Why leaders must focus on big decisions over small ones
Early in my Amazon career, I made a common management mistake—I spent too much time on small decisions and very little time on big ones. Small decisions are much easier to make than big decisions. They give leaders the illusion of productivity because it feels better to make more decisions per unit of time. But […]
by Bill Carr
The tradeoff between work-life balance and career success
When I joined Amazon in 1999, my peers had more exceptional university pedigrees and intellect. In spite of this, I outperformed them. I was promoted 3 times in 5 years (from Product Manager to Vice President). Luck was a factor for sure—I was lucky to land at Amazon so early, I was lucky to land […]
by Bill Carr
Why Amazon leaders own strategy and execution
In his youth, Jeff Bezos spent summers on his grandfather’s ranch in Texas. As he put it, “If you’re in the middle of nowhere, you don’t pick up the phone and call somebody when something breaks. You fix it yourself.” He brought this thinking with him to Amazon. He was always pushing leaders like me to […]
by Bill Carr
How Jeff Bezos structured effective executive meetings
In my work with CEOs, one of the most common concerns is how to run effective weekly meetings with their executive team. When I tell them how Jeff Bezos managed this process, they are very surprised. Jeff would meet with his Exec team (the S-Team) each week on Thursday mornings for four hours. My co-author, […]
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
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