranted in general, but isn't in Amazon's case)
I also hadn’t heard about him sending fixers in; was that an escalation to sending a question mark email or was it part of the normal process? I know you’re probably aware of this but for other people reading this discussion I feel I should elaborate: if some problem at Amazon, usually customer-facing and often a complaint from an actual customer, landed in Jeff’s inbox and caught his attention, he would forward the email to whoever was responsible for the situation, adding “?” as his sole commentary. I think he just forwarded the email to one of the S-team and it would get passed down the org chart until it reached the relevant manager but everyone in that chain would keep the issue at front of mind until it was resolved. And if you were the manager that actually owned the issue, it was now your top priority. The expectation was that not only would you address the customer’s immediate problem but that you would root-cause the problem and address it as categorically as possible.
Come to think of it, maybe this is a good example of founder mode.