Definition
Speed matters in business. Many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study. We value calculated risk taking.
Explained by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy
Speed disproportionately matters in every business, at every stage of the business you’re in, in every industry segment that you’re in, at every size of company that you’re in, unless you have a monopoly. And I don’t know, companies that exist as monopolies anymore. Speed really matters.
And there are some companies who get to a stage where they just believe they can’t be fast. And I saw this a lot in my last job when I was managing the AWS business, I met with many enterprise CEO’s who said, “look, you don’t understand we can’t move fast anymore. We have security concerns, we have compliance concerns. We’ve gotten really big. We have a culture that’s slow.” And the reality is that isn’t true.
Speed is not preordained, it is a leadership and a culture decision. And if you want to organize and prioritize and you value speed, you can move quickly. Even if you historically haven’t.
And so you have to think about decisions in a certain way. Most decisions that any organization takes can be characterized as either one-way door or two-way door decisions.
And the thing to think about is imagine walking through a door. There are certain doors you can walk through where if you walk in the room and you’ve made a mistake, you can walk right back through that door and no harm. And those are two-way doors.
And then there is a smaller number of decisions, where if you walk through that door, maybe you can walk back through the door, maybe you can’t walk back through the door. It would be very hard to walk back through that door. And those are one-way door decisions.
The overwhelming majority of decisions that we make all the time here at Amazon are two-way door decisions. And those decisions should be made at the team level and you should make them quickly. You should be thoughtful about them. I wouldn’t make them in a harebrained way, but you should make them quickly. And if you get it wrong, walk back through that door.
One-way door decisions, as I said, are going to be a very small number of those and those you should take time to think through carefully, but most are two-way door decisions.
Then you also have to have the right mindset and the right urgency about decisions. Don’t take weeks to get done what could be done in days or hours. And by the way, that sounds super obvious. And you would be surprised how often you find teams that take weeks to get things done that could be done in days or hours.
You have to have this idea in your head that we live in a world of closing windows. And we had this for the first many number of years of Amazon, and I think we still have it in lots of places, but where there’s a closing window. There’s a land rush.
And if you think about the areas in which we are building businesses and customer experiences, we are competing against the most well-funded, capable, talented companies who are all pursuing the same types of things that we’re going after. These are races.
And so you have to think of it like that, like we are pursuing closing windows types of opportunities. And you want to show up every day, every week, thinking about how when I leave this week, will my customers be better off than when I started the week?
Now, is there a tension between having the highest standards and having a bias for action? Yes, there can be a tension. Because the reality is in moving fast, you can’t launch a subpar customer experience. By the way, launching a subpar customer experience also breaks the customer obsession leadership principle. And so, just like I said earlier, leadership principles inherently have tension in them because you actually want to be very proficient and fantastic for customers across a lot of dimensions. And sometimes those dimensions will intersect and conflict. And part of our job, part of the nuance of leadership principles, is to figure out how to find the right balance between them.
But you can be fast while still having high standards. I’ve seen it for 29 years at the company.
So we need to think of ourselves, and this is the way I think about the company, as being the world’s biggest start up. And that’s the way we need to behave. That’s the way we need to act. And we need to keep asking ourselves why can’t we move faster for customers?