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. We found a way to avoid this at Amazon. When annual bonus targets are hard-coded into Operating Plan (OP) goals, the planning process stops being […]
by Bill Carr
How Amazon’s Weekly Business Review boosts metric insight
Jeff Bezos once said, “Humans are unbelievably data efficient.” In my 15 years as an Amazon VP, I saw Jeff apply this idea to various structures inside Amazon. This is the key concept behind the Amazon Weekly Business Review: Jeff’s general point was that humans need much less data to learn effectively than machines do, […]
by Bill Carr
How Amazon’s flywheel sped fulfillment from 18 to 2 hours
In Andy Jassy’s first letter to Amazon shareholders, he writes that it took 18 hours to get an order through fulfillment in the early 2000s. By 2022, the same process took only 2 hours. He explains how the company made such incredible improvements: “Going back to the pandemic, there’s no way we could have started […]
by Bill Carr
Align operating plans with strategy for lasting impact
In 2001, Jeff Bezos drew the Amazon flywheel. This graphic gave us the “winning strategy” for the next 20+ years. But the “winning strategy” does not automatically translate into operational success. This is where the true work begins. I wrote a post last week about finding the right strategy and how the Amazon S-Team did […]
by Bill Carr
Amazon S-Team: execution-focused goal review process
Many people are surprised that the Amazon S-Team does not spend their meetings talking about big picture or high-level strategy issues. Jeff Bezos explained exactly why this is the case: “We’ve already done the hard work of identifying what we need to do for the year in our annual planning process. Our job as the […]
by Bill Carr
How executives should structure a recurring calendar
How executives spend their time is an underrated concept. People talk about time management, but they think about it on a day-to-day or even week-to-week basis when they should consider it comprehensively. As an executive at Amazon, I learned how to set my schedule of recurring and one-off meetings on a weekly, monthly, quarterly, and […]
by Bill Carr
How Amazon instruments data collection for business reviews
Amazon’s main control processes are S-Team Goal Reviews, QBRs, MBRs, and WBRs. But before any of these reviews can take place, the data to be reviewed must be properly collected. Here is how Amazon instruments this data collection: First, imagine you run a small, single-person business. You do not need lots of instrumentation to understand […]
by Bill Carr
How Amazon sets clear, actionable goals with no hierarchy
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 is how this approach works so well for Amazon: Amazon’s goal-setting process is simple. Every year, through the OP-1 planning cycle, teams generate a list […]
by Bill Carr
How Amazon executives operate three years in the future
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 same way I do. They work in the future, they live in the future. None of the people who report to me should really be […]
by Bill Carr
Seven tips for writing effective Amazon-style business narratives
My co-author, Colin Bryar, and I wrote, read, and reviewed thousands of business narrative documents during our combined 27 years at Amazon. Based on our experience, here are tips to follow and common pitfalls to avoid. 1. Write for a generalist executive audience. Picture your reader as intelligent but unfamiliar with the specifics of your […]
by Bill Carr