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We enable CEOs to build an
Invention Machine.

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:
THE AMAZON INVENTION MACHINE
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Reviews of Working Backwards - Jeff Wilke
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.
JEFF WILKE
CEO, Worldwide Consumer
Amazon
Reviews of Working Backwards - Jeff Wilke
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

KIM SCOTT
Author, Radical Candor

Reviews of Working Backwards - Jeff Wilke
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.

TIM O’REILLY
Founder, O’Reilly Media

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Colin started at Amazon in 1998; Bill joined in 1999. In Working Backwards, these two long-serving Amazon executives reveal and codify the principles and practices that drive the success of one of the most extraordinary companies the world has ever known.

With twenty-seven years of Amazon experience between them, much of it in the early aughts—a period of unmatched innovation that brought products and services including Kindle, Amazon Prime, Amazon Studios, and Amazon Web Services to life—Bryar and Carr offer unprecedented access to the Amazon way as it was refined, articulated, and proven to be repeatable, scalable, and adaptable.
With keen analysis and practical steps for applying it at your own company—no matter the size—the authors illuminate how Amazon’s fourteen leadership principles inform decision-making at all levels and reveal how the company’s culture has been defined by four characteristics: customer obsession, long-term thinking, eagerness to invent, and operational excellence. Bryar and Carr explain the set of ground-level practices that ensure these are translated into action and flow through all aspects of the business.

Working Backwards is a practical guidebook and a corporate narrative, filled with the authors’ in-the-room recollections of what “Being Amazonian” is like and how it has affected their personal and professional lives. They demonstrate that success on Amazon’s scale is 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 practices—shared here for the very first time.
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