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 focused on the current quarter.”
He continued, “People will stop me and say, ‘Congratulations on your quarter.’ And I say, ‘Thank you, but what I’m really thinking is that quarter was baked three years ago. Right now I’m working on a quarter that’s going to reveal itself in 2021 sometime.’ And that’s what you need to be doing. You need to be out two or three years in advance.”
After 15 years at Amazon, I became accustomed to spending most of my daily meeting time “in the future,” as Jeff says. After leaving Amazon, I found it jarring when I started working with CEOs at other companies and realized they were operating on a time horizon focused on this week, this month, or this quarter.
I have tried many times to explain to other CEOs how Amazon operates in the future, but because it departs so significantly from how they have managed throughout their careers, the concept is hard to grasp. If you have never operated in such an environment, I’m sure it is difficult, if not impossible, to envision how it works.
The secret to truly “living in the future” is that Jeff Bezos and Amazon executives spend between 10 and 20 hours a week in Working Backwards PR FAQ meetings. These meetings review prospective initiatives, including new products, services, and processes. It is the method that enables them to decide what to build and what not to build. In essence, it is what allows them to “look into the future”.
Because it has been in use for over two decades, Amazon has built up a backlog of approved ideas for development. So, when a new initiative is approved through this process, in most cases, the work to begin building it does not commence for another 12 to 18 months. That’s because the team is already building, or plans to build, new products and services that were approved 12 to 18 months beforehand. Then, of course, it takes months or years to make each new product or service.
The result is that Working Backwards PR FAQ reviews occur one to three years before a new product launch. That means that Amazon executives spend 10 to 20 hours a week debating, discussing, and refining work that won’t be public for another three years.
This is what Jeff meant when he said that they live and work in the future.
Working in the future confers many benefits on the organization. First, it provides teams with a time gap between two distinct modes: planning and operating. The planning mode is painstakingly detailed, which means that teams know what they are doing, when they are doing it, and with what resources. As a result, the operating mode can move extremely fast.
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