9 Lessons From Jeff Bezos' Only Podcast Appearance
- Matt Symes
- May 1, 2024
- 4 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
Lex Fridman recently interviewed Jeff Bezos on his first-ever podcast appearance. The episode is a masterclass on decision-making, overcoming human nature's inherent flaws, and the art and science of leading high-performing organizations.
Broken into a 3-part weekly series, we'll share:
9 Lessons From Jeff Bezos' Only Podcast Appearance
Part 1/3
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1. Humans Are Not Truth-Seeking Animals.
“...we humans are not really truth-seeking animals. We are social animals.
[Go] back in time 10,000 years and you’re in a small village. If you go along to get along, you can survive. You can procreate. If you’re the village truth-teller, you might get clubbed to death in the middle of the night. Truths are often… They don’t want to be heard because important truths can be uncomfortable; they can be awkward; they can be exhausting.
But any high-performing organization, whether it’s a sports team, a business, a political organization, an activist group, I don’t care what it is, any high-performing organization has to have mechanisms and a culture that supports truth-telling. One of the things you have to do is you have to talk about that. You have to talk about the fact that it takes energy to do that. You have to talk to people, you have to remind people, “It’s okay that it’s uncomfortable.” Literally tell people, “It’s not what we’re designed to do as humans.”
And so you want to set up your culture so that the most junior person can overrule the most senior person if they have data.”
You have to see the world as it is, not how you wish it was. And you have to create psychological safety (see Amy Edmondson’s critical talk here) for the mistakes, the errors, the thoughts, and the hunches to come out as a team.
This is incredibly hard to do as a group of flawed humans.
We are filled with bias - Optimism bias, familiarity bias, etc (see the many forms of bias here). We tend to respect hierarchy more than it is productive.
Your organization needs to be a truth-seeking machine in the service of the value you create for your customers.
If that is the time to answer the customer service line (see Jeff’s story here).
If that is surgical errors to save future lives (Amy’s video).
If that is marketing results to drive more traffic.
Your organization gets better faster when it interacts with the truth.
Is your organization set up to hear, see, and act on uncomfortable truths?
Here are three tips:
Seek the data you need, not the data you can see.
When the anecdote disagrees with the data, investigate the anecdote.
Ideally contributions in a meeting start from the most junior person to the most senior so that seniority bias does not drive the agenda.
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2. One-Way Doors; Two-Way Doors [1:00:06]
Is your organization set up for two-way door decisions to be made at the right level of the organization?
“If you make the wrong decision, if it’s a two-way door decision, you pick a door, you walk out and you spend a little time there. It turns out to be the wrong decision, you can come back in and pick another door. Some decisions are so consequential and so important and so hard to reverse that they really are one-way door decisions. You go in that door, you’re not coming back. And those decisions have to be made very deliberately, very carefully. If you can think of yet another way to analyze the decision, you should slow down and do that.
And what happens unfortunately, in companies, is that you have a one-size-fits-all decision-making process where you end up using the heavyweight process on all decisions…
Two-way door decisions should mostly be made by single individuals or by very small teams deep in the organization. And one-way door decisions are the irreversible ones. Those are the ones that should be elevated up to the senior-most executives who should slow them down and make sure that the right thing is being done.”
Where and to what degree are decisions made in your organization?
Have you created a way to learn, share, and leverage through two-way door experimentation?
If you have, you ought to be able to see exceptional gains in the last two years.
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3. For Big Strategic Decisions Rely on the Power of a Memo
In a PowerPoint presentation, the onus is on the audience to understand. In a memo, the onus is on the writer to be clear.
You can hide sloppy thinking in a PowerPoint. Bad thinking has nowhere to hide in a well structured narrative. It can take more than 2 weeks to put this document together - and that’s the way it should be.
Jeff starts every one of these sessions with 30 minutes of silence. So that everyone can take the time to read, make notes in the margins, and get their questions prepared.
The discussion that comes next is elevated.
A crisp memo and a messy meeting - it rarely ends on time.
One-way doors benefit from this approach.
I have to work with my business partners to implement this intelligently into our different businesses.
PS - If you want to dive further into important insights and strategies for pushing through growth challenges and scaling up your organization, check out the latest Racki & Symes podcast.
