John Rossman > Quotes

“Sometimes execution is poor, and that is a performance issue. Sometimes the idea is just not quite the right idea, and so you learn, adjust, and move forward.”
― John Rossman, The Amazon Way: Amazon's Leadership Principles

“Achieving clarity can be uncomfortable. It can disrupt. People tend to want to avoid conflict, be collaborative, and basically accept all the ideas and all the wording. This tactic does not demand the best thinking and avoids the sensitive topics in the spirit of “getting along.”
― John Rossman, Think Like Amazon: 50 1/2 Ideas to Become a Digital Leader

“It would certainly be much easier and socially cohesive to just compromise and not debate, but that may lead to the wrong decision.”
― John Rossman, Think Like Amazon: 50 1/2 Ideas to Become a Digital Leader

“Strong processes with measurable outcomes eliminate bureaucracy and expose underperformers.”
― John Rossman, The Amazon Way: Amazon's Leadership Principles

“At the heart of how Amazon innovates is its six-page memo, which kicks off everything the company does. Executives must write a press release, complete with hypothetical customer reactions to the product launch. That is followed by a series of FAQs, anticipating questions customers, as well as internal stakeholders, might have.”
― John Rossman, Think Like Amazon: 50 1/2 Ideas to Become a Digital Leader

“Adam Lashinsky explained how Amazon. com had gone on a “military hiring spree” because Jeff was impressed with veterans’ logistical know-how and bias for action.3 In fact, Amazon.com has a dedicated military recruiting website and a highly consistent hiring and retention record for ex-military personnel. This practice of hiring veterans isn’t about expressing gratitude for ex-soldiers’ service to our country. Veterans fit Jeff’s business model. As a result, Amazon.com has not bothered to launch a huge PR campaign about its military employment program. Jeff just realized it was good business.”
― John Rossman, The Amazon Way: Amazon's Leadership Principles

“Why do programs and projects take too long, go over budget, become bloated, and fail to deliver according to expectations? Execution and project management technique can be reasons, but the biggest root cause is failing to accurately define the end state at the beginning.”
― John Rossman, Think Like Amazon: 50 1/2 Ideas to Become a Digital Leader

“A well-written narrative and the process of writing it will force teams to get beyond being polite and get to insights.”
― John Rossman, Think Like Amazon: 50 1/2 Ideas to Become a Digital Leader

“best customer service is no customer service—because the best experience happens when the customer never has to ask for help at all.”
― John Rossman, The Amazon Way: Amazon's Leadership Principles

“However, it’s important not to twist this notion to mean that being a great colleague or respectful to others is not important. It’s just that it’s not enough, and it’s not the top priority. Being nice and getting along are necessary and valued. You can’t achieve the right results if you leave nothing but burned bridges behind you. But getting along is simply not the most important thing.”
― John Rossman, Think Like Amazon: 50 1/2 Ideas to Become a Digital Leader

“Sometimes companies embark on new projects and if it doesn’t work out after a year or two, and they are losing a lot of money, they abandon it. Jeff is quite willing to take 10 years to make money on a new area that we go into. But if it looks like we are making progress, we’re going to stick with it.”36 Long-term thinking and willingness to pioneer into new areas are a powerful force for breakthrough innovation.”
― John Rossman, The Amazon Way: Amazon's 14 Leadership Principles

“And since your own team is one of the most important dependencies under your authority, your ability to mentor those around you is a key metric during your annual evaluation.”
― John Rossman, The Amazon Way: Amazon's 14 Leadership Principles

“Amazon’s low-price strategy is well documented. For nearly two decades, Jeff has proven that he is willing to make less on an item—or an entire line of products—in the short term to guarantee the long-term growth of the business.”
― John Rossman, The Amazon Way: Amazon's 14 Leadership Principles

“Leaders who think like owners are crucial to this process because you don’t want people who prioritize short-term results at the expense of long-term enterprise value. When organizations prioritize output financial goals, they often sacrifice the big picture. As a result, it’s important to debate and coordinate annual goals more intensely than ever before.”
― John Rossman, The Amazon Way: Amazon's 14 Leadership Principles

“There’s a slogan in Silicon Valley: Step one, install software. There is no step two. That’s it. That’s how easy you have to be.”1”
― John Rossman, Think Like Amazon: 50 1/2 Ideas to Become a Digital Leader

“That means having rock-solid contracts, service-level agreements, and penalties in place, as well as continual, active management of communications”
― John Rossman, The Amazon Way: Amazon's 14 Leadership Principles

“To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment.”
― John Rossman, The Amazon Way: Amazon's 14 Leadership Principles

“When you have to be super specific, it further drives a culture of clarity, commitment, and accountability.”
― John Rossman, The Amazon Way: Amazon's 14 Leadership Principles

“If I drive us over a cliff,” Jeff would say, “You’re as much at fault as I am.”
― John Rossman, The Amazon Way: Amazon's Leadership Principles

“The best design is the simplest. Simple is the key to easy, fast, intuitive, and low cost. Simple scales much better than complex, which means that simplicity is intrinsically linked to another leadership principle: Think Big”
― John Rossman, The Amazon Way: Amazon's 14 Leadership Principles

“Promotions are heavily scrutinized. They require multi-page written documents with hard evidence rationalizing the promotion. They must be debated and read all the way up the chain of command to the CEO. These promotion documents can also be audited to ensure claims are not inflated. Finally, every year, Amazon terminates five to eight percent of the organization for not reaching the required standards of excellence.”
― John Rossman, The Amazon Way: Amazon's 14 Leadership Principles

“I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, “Okay, now I’m looking back on my life. I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have.” I knew that when I was 80, I was not going to regret having tried this.”
― John Rossman, The Amazon Way: Amazon's 14 Leadership Principles

“When a team takes ownership of its problem, the problem gets solved. It is true on the battlefield, it is true in business, and it is true in life. —Jocko Willink”
― John Rossman, Think Like Amazon: 50 1/2 Ideas to Become a Digital Leader

“Amazon, Two-Pizza Teams work like little entrepreneurial hothouses. Insulated from the greater organization’s bureaucracy, the Two-Pizza Teams encourage ambitious young leaders, provide opportunity, and instill a sense of ownership.”
― John Rossman, The Amazon Way: Amazon's 14 Leadership Principles

“Leaders listen attentively, speak candidly, and treat others respectfully. They are vocally self-critical, even when doing so is awkward or embarrassing. Leaders do not believe their or their team’s body odor smells of perfume. They benchmark themselves and their teams against the best.”
― John Rossman, The Amazon Way: Amazon's 14 Leadership Principles

“One year, we ordered four thousand pink iPods from Apple for Christmas. In mid-November, an Apple rep contacted us to say, “Problem—we can’t make Christmas delivery. They’re transitioning from a disk drive to a hard-drive memory in the iPods, and they don’t want to make any more using the old technology. Once we get the new ones made, we’ll get you your four thousand. But it won’t be in time for the holiday.” Other retailers would have simply apologized to their customers for the failure to deliver a product on time. That wasn’t going to fly at Amazon.com. We were not the kind of company that ruined people’s Christmases because of a lack of availability—not under any circumstances. So we went out and bought four thousand pink iPods at retail and had them all shipped to our Union Street office. Then we hand-sorted them, repacked them, and shipped them to the warehouse to be packaged and sent to our customers. It killed our margins on those iPods, but it enabled us to keep our promise to our customers. During the next weekly business review, we had to explain to Jeff what we were doing and why. He just nodded approvingly and said, “I hope you’ll get in touch with Apple and try to get our money back from the bastards.” Ultimately, Apple did grudgingly split the cost difference with us. But even if they hadn’t, it still would have been the right thing for Amazon to do.”
― John Rossman, The Amazon Way: 14 Leadership Principles Behind the World's Most Disruptive Company

“For the more technically inclined, it also comes with a set of APIs [application programming interfaces] so that you can use our global fulfillment center network like a giant computer peripheral.”
― John Rossman, The Amazon Way: Amazon's 14 Leadership Principles

“Jeff Bezos doesn’t worry about your feelings; he doesn’t give a damn whether or not you’re having a good day. He only cares about results—and they’d better be the right results.”
― John Rossman, The Amazon Way: 14 Leadership Principles Behind the World's Most Disruptive Company

“Putting together a slideshow makes it all too easy for employees to only skim the surface of their ideas while creating the illusion of an intelligent argument.”
― John Rossman, The Amazon Way: Amazon's Leadership Principles

“The Amazon version of the Andon Cord started with a conversation about a customer care problem during a weekly business review. The issue centered on the way mistakes made by one set of employees—those working in the retail group—were creating headaches for a different set—those in the customer care department. “When the people in the retail group don’t provide the right data for the customer, or enter a product description that’s inaccurate,” the head of customer care explained, “the customer is disappointed with the purchase. And that means they call customer care, which lands us with the hassle of refunding the product.”
― John Rossman, The Amazon Way: 14 Leadership Principles Behind the World's Most Disruptive Company