Amazon’s Jeff Bezos on decision making, in his 2016 Annual Letter to shareholders:<\/p>\n
Day 2 companies make high-quality decisions, but they make high-quality decisions\u00a0slowly. To keep the energy and dynamism of Day 1, you have to somehow make high-quality,\u00a0high-velocity\u00a0decisions. Easy for start-ups and very challenging for large organizations. The senior team at Amazon is determined to keep our decision-making velocity high. Speed matters in business \u2013 plus a high-velocity decision making environment is more fun too. We don’t know all the answers, but here are some thoughts.
\nFirst, never use a one-size-fits-all decision-making process. Many decisions are reversible, two-way doors. Those decisions can use a light-weight process. For those, so what if you\u2019re wrong? I wrote about this in more detail in last year\u2019s letter.
\nSecond, 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\u2019re probably being slow. Plus, either way, you need to be good at quickly recognizing and correcting bad decisions. If you\u2019re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure.
\nThird, use the phrase \u201cdisagree and commit.\u201d This phrase will save a lot of time. If you have conviction on a particular direction even though there\u2019s no consensus, it\u2019s helpful to say, \u201cLook, I know we disagree on this but will you gamble with me on it? Disagree and commit?\u201d By the time you\u2019re at this point, no one can know the answer for sure, and you\u2019ll probably get a quick yes.
\nThis isn\u2019t one way. If you\u2019re the boss, you should do this too. I disagree and commit all the time. We recently greenlit a particular Amazon Studios original. I told the team my view: debatable whether it would be interesting enough, complicated to produce, the business terms aren\u2019t that good, and we have lots of other opportunities.They had a completely different opinion and wanted to go ahead. I wrote back right away with \u201cI disagree and commit and hope it becomes the most watched thing we\u2019ve ever made.\u201d Consider how much slower this decision cycle would have been if the team had actually had to\u00a0convince\u00a0me rather than simply get my commitment.
\nNote what this example is not: it\u2019s not me thinking to myself \u201cwell, these guys are wrong and missing the point,but this isn\u2019t worth me chasing.\u201d It\u2019s a genuine disagreement of opinion, a candid expression of my view, achance for the team to weigh my view, and a quick, sincere commitment to go their way. And given that this team has already brought home 11 Emmys, 6 Golden Globes, and 3 Oscars, I\u2019m just glad they let me in the roomat all!
\nFourth, recognize true\u00a0misalignment issues early and escalate them\u00a0immediately. \u00a0Sometimes teams have different objectives and fundamentally different views. They are not aligned. No amount of discussion, no number of meetings will resolve that deep misalignment. Without escalation, the default dispute resolution mechanism for this scenario is exhaustion. Whoever has more stamina carries the decision.
\nI\u2019ve seen many examples of sincere misalignment at Amazon over the years. When we decided to invite third party sellers to compete directly against us on our own product detail pages \u2013 that was a big one. Many smart,well-intentioned Amazonians were simply not at all aligned with the direction. The big decision set up hundreds of smaller decisions, many of which needed to be escalated to the senior team.
\n\u201cYou\u2019ve worn me down\u201d is an awful decision-making process. It\u2019s slow and de-energizing. Go for quick escalation instead \u2013 it\u2019s better.
\nSo, have you settled only for decision quality, or are you mindful of decision velocity too? Are the world\u2019s trends tailwinds for you? Are you falling prey to proxies, or do they serve you? And most important of all, are you delighting customers? We can have the scope and capabilities of a large company and the spirit and heart of a small one. But we have to choose it.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Amazon’s Jeff Bezos on decision making, in his 2016 Annual Letter to shareholders: Day 2 companies make high-quality decisions, but they make high-quality decisions\u00a0slowly. To keep the energy and dynamism of Day 1, you have to somehow make high-quality,\u00a0high-velocity\u00a0decisions. Easy for start-ups and very challenging for large organizations. The senior team at Amazon is determined […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,30,66,77],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8364","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-decision-theory","category-getting-things-done-intelligence","category-project-management","category-team-working","p1","y2017","m04","d12","h21"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8364","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8364"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8364\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}