How Amazon overcomes dependencies to accelerate execution
Unidentified dependencies are one of the biggest reason companies cannot execute. At Amazon, we established two mechanisms to address this: the Working Backwards PR/FAQ process and the Annual Operating Plan (OP1). Here’s how they help overcome dependency blockers: In both the Working Backwards PR/FAQ process and the Annual Operating Plan (AOP), you must identify your […]
by Bill Carr
How Amazon executives make and execute great plans
I was an executive at Amazon for 15 years, and I was fortunate to work alongside many other execs. The work of the best executives can be described in 7 words: “They make good plans and execute them.” It sounds so simple, but only the best actually do it. There are a number of common […]
by Bill Carr
Building Amazon-style weekly business reviews with the WBR app
An effective Weekly Business Review is essential to operational excellence. It requires an upfront investment in data, metrics, reporting, and meeting discipline. That’s why we created an app to make it easy to generate Amazon-style WBR reports. An Amazon WBR aims to answer three critical questions every week: 1. How did our business do last […]
by Bill Carr
How to prepare for meetings with Jeff Bezos
I have spent 1000+ hours in meetings with Jeff Bezos. His process of inquiry and review challenged and improved my thinking more than anyone I have worked with. Here is how I prepared for meetings with him: 1) The famous narrative memo Many people know that Amazon meetings are conducted using a structured, six-page narrative […]
by Bill Carr
Balancing professionalism and personal identity at work
I could not agree more with the author of this Op Ed. As he points out, many people have taken the concept of “bring your whole self to work” too far. I entered the workforce in 1989. Expectations were different then. Like everyone, I dressed in formal business attire— I wore a suit and tie […]
by Bill Carr
The importance of input metrics for customer experience
There’s no excuse for a bad website or app customer experience in 2025. I just lost 10 minutes of my life in an endless loop of login failures on the Virginia Mason payment gateway. The site’s UI is painfully bad, and the password recovery flow is prehistoric. I eventually skipped that flow and used the […]
by Bill Carr
Lessons from the failure of the Amazon Fire Phone
The Fire Phone was one of Amazon’s most public failures. People still refer to it today, assuming it was a failure of Amazon’s systems for invention. But here’s what Jeff Bezos told shareholders in a 2014 letter after sunsetting the business: “If you think that’s a big failure, we’re working on much bigger failures right […]
by Bill Carr
Understanding single-threaded leadership at Amazon
In the 2000s, Amazon struggled with the complexity of expansion. Bottlenecks were everywhere, and resource debates sucked time and executive attention away from building. This is where “single-threaded leadership” was born. At Amazon, single-threaded leadership (STL) is a core organizational mechanism that drives focus, accountability, and velocity for high-priority initiatives. A “single-threaded leader” is defined […]
by Bill Carr
How Amazon’s compensation drives long-term thinking
Most companies’ compensation models push their employees to optimize for the short term. Annual compensation incentivizes us to think about the next 12 months, not the next 12 years. Here’s how Amazon pays people differently to make them think differently. In most companies, you set annual goals, pay employees annually, and tie bonuses to annual […]
by Bill Carr
Amazon’s correction of error process for lasting improvement
At Amazon, the Correction of Error (COE) process is a structured, scalable tool designed to ensure that customer-impacting problems are not only fixed, but truly understood. Here’s a template any company can use: Most companies will execute “post-mortems”—focusing on addressing symptoms. In contrast, Amazon’s COE framework insists on identifying and eliminating root causes. The approach […]
by Bill Carr