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 be resourceful and not to limit their abilities and work to a narrow specialty. If we didn’t know how to do something, we’d learn.
We’d dig in. In some cases, we’d hire someone with relevant experience, but we’d never hand over the thinking. We had to own it.
This is why in my 15 years at Amazon, to my knowledge, we never hired a consulting firm to help us with strategy or execution.
At Amazon, leaders were expected to be skilled at both strategic thinking and execution. It was part of the job at every level.
Strategic thinking was not a one-time exercise. It was an output of the daily work of execution: ideating, building, launching, and measuring the business results and customer experience.
We never outsourced our strategy.
