Ending the compensation-planning doom loop in leadership
One of the most destructive forces in a growing company is the “Compensation-Planning Doom Loop.” This is when leaders are more focused on hitting bonus targets than driving long-term value.
Colin Bryar and Bill Carr spent a combined 27 years as senior Amazon executives and wrote the bestselling book Working Backwards. Today, they help companies apply the repeatable management processes used at Amazon to invent, measure, plan, hire, and make decisions. You can learn the processes through our online courses, bring them to your team through training, or work directly with Colin and Bill to put them into practice in your organization.
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8 hr 4 min of video across about 43 lessons, plus every template and tool. Save $396 versus buying separately.
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Want us to implement it with you? Advisory & Coaching
Working Backwards is a practical, guidebook and a corporate narrative, filled with in-the-room recollections of what it means to “Be Amazonian.” It describes how Amazon’s success and scale was not achieved by the genius of any single leader, but rather through commitment to and execution of a set of well-defined, rigorously executed principles and processes. If you want a practical,comprehensive answer to “How does Amazon work?”, this book is for you. Buy a single book for yourself or place a bulk order for your organization.
Any company can build an invention machine like Amazon. It is not a mystical cult but rather a set of principles combined with five scalable repeatable processes. We teach and advise how to implement each component of the machine:
Learn the repeatable management processes used at Amazon to invent, measure, plan, hire, and make decisions. Choose from five self-paced courses or the complete bundle, with the templates and tools to start running each process. Browse the courses.
Work directly with Colin or Bill to put these processes into practice in your organization. From weekly coaching to full hands-on advisory, we teach and guide the implementation so the capability belongs to your team, not to us. See how we work.
Colin and Bill deliver engaging keynote speeches offering a combination of practical tools that leaders can apply to their company, as well as stories and examples from their day-to-day work with Jeff Bezos and the senior leadership team at Amazon.
One of the most destructive forces in a growing company is the “Compensation-Planning Doom Loop.” This is when leaders are more focused on hitting bonus targets than driving long-term value.
Amazon does not use OKRs or KPIs. Instead, Amazon uses a simple, flat list of goals with no hierarchy. Each goal has a single owner and objective pass/fail criteria. Here
Jeff Bezos gave a speech for the Economic Club of Washington in 2018 where he spoke about how he and Amazon executives operate: “All of our senior executives operate the
Colin and Bill have captured the essence of what it means at Amazon to start with the customer and work backwards. They both held important leadership roles at critical moments in the company’s history that they’ve translated into interesting stories and lessons for readers. I even plan to use it as a reference myself.
Colin Bryar and Bill Carr have operationalized the core management practices that lie behind Amazon’s success. In particular, their insights into how any successful leader can focus on narrative and metrics to take a short-cut to the truth are essential for any leader in any industry. You’ll want to have your highlighter ready and keep this book close at hand for quick reference
Jeff Bezos once told me that unlike Google or Apple, “Amazon doesn’t have one big advantage, so we have to braid a rope out of many small advantages.” Amazon has demonstrated again and again that success doesn’t result from one big stroke of genius but from a set of clear business practices consistently and boldly applied. Colin Bryar and Bill Carr dive deep into how Amazon has become the company to study if you want to succeed in 21st-century business.