Book Review | The Amazon Way: 14 Leadership Principles Behind the World's Most Disruptive Company

Book Title: The Amazon Way: 14 Leadership Principles Behind the World's Most Disruptive Company

Author: John Rossman

 

Amazon.com was in the business of internet bookseller to a global company revolutionizing and disrupting multiple industries, including retail, publishing, logistics, devices, apparel, and cloud computing. The Amazon Way, introduces the unique corporate culture of the world’s largest Internet retailer, with a focus on the fourteen leadership principles that have guided and shaped its decisions and its distinctive leadership culture. I found this book interesting with easy flow on each of the principles with some examples. . Amazon is one of the globally admired companies. The book just reflects on the 14 principles of leadership that build a great organisation. The crux of these 14 principles 

1.    Obsess over the Customer

·         Customer don't actually like to talk to customer service reps, they'd rather resolve the problem themselves

·         Amazon is focused on Free Cash Flow - cash the company is able to generate after maintaining its base assets

·         Price, Selection and Availability - the holy trinity (The three pillars of Amazon)

·         If you are competitor focused, you have to wait until there is an competitor doing something, Being customer focused allows you to be more pioneering.

2.     Take Ownership of Results

·         Successful companies have very low turnover rate at the top.

·         Maintain an atmosphere of urgency is crucial

·         Breakdown of dependency is a leadership failure.

·         The highest level of customer service is impossible to achieve without a high degree of accountability and honesty and a willingness to be direct, open, and honest - especially when things are not going well.

3.    Invent & Simplify         

·         Simple is the key to easy, fast, intuitive and low cost.

·         Good process eliminates bureaucracy and exposes under performers.

4.    Leaders are right - a lot          

·         Clarity is vital for culture of learning, growth and accountability

·         Plans are nothing, Planning is everything  

·         Writing down ideas in complete sentences and complete paragraph will force a deeper clarity of thinking

5.    Hire & Develop the Best        

·         Leaders develop leaders and take seriously their role in coaching others

6.    Insist on highest standard    

·         Service level Agreements

7.    Think Big           

·         Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy  

·         Free Cash Flow - The secret of thinking Big

8.    Have a bias for action

·         Value calculated risk taking

9.    Practice Frugality        

·         Frugality breeds resourcefulness, self-sufficiency and innovation

10. Be Vocal, Self – Critical         

·         "Hubris"- The excessive pride that destroys the hero        

11. Earn the Trust  

·         True collaboration is only possible in a atmosphere of Trust  

·         Two-Pizza Team is about trusting a small fraction within an organization to operate independently and with agility

12. Dive Deep          

·         Leadership is responsible for the entire life cycle of a project and its outcome.

·         Five Whys is an iterative question-asking technique used to explore the cause-and-effect relationships

13. Have backbone - Disagree & Commit       

·         once decision is made, commit to it whole heartedly

14. Deliver Results  

Book Review | The enemies of excellence by Greg Salciccioli

Book Title: The enemies of excellence

Author: Greg Salciccioli 

Blindness is widespread today as disgraced leaders sit in the wreckage of their own actions, stunned at their own capacity for deviance. Leadership Excellence is a journey and in the journey there will be hurdles. Some of the failures are due to unforeseen conditions and few due to personal conditions.  The world is beautiful when you are successful and the world is more meaningful when there is a purpose attached to living. Everyone is susceptible to self-sabotage—especially in the presence of success. This book is on about being a morally strong a leader,  has to overcome seven core risks which one needs checked and worked on in order to excel.  By identifying and learning to recognize each risk, leaders can stop creating misery for themselves and the people who rely on them emotionally and financially. The Enemies of Excellence can affect anyone—from the corner office to the conference room, and from the classroom to the living room.

Managing personal life is a struggle for every leader. We all have flaws that blind us. If left unattended and unexamined, they will eventually destroy us. One of my own tragic flaws was anger, which affected everything in my life. The book narrates the seven core enemies classified into common and disastrous for excellence. The first three Egotism, Life Mismanagement, Bad Habits are commonly found in most of the leaders. Timely feedback, due-diligence and awareness on these can be controlled through willpower. Indulgence, Broken relationships, Isolation and Self-sabotage are the lethal for excellence. All these seven core risks occurs when being successful or enjoying success is at top of the mind resulting in mismanagement.  Therefore it is needed to be grounded and do a self-check to ensure that success is not captured in mind and body.

The first three Enemies of Excellence. As egotism is allowed to exist, it breeds arrogance, and arrogance in turn builds ignorance. People become ignorant of the other Enemies that are active in their life and leadership. The second Enemy ensures that the balance between work and life is ignored and allowed to break down. As work-life balance breaks down, bad habits accumulate. This third Enemy opens the door to the dark side of Indulgence.

Egotists make people feel expendable. Ego-driven leaders not only harm themselves and others—they destabilize and potentially destroy organizations. To avoid the enemy of an egocentric focus, we need to not only determine to avoid egotism but to understand the benefits of altruism. Altruism has great advantages over egotism.

Life Mismanagement: a situation due to egotism is disorganized or controlled badly. This may be in the personal life or corporate life, may be due to habits or addicts. Due to external environment or internal pressure. Enemy of Life Mismanagement can’t stand against a person who establishes their priorities and drives towards them each day. Life mismanagement is basically due to centrally decision making and controls. Decentralization and Delegation of controls is advantages over Life Mismanagement.

Bad Habits: Patterned behaviour regarded as detrimental to one’s physical or mental health, which is often linked to lack of self-control. Everyone has a bad habit. Some are more obvious than others. The primary reason that we are overrun by the Enemy of Bad Habits has to do with intentional versus reactionary living. The first step in choosing intentional leadership lies in a simple but powerful best practice.

Indulgence: Indulgence means yielding to your desires, resulting in excess that undermines your success. Indulgence dismantles the conscience piece by piece until the alarms of moderation or morality are silenced. With the alarm system disabled, all kinds of destructive behaviour can be explored.

Isolation: An ideal mind is a devils workshop, Isolation will lead to power for destruction. The enemy of Isolation will plan of attack is to divide and conquer. He wants us to leave the presence of others and go it alone, to be the maverick who ends up masterminding his own demise.

Self-Sabotage: Self-sabotage is any behaviour, thought, emotion or action that holds you back from getting what you consciously want. Moreover, it’s the conflict that exists between conscious desires and unconscious wants that manifest in self-sabotage patterns.  Self-sabotage patterns because we are unable to manage our emotions effectively.

Book Review | Look: A Practical Guide for Improving Your Observational Skills

One word that we frequently hear from our parents, teachers and boss is “ Observe” correctly.  Attentive observation will help to grasp the topic in case of studies, provides clarity in case of work. Therefore the way we look and observe needs a varied approach based on the requirements. The book ““Look – A practice Guide for Improving your observation skills” provides narratives on application on the relevance of anything we do.  Six Thinking Hat methods are widely used for driving creativity and solving problems in the organisations.  However when a student writes answers in the examination describing in his own words, he never gets the top score. This is because the teacher needs answers as she has thought at the school. Without imbibing creative thinking and appreciating creativity at the schools, organisations have to invest to teach lean and unlearn.

Observation is key for any improvement and investigation. Observations influence on how we act and opt. Moreover observations in everyday lead us to the thoughts that possibly modify, reshape, reform and transform our behavior or overthrow aspects of the world. Creative thinking has four steps – Focus, Provocation, Movement and Harvesting. Focus involves identifying what one wants ideas about. Provocation requires setting up of mental stimuli on the chosen focus area. Movement responds to provocations and challenges by deliberation. Harvesting captures the value of creative output by recognizing the newness of thoughts.

The Six Looking Glasses method guide to become more skilled observer by enriching the time spent looking. The six different type of looking are

1.  Binoculars Look

2.  Bifocals Look

3.  Magnifying glasses Look 

4.  Microscope Look 

5. Rose coloured Glasses

6. Blindfolds.

7.       

These six methods of looking is critical and applicable across the life cycle of human and organisation. In today’s world, every day we use these six looking glass method. We scroll on the messages in our what sup application for a Binocular look. For certain messages we use Bifocals look to interpret two alternate views of any given situation. We use Magnifying glasses look  to spot one thing to look closely to respond. We use Microscope looking for greater details involving scrutinizing and studying scene. We use Rose coloured glasses look to uncover the hidden opportunity. We use Blindfolds look to reflect and recall what was seen and how was scene. 

Book Review | Why We Work - Barry Schwartz

What if the human beings had an option to choose, energy without consuming any food then will there be the need to work and earn? Today we are in the smart technology world and motivating the Gen - Z workforce is really a challenge.  We are deep into a destructive foray regarding our conception of workforce motivation. We created an idea two centuries ago that people hate work and do it only for money and other extrinsic rewards. This human invention (which is what an idea is) is not a widespread food ingredient but a ubiquitous workplace element. It does cause heartache, disgruntlement, disengagement and low productivity. The science is in: It’s not human nature to hate work and treating workers as if they do causes damage to them and to business.

The industrial revolution had workers to do their job where in they lived in it, even if they hated their jobs. Understanding individual psychology and the attitude the person brings to a job is important, but so too is understanding how to create an environment in which people motivate themselves

Organisations have layers and segments. One of the interesting scrutiny on the engagement level, we find the bottom of the pyramid highly engaged. The reason behind this is they are able to empathises and relate their work to the cause.  You don't need to be working for an organization that saves lives to find meaning and purpose in what you do. You just need to be doing work that makes peoples' lives better.

The author narrates that we are in the legacy of FALSE RATIONALE on the job and work of “carrot and stick” approach that dominated the efforts in the work place. As long as the people were paid for what they did, it didn’t matter very much what their job entailed. Many believe that only certain kind of jobs permit people to find a meaning, engagement, discretion and autonomy and opportunity to learn and grow WHEN WORK IS GOOD. Job crafting needs to aimed of how the job could be linked to a meaningful purpose that meets the challenge demanding empathy, good listening and accomplishing the goals. People who see their work as “job” enjoy little discretion and experience minimal engagement or meaning. People with job see work as necessity of life, they work for pay, and they would switch jobs to earn more money.  People who see their work as a “career” generally enjoy more discretion and more engaged.  When we loose confidence that people have the will to do the right thing and we turn to incentives, we find that we get what we pay for. Therefore a decision has to be taken on HOW GOOD Work GOES BAD: Rules and Incentives over Integrity. It’s because of human nature.  Human nature as a battle between metaphors and THE TECHNOLOGY of IDEAS to drive behaviours. No matter what ideas people appeal to when they explain their lack of food, their bellies remain empty. The idea technology that dominates our age is a fiction; it is ideology. THE FUTURE OF WORK: DESIGNING HUMAN NATURE.

The book narrates, that it is not incentive that trigger the work. It is finding out a meaningful purpose on how our work is linked to the purpose. If we can craft our purpose to the job, the work becomes meaningful and joy. The book is very narrative of examples on being meaningful

Book Review | The First 90 Days - Michael D Watkins

The people judge the first 100 days performance of the newly formed government. The first 90 days of any Government becomes critical parameter to gain confidence. Similarly when a lateral entrant on boards an organisation at a leadership position, all the eyes will be on his first 90 days. The initial 90 days of on-board becomes critical for the leader and the company.  The transaction is critical to reach a breakeven point and one needs to avoid few transaction traps  such as Sticking with what you know, Falling prey to the action imperative, setting unrealistic expectations, Attempting to do too much, coming in with the answer, engaging in the wrong type of learning, neglecting horizontal relationships. The transition failures happen because new leader either misunderstand the essential demands of the situation or lack the skill and flexibility to adapt to them.    Leadership ultimately is about influence and leverage and needs a right steps to follow for deliver with right energy. Any changes from one profile to other has risk. Identification of the key risk and mitigation plan will accelerate to be successful initially. The initial success will also build confidence and acceptance in any new organization. To better on boarding and deliver excellently, the author suggests the steps converted into 10 chapters for a smooth transaction.

1.       Prepare Yourself

2.       Accelerate Your learning

3.       Match your strategy to the situation

4.       Secure early wins

5.       Negotiate Success

6.       Achieve Alignment

7.       Build Your Team

8.       Create Coalitions

9.       Keep your balance

10.   Accelerate everyone.

Chapter – 1 : Prepare Yourself

The key of effective delegation remains necessary. Build a team of competent people whom you trust, you establish goals and metrics to monitor their progress, you translate higher level goals into specific responsibilities for your direct reports, and you enforce them through process.  While preparing yourself one has to find ways to overcome the following challenges with Balancing Breadth and Depth | Rethinking what you Delegate | Influence differently |Communicate more formally | Exhibit the right presence

To overcome these barriers and succeed in a joining a new company, one should focus on Four pillars of effective on boarding

Business Orientation | Stakeholder connection | Alignment of expectations | Cultural Adaptation.

Reflection checks

·         What are the implications for your need to balance breadth and depth, delegate, influence, communicate and exhibit leadership presence?

·         How will you orient yourself to business, identify and connect with key stakeholders, clarify expectations and adapt to the new culture? what is the right balance between adapting to the new situation and trying to alter it

·         What has made you successful so far in your career? Can you succeed in your new position by relying solely on those strengths? If not, what are the critical skills you need to develop

·         Are there aspects of your new job that are critical to success but that you prefer not to focus on? Why? How will you compensate for your potential blind spots?

·         How can you ensure that you make the mental leap into the new position? From whom might you seek advice and counsel on this? What other activities might help you do this?

Chapter -2 : Accelerate your learning

Leaders who are on boarding into new organisation must focus on learning and adapting to the new culture | Managing learning as an investment process – Define your learning agenda - Identify the best sources of insight - Adopting structured learning methods

Reflection – Checklist

·         How effectively are you at learning about new organizations? Do you sometimes fall prey to the action imperative? To coming in “the “answer? If so, how will you avoid doing this?

·         What is your learning agenda? Based on what you know now, compose a list of questions to guide your early inquiries. If you have begun to form hypotheses about what is going on, what are they, and how will you test them?

·         Given the questions you want to answer, who is likely to provide you with the most useful insight?

·         How might you increase the efficiency of your learning process? What are some structured ways you might extract more insight for your investment of time and energy?

·         What support is available to accelerate your learning and how might you best leverage?

·         Given your answers to the previous questions, start to create your learning plan

Chapter -3 : Match Strategy to Situation

Use STARS Model – Start-Up | Turnaround | Accelerated Growth | Realignment | Sustaining success to match strategy to situation.

Reflection – Checklist

·         What portfolio of STARS situations have you inherited? Which portion of your responsibilities are in start-up, turnaround, accelerated-growth, realignment, and sustaining success modes?

·         What are the implications for the challenges and opportunities you are likely to confront and for the way you should approach accelerating your transition?

·         What are the implications for your learning agenda? Do you need to understand only the technical side of the business or is it critical that you understand culture and politics well?

·         What is the prevailing climate in your organisation? What psychological transformation do you need to make and how will you bring them about?

·         How can you best lead change given the situations you face?

·         Which of your skills and strengths are likely to be most valuable in your new situation, and which have the potential to get you into trouble

·         What are the implications for the team you need to build?

Chapter -4 : Negotiate Success

Negotiate success means proactively engaging with your new boss to shape the game so that you have a fighting chance of achieving desired goals.

Don’t with boss for  building positive relationships  - Don’t stay away | Don’t surprise your boss |Don’t approach your boss only with problems | Don’t run down your checklist | Don’t expect your boss to change

Do’s for building positive relationships – Clarify expectations early and often | Take 100 percent responsibility for making relationship work | Negotiate timelines for diagnosis and action planning | Aim for early wins in areas important to boss | Pursue good marks from those who opinions your boss respects

Conversations framework – Situational diagnosis conversation | the expectations conversations | the resource conversation | The style conversation | The personal development conversation

Reflection – Checklist

·         How effectively have your built relationships with new bosses in the past? What have you done well? Where do you need improvement?

·         Create a plan for the situational conversation based on what you know now, what issues will you raise with your boss in this conversation? What do you want ot say up front?  what order do you want to raise issues?

·         Create a plan for the expectations conversation. How will you figure out what your new boss expects you to do?

·         Create a plan for the style conversation. How will you figure out how best to work with your boss? What mode of communication does he prefer? How often should you interact? How much detail should you provide? What types of issues should you consult with him about before deciding?

·         Create a plan for the resource conversation. Give what you need to do, what resources are absolutely needed? With fever resources, what would you have to forgo? If you had more resources what would the benefits? Be sure to build the building case?

·         Create a plan for the personal development conversation. What are your strengths and where do you need improvement t? What kinds of assignments or projects might help you develop skills you need?

·         How might you use the five conversations framework to accelerate the development of your team? Where are you in terms of having the key conversations with each of your direct reports?

Chapter – 6: Secure Early Wins

Plan your waves – Starting with Goal | Focus on Business Priorities | Identify and support behavioural Changes

Problematic behaviour pattern – Focus | Discipline |Innovation | Teamwork | Sence of Urgency

Overcoming Basic Principles – Focus on a few promising Opportunities | Gen wins that matter to your bosses |Get wins in the right ways | Take your STARS portfolio into account | Adjust for the culture | identifying your early wins

FOGLAMP checklist – Focus | oversight | Goals | Leadership | Abilities | Means | Process

Leading change – Planning versus learning – Awareness – Diagnosis – vision – Plan – Support

Reflection checklist

·         Given you agreed to business goals, what do you need to do during your transition to create momentum for achieving them?

·         How do people need to behave differently to achieve these goals? Describe as vividly as you can the behaviours you need to encourage and those you need to discourage

·         How do you plan to connect yourself to your new organisation? Who are the key audiences and what message would you like to convey to them? What are the best modes of engagement?

·         What are the most promising focal points to get some early improvements in performance and start the process of behaviour change?

·         What projects do you need to launch and who will lead them

·         What predictable surprises could take you off track?

Chapter – 6: Achieve Alignment

Common Traps to avoid – Making change for change’s sake | Not adjusting for the STARS situation |Trying to restructure your way out of deeper problems | Creating structures that are too complex | Overestimating your organizations capacity to absorb change

Designing organizational Architecture - Strategic Direction | Structure | Core Processes | Skill base

Diagnosing Misalignments – Misalignments between strategic direction and skill base | Misalignment between strategic direction and core processes | Misalignment between structure and processes | Misalignment between structure and skills

Getting started – Begin with strategic direction | Look at supporting structure, processes and skills |Decide how and when you will introduce the new strategic direction | Think through the correct sequencing | Choose the loop

Reflection checklist

·         What are your observations about misalignments among strategic directions, structure, process and skills? How will you dig deeper to confirm or refine your impression?

·         What decisions about customers, capital, capabilities and commitments do you need to make? How and when will you make these decisions?

·         What is your current assessment of the coherence of the organisations strategic directions? Of its adequacy? What are your current thoughts about changing directions?

·         What are the strengths and weakness of the organisation structure? What potential structure are you thinking about?

·         What are the core processes in your organisation? How well they are performing? What are your priorities for process improvement?

·         What skill gaps and underutilized resources have you identified? What are your priorities for strengthening key skills bases?

Chapter -7 – Build your team

Reflections:

·         What are your criteria for assessing the performance of members of your team? How are relative weightings affected by function, the extent of required teamwork, the stars portfolio and the criticality of the positions?

·         How will you go about assessing your team?

·         What personnel changes do you need to make? Which changes are urgent and which can wait? how ill you create backups and options?

·         How will you might high priority changes? What can you do to preserve the dignity of the people affected? What help will you need with the team in the restructuring process, and where are you going to find?

Chapter -8 – Create Alliances

Defining your influence Objectives – Understand the influence landscape | win and block alliances | Map influence networks | Draw influence diagrams

Reflections:

·         What are the critical alliances you need to build –both within your organisations and externally to advance your agenda?

·         What agendas are other key players pursuing? Where might they align with yours and where might they come in to conflict?

·         Are there opportunities to build long term broad based alliances with others? Where might you be able to leverage shorter term agreements to pursue specific objectives?

·         How does influence work in the organisation? Who defers to whom on key issues or concern?

·         Who is likely to support your agenda? Who is likely to oppose you? Who is persuadable?

·         What are the motivations of pivotal people, the situational pressure acting on them, and their perceptions of their choices?

·         What are the elements of an effective influence strategy? How should you frame your arguments? Might influence tools such as incrementalism, sequencing and action forcing events help?

Chapter – 9: Mange Yourself

·         What are your greatest vulnerabilities in your new role? How do you plan to compensate for them?

·         What personal disciples do you most need to develop or enhance? How will you do this? What will success look like?

·         What can you gain more control over your local environment?

·         What can you do to ease your family transition? What support relationships will you have to build? What are your highest priorities?

·         What are your priorities for strengthening your advice and counsel network? to what extent do you need to focus on your internal network ? Your external network >?  In which domain do you most need additional support – technical, cultural, political or personal?

Chapter 10 – accelerate everyone

·         What are the most important transitions in your organisation and how often do they occur

·         Is the organisation able to identify where and when transitions are occurring?

·         Is there a common core transition, acceleration, framework, language and toolkit?

·         Do leaders have the support they need, when they need it and throughout their transitions? What could be done to provide focused resources for on boarding and promotion transitions?

·         Are the company’s systems for recruiting and accelerating transitions linked in appropriate way

·         Should transitions acceleration be part of your organisation curriculum for developing high potential leaders?

·         How might the 90 day framework be used to accelerate organisational change – for example restructuring or post acquisition integration?