Sublime

It’s a practice that enables every leader at Amazon.com to overcome traditional organizational barriers—another form of bureaucracy-busting that crashes through the obstacles that might delay or distort progress or learning along the new performance dimensions.

John Rossman didn’t “grow up” at Amazon but rather came from the outside and had to quickly get up to speed on Amazon’s “gladiator culture” and Jeff Bezos’s constant probing, questioning, and, yes, at times, screaming at his team.

It was not uncommon for senior people at Amazon to be able to talk with knowledge and authority about details of a project that was not in their own department, let alone under their direction.

Provide a Stateless Workflow for Real-Time Customer Feedback.

as any major initiative unfolds at Amazon. com, Jeff stays as close to the project team and its data as he can, not only monitoring it but questioning it, poking holes in it, and examining every facet down to the smallest detail.

effort.

And as I learned in that 2003 S-Team meeting, if you started caveating or waffling about why you were not hitting objectives, Jeff wouldn’t hesitate to tear that kimono off for you.

Jason Child, a colleague of mine from my Arthur Andersen days (he’s now the CFO of Groupon), introduced me to Jason Kilar (who later became the founder and CEO of Hulu). They invited me to interview at Amazon.com