Ex-Amazon VP: Do This at Work to Get Promoted Fast | Ethan Evans

25:32So if you want to go full owner mode or just curious about it, grab your ticket below at msm.live. I'll see you there. Okay, back to my conversation with Ethan Evans. Had some management issues at the time, didn't have a great leader on top of her, so that's my fault. But what was so interesting to me is if she had come to us and said, I want to just make this much more, here's a couple things I think I could do. Is there any way to get there? We probably just would have said, yeah, let's right-size this. And again, that is our fault for not maybe continuing to right-size her as she grew proactively.

26:06Now we try to do that. But I think before you make a jump, just if you like what you do, asking and telling what you're going to do additionally, you might be shocked what you get from your current company. Well, so two things there, if I can point them out first. What you said, if I can paraphrase, is we as the management should have been on top of that. Well, true. Yeah. So she was waiting for you to do what should have happened, but it didn't happen. So she just left. That's the mistake is she wasn't asking. second thing is just statistically 70 of employees never ask for a raise this is probably foreign to me and you because we're a little aggressive but 70 never ask and yet of the 30 that do ask 70 of them get something they may not get what they ask for so oh i want you know i want to go to at least 100 000 well maybe they say well we can't do that we can go to 97 and And but you get something.

27:04And so asking almost always pays off. And of course, you know, this same way you teach your all of your audience to negotiate for businesses. If you just ask, it's probably there. Yeah, it's so true. You have this this philosophy about invisible performers versus visible performers. Can you talk about how being visible and high versus invisible and mid can sort of change your career? Will you break down that philosophy? Yeah, absolutely. So here's the basic idea. Most managers are trying to reward their top performers. But the thing people forget about managers, managers have their own career, their own life, their own partner and children.

27:47They're not noticing everything. And so if someone is doing a good job advertising their work, making it visible, they may be seen as a much higher performer than this person who's sitting silently. The number one thing I hear people tell me is, oh, I'm just going to keep my head down and work hard. And I expect my hard work will be rewarded. And I call this work hard and hope to be noticed. And to follow on to that, hope is not a very good strategy. So there are things you can do that are pretty simple to make your work visible. the most obvious in a corporate environment is just send out a status report.

28:32Just write a little note at the end of every week or put it in Slack and say, hey, here's what got done this week. And compared to the people who don't do that, it's just like going in and offering help. They'll immediately jump to the front. I love to study psychology. And one of the things about psychology is humans can't avoid reading. Once we learn how to read, if you put words in front of us, our brain reads them. We can't basically not read. It's why billboards work. We're driving down the highway. We don't care, but there it is. And suddenly we know Chick-fil-A at the next exit, whether we wanted to know or not.

29:05The same thing happens with that status report. It comes into your inbox and like, oh, it's Ethan saying what he did this week and somebody else, your Barbara, isn't there. And right there, week after week, what you're getting is, oh, Ethan worked, Ethan worked, Barbara, who's Barbara? And that's what happens. Such a good point. Also, as a leader, I love status updates because I think one of the fears that your leader has and all leaders have is that their team actually isn't doing anything. And it is, especially when you're an owner, you're like, I have these resources. They're finite. I have to allocate them places.

29:42And then I got to go chase down, am I allocating them appropriately to the right people? And if you're any good at running a business, you're often thinking, well, I have a million bucks to put here or here. Which one is going to deliver me better performance? And even at a company as big as Amazon, you don't get unlimited budget. And so it's really interesting. Now I have almost all my direct reports, well, all my direct reports, and then everybody who's working on key projects for me send a weekly update. But what is almost just as bad is when you say you're going to, and then you don't do it weekly.

30:17And then your manager has to chase you. I feel like that is, there's almost like, I don't know if you have a philosophy that you've been doing this longer than I have. Why is that worse almost? So, well, it's a busted expectation. In other words, if I didn't ask you for it or we didn't agree, then maybe I wanted it, but like, I can't really blame you. Yeah. But when you say you're going to do it and then you don't, this is, this is letting me down. And And it's a way that feels more personal, like you broke a promise. I actually say the same thing in the magic loop, which is the only way to screw up this loop is to go to your boss and say, how can I help you?

30:51And they say, oh, do this. And then you don't do it because that's much worse than if you just kept your head down and never gone in their office because they weren't thinking about you. But now you've put yourself on their on their horizon and let them down. And they will remember that much more than if you had not ever showed up. So that status report you don't get when you're expecting it or when you've been clear that you want it, that's a much bigger black mark that someone who just doesn't do something on their own. Yeah, that's really good. But what a simple way. Like if you want to make more money, what do you do?

31:26You send status reports weekly. You update your manager about what you're working on. You show the results that you've had. And you call it being strategically annoying, basically. Absolutely. Are those the four or is there anything else that like if you want to make more money, you should absolutely do? I mean, another good one is bring solutions or propose solutions. The last thing I would probably add to your short list is if I have a problem that I'm not sure how to solve or that needs your approval because we're going to spend money. Make the case. Don't just come and say, oh, Cody, would you pick between A and B?

32:01But instead, look, say we face A and B. It's a debate in the team. Here's the advantages of A. Here's the advantages of B. I recommend, but you tell me because in the end, it's your money. What I'm doing there is making it super easy for you, but still letting you make the choice. Now, if you're a really strong lieutenant, if I have a great relationship with you, I might be so bold. This is like playing the advanced level of the game to say, hey, Cody, we looked at A and B and I know how you think. And so I've gone ahead because of these reasons and made the call A. it is still reversible if you disagree call me back but otherwise just know we're already running and at this point you're like this person is magic they're doing what i would do for the reasons i would do it and making me money and all i have to do is like well nothing actually right just read the email and collect the check that's that's where you're trying to get to but that takes a relationship where i where you and i have enough trust that i can make decisions for you by proxy And I'm sure you have a few people like that.

33:06Definitely. Well, why do you think it is that this is so rare, too? I'm not sure how much more work it takes or how much more intelligence it takes. But it's one really rare, I think, for people to come with solutions, not problems writ large. And it seems really hard for people to come and actually take the responsibility to say, I'm going to do X or Y. Well, a lot of people have a ton of fear of being wrong. I remember very early in my career I was still in school I was working on a project as a graduate student and I ran into a guy from our facilities department and we needed to do something like drill a hole in the wall and I was like let's do it here and he said, it sticks with me like glue he said, I ain't making no damn decision right?

33:53He was just terrified that someone would tell him you did it wrong and he was much older than me so I was just 18, 19, 20 And I'm like, I'll make the decision. Do it here. So that's part of it is people are afraid of being wrong. And some of them have been smacked for being wrong. How could you do that? You know, you didn't have the authority because there are controlling people who are afraid to delegate. And so they learn fear. The second thing is when it comes to like coming up with a solution or proposing something, I don't want to be blamed is a stronger thing than I see the reward. So I think what differentiates people at Amazon, we had an ownership leadership principle, which is part of how Amazon runs.

34:41It has a set of principles. And at one point they were considering removing it and I led the fight to keep it. And some of the words in it that I helped create say an owner never says that's not my job. And what happens is people feel like, oh, making this decision or taking this risk, well, that's not my job. I'm a content producer or I'm a negotiator. It's not my job. I don't. And what we want, of course, as founders or leaders in a company is people who see, okay, I might not be the right person to do this work, but since nobody's doing it, I'm going to jump on it either and do my best job or find who should own it.

35:24I'm not just going to leave it there. Oh, not my job. You know, alligator arms, right? T-brex. Yeah. There's this great meme that I saw and it was like a little lifeboat and a lifeboat had like holes in it over here and cracks there and a broken sail. And next to all the things that were wrong with it, there are people all around the boat. But next to all those issues, it was like, not my job. Somebody else will deal with that. I don't want to be the one to bring that up. All these little excuses. And then it talked about how there are two types of people, sort of the people who fix and the people who ride.

35:57And the people who fix always end up being in charge and the people who ride always end up behind. And you have an idea that's a little bit like this, like two types of managers, umbrella managers versus funnel managers. What are the difference between the two? Well, the basic idea is, you know, shit runs downhill and the manager is either an umbrella over the team kind of covering for that and getting it out of the way so that the team can work. Whereas funnel managers look like a funnel and they're catching all the crap, passing it by themselves and like, hey, you deal with it. You know, my boss is mad about this.

36:32You'd better fix it. My only job is to like pass the blame to you and then push you to work harder. So that's the main difference. And I've definitely seen both of these. Yeah, those are stories I can tell. they come in to a case where I failed Bezos. We can talk about that maybe later. Tell me now. This sounds great. I failed Jeff twice in my life, like big public failures. The first one was when we very, the very first time we began Prime Video, before it was even called Prime Video, we were going to start showing movie and TVs and he asked us to come to an all hands of the company and demo the product.

37:13Well, to shortcut the story, I got on the stage and we had a bug, which happens with lots of software. And you probably know the old movie Office Space, like a red stapler scene. So we wanted to show that. And I'm standing there with microphone, Jeff's in the front row and all of Amazon is behind him. And I say, okay, so this is Office Space. And everybody starts laughing. And it's, the scene's funny, but not that funny. I turn around and you can actually see me go and turn upside down because it's playing upside down on the screen. So I'm holding the mic. I'm brand new at Amazon. Here's Jeff Bezos and all of my chain of management.

37:52What do you say? And I said, well, obviously we have some problems. I'm going to go work on those. And the interesting part about this is Jeff has a lunch after the all hands where where he takes all the presenters to lunch and so we get through this meeting i go to lunch i walk into the room it's big room conference room size and he's there alone well it's just no one else has arrived but like i bolt for the farthest possible seat you know and he sees me he's like no no no come sit next to me and i'm like okay shit's about to get real he says, look, he could have said anything. What are you going to do?

38:39What's the problem? Why did that happen? What he actually said was, I just want you to know, I'm not worried about this problem because clearly you are. And then we had lunch, but you know, of course that sent me back like, oh my God, Jeff Bezos is behind me, you know, like super energizer bunny. And that became prime video. So the second story is where the umbrella manager comes in. Fast forward, almost 10 years, I've risen in the company. I have a big team. We're launching something for Jeff. And it doesn't, again, it doesn't work. And in this case, we've been working all night to launch it for a morning press release.

39:17Well, Jeff gets up and we haven't done the press release because it's not work. And so he's immediately on email and he says like, what's going on? And I replied to him. You know, he says, where's the press release? I replied to him and say, well, we have some problems. And I'm thinking, get in the shower, get on your treadmill, anything. I'm going to fix these problems. And he comes back and says, what problems? And starts auditing and digging. And my goose is cooked. Well, Jeff's mad. He's mad that we fail. It's reasonable, right? We've let him down. But one of his executives decides, not unreasonably, like, my job is to play the heavy for Jeff and make sure Ethan knows he fell short.

39:59So this number two in the company comes marching into our physical space. And the case of an umbrella manager, my boss was a guy named Paul Ryder. And Paul goes and puts himself physically in front of that manager and says, who's his direct boss and says, look, if there's any problem here, address it with me. This is my team and I'm solely responsible. And that's an umbrella manager. Now, the funny part of this story is the executive says, Paul, that is really good leadership. And I appreciate that. Now, I need to talk to Ethan. Please step out of the way. So it didn't work. But like he made the try.

40:44Oh, yeah, that would be so horrifying. I don't think I mean, I remember when I was working in corporate, my like version of Jeff Bezos, his name was Jim Bowen. And actually funny, JB. But he was so impressive to me that the idea of letting him down in anything was sort of crippling. And so I could only imagine how you would feel being called out in public. Because Jim was pretty, he was pretty ruthless, in a good way though, about public feedback, basically. And so I've sort of taken it under wing in that. Not everybody can handle it. I try to only do it to like executive level. But, you know, he would kind of say in front of everybody's going to get to learn from this.

41:31Like that was wrong. This is a huge mess up and you have to fix it. And we're still friends to this day, I think, because to your point earlier, he would hold such high standards that I got so much better through that relentless sharpening, even though it sucked in the moment. And I think maybe a lot of people today don't realize what a gift it is to have people who are hard on you. Because if they didn't think you were going to be able to fix it, they would have just been like, well, whatever. I'm not even going to talk to Ethan. He's not going to fix this. That's right. Absolutely. And I know that in that case, there was a behind the scenes discussion of, do we need to remove Ethan here?

42:07Because this guy who was charging through Paul told me that later in a meeting. He said, we were discussing whether or not you could still be here. but the way you stepped up and the way you communicated we gave you the space and you fixed it so you still screwed up never do that again kind of you know pounding the lesson home but you get to keep your job and you know they were making a decision and definitely it was like a eye-opening breath when he's like well we were considering whether or not to fire you like what what do you think the right way is to give really difficult feedback to somebody so they actually listen to it well a couple things uh privacy is better if it's going to be that hard in like it's you're just going to lose trust from a lot of people if you have a we're considering firing you discussion in public everybody's we like what kind of jerk are you so it's got to be in private but i think clarity what happens with hard feedback is people are afraid of the potential confrontation and so they don't want to say uh something that might get blowback like well that's not fair.

43:13This happened and that happened. They don't want the argument. What I've learned to do is I call it being professionally firm while being personally warm. So what I would do in a case like this with you is I would say, Cody, I need to discuss something that's going to be difficult. And I want you to know that like I'm always behind you, I'm telling you this in order that you can succeed. That said, this last screw up didn't show enough attention to detail and we can't have any more of them. And I need to tell you, this does, you know, more of this is not compatible with staying here. Right. Or I could use other words, right.

43:56But it could lead to the end of your job and I don't want that for you. And so the trick is to show human warmth to the fact that they care about you, but a very unmistakable line of this performance doesn't fly. And most people, if you've built the trust to where you believe that I do want to help you, then you can hear almost anything. If you believe it's coming from a position of help, if you believe it's coming from a position of condemnation, that wasn't good enough. I need better. You, I start pointing my finger and like you didn't you this you that and i'm not involved and the reason a lot of people do that they get into the blaming style is they can't risk confrontation without getting themselves worked up first so that they're ready for a fight because if you push back you're like that's not fair and you're not supportive uh you know they don't know how to handle that say well we can talk about that, but this is still the objective performance.

44:59They can only do that if they're ready for a fight and that makes them aggressive, which you feel. Do you feel like a lot of people get feedback? Like do most managers have hard conversations with their team? So according to what everyone says, no, right? The constant feedback, just like I said earlier, managers don't get asked if they want help. Almost every employee will say, I don't get any real feedback. There are some reasons for this. The biggest thing though is as a manager, I'm busy asking myself, how important is this feedback versus if I make you upset, do I want to deal with that? And then what if you quit?

45:44Like, how do I give you this feedback in a way that you feel like, okay, I've got to address it, but I can, as opposed to, oh, that meant get out and now I'm going to have a hole. So they're trying to figure out how to like, well, it's called sandwich feedback, right? I'm going to say something nice to you. Then I'm going to slip in a little bit of like, oh, you could do this better. And then I'm going to say something else nice. Well, the problem with that is most people, they hear that there's a criticism in there, but they don't hear. Actually, I have to change. I have to do something different.

46:17They don't hear that part. And that's, again, managers aren't trained to do this. Well, let's look at your corporations. You know, when you worked in corporate history, how many of your managers had actual training, would you say, in how to be good managers versus they were just top performers on the trade desk or wherever and got moved up? The only company I think did a really good job of that was Vanguard. Vanguard has a pretty incredible corporate training. So, yeah, probably less than half for sure. Yeah. And I would say it's normally even less than that. is that a top performer in an individual role gets made a manager because they want it and they're good at what they do.

46:53And so it's assumed, oh, you're a good engineer. You're a good designer. You can manage designers. Well, there's no proof of that. And even if it is true, you certainly haven't been told how to give good feedback. And so you're left, you know, there are cases where I've hurt people because I had to learn on the job and I did it badly because I didn't have the skills and the training. And so to your point of feedback, I once had in my very first job, one of the very first performance reviews I ever gave, I thought very deeply about where can this person improve and what do they do well? And I gave this, I was young and this employee was older than I was, which is already awkward.

47:37Like I'm reviewing someone, you know, significant than a senior. Well, I did, in my opinion, a pretty good job actually noting strengths and weaknesses. What I didn't at all do was understand the relationship dynamic here. And so I pissed him off and he fought me and undermined me the rest of my career there. Because I, you know, I embarrassed him, right? Here's this young kid telling me I need like, you know, he, because I wasn't trained in how to give that feedback. to build the relationship to say, hey, could I share a couple of things? You know, could I share a couple of things to help you?

48:18Which is the last point I'll make. It's a great trick. Ask for permission. I can come to you and say, could I share a couple of things I've noticed? Would you like some feedback? Great trick here. You're almost never going to say, no, actually, I'd rather blunder forward blindly. It's a very good point. But then once you say yes, you also can be like, oh, I don't want to hear that. So it kind of sets you up for being open to it because you opt in. What about political correctness in a corporation and politics in a corporation? And Lord, we've seen a lot of that over the last, let's call it 10 years.

49:03How do you manage that in a company and what do you allow or not allow? I'm a big believer that what the leader exemplifies is what they get. So if they see political correctness and they say, well, that's very politely worded, but please share what you really think, that will encourage more transparency. So I think saying, oh, we don't do political correctness, don't do that is tougher than exemplifying. Bezos had this thing where he taught we don't want people to succumb to what he called social cohesion. And he wanted people to be willing to debate. And so he exemplified that. And the big example was he would tolerate debate.

49:53I had a manager, a vice president who was arguing with Jeff about something. And the CFO, because it was going on and on a little bit, said, stepped in and said, Jeff, do you want me to shut this down? Like right in front of my boss. Basically, do you want me to tell him shut up so that you don't have to? And Jeff said, no, this is how we learn. And they went, you know, six more rounds. Of course, Jeff still won because he's the CBO. but he explained his logic and defended it. And that later that day, I heard other leaders broadcasting that example of you wouldn't believe what happened today. You know, Jeff agreed to go extra rounds with his VP because he said, this is what I want.

50:37I want people who will push back. Those examples spread. That's actually what I would call good gossip. That storytelling of, look, the leader is for real. The leader really does want this. So that's how I think you get rid of political correctness is you have to live it and you have to get your leaders to live it. And then if they live it, it will die. The temptation to be afraid to say anything and we have to be super inclusive and bring everybody into a big group hug. I don't want to exclude anyone, but I also don't have time to come around and, you know, sort of politely say, do you have anything to add?

51:19Yeah. You know, say it or don't. Yeah. And it's not, again, I respect there are quieter people and give space, but only to a degree. Yeah. What are the career killers that you can do that people will remember forever in their jobs? Betrayal is the number one. Any sort of, and to some degree, that's the letting me down where you promise something like I'm counting on something and then it doesn't show up and it makes me look bad. Anything that hits people's ego or identity is actually more than raw performance. If you lose me money, I'm upset. But if you make me look bad, I'm furious, even if I can't admit it.

51:58Right. So if you leave me hung out to dry where I feel foolish or I feel incompetent, that's going to be the number one thing. The second thing is anything that leads me to distrust you more generally. I see you, you know, cheating on an expense report or behaving inappropriately. Again, anything that makes me question you as a human being is probably deeper than things that make me question your performance. Because performance, maybe you can get better. Maybe I can train you. Maybe you can learn. Whereas if I start to distrust you, there's really no path back from that, right? It's a little bit like how many marriages recover when a partner cheats.

52:42It's just usually kind of over. Same thing. Yeah, it's true. I don't think people realize the harm that happens from lying, cheating, stealing, and that betrayal component. You know what the other one is, actually, too? The gossiping. I feel like leaders… Breaking trust, though. It's not maintaining my confidence. It's another betrayal. Yeah, that's true. That's true. You see it a lot in corporate cultures, but we're going to gossip about this person, but then present another face, I think is a really fast way for you to get fired or to never be put in a position of power. And it's interesting because I had a meeting with some of my leaders.

53:23There's a little gossiping going on from some of their teams. And I had to sit down with them and say, you know, one of my favorite rules from Dave Ramsey's company when I went and went to his headquarters, and I have a lot of respect for Dave in many ways, is they have a no gossip policy. It's really aggressive at their company. And if you do it and another team member hears you do it, they'll just say, hey, we don't do that here. But if it happens another time, you're let go from the company. And I said, I really think this is by and large a good philosophy because it can be really toxic. And one of the leaders said, gossip is just natural.

53:56And I said, it is. You're right. But if we are the ones that stop it every time, it will become a lot less natural. And so like, I think you have to be okay saying, hey, we just don't do that here. We don't have the energy for it. That's not part of our corporate culture. You know, if you want to gossip about things, don't do it here. But that's really not going to be who we are. But even given that feedback in real time, I think is really hard. And yet it's how you press. Well, the closer the closer piece of feedback is to the event, the more likely it is that'll change like holding it. You can hold it in private if necessary.

54:33But as soon as you can pull someone aside, because a day or two later, it just doesn't connect the same way. This is the whole like if we touch a hot stove, we learn very quickly not to do that. But there's no one who smokes who's unaware smoking is bad for you. The thing is, it's bad for you 20 or 30 years from now. And so that long feedback means that no one, you know, that's a someday problem that might happen. The same thing with feedback is if I did something and then I'm telling you like, hey, last week you gossip and you're like, what? What did I say to who? Oh, really? It's just it's too faint.

55:09So it is tough to say, hey, just quickly, we don't do that here. I do think leaders need to be strong on the culture if they want it, because the culture you exemplify is the culture you get for sure. Let's talk about that, because, you know, you're one of the greatest companies of all time, certainly of our lifetime. What is your take on that? Like, what is the culture of Amazon that led to such massive performance? So there's a couple of things. Number one, Amazon was unabashedly hard driving. And some people definitely with justification would call it a sweatshop. But it was very clear that Amazon was a place where you were expected to work very hard.

55:55And it was OK if that wasn't for you. No problem. Go somewhere else. But we're not going to slow down or lower our expectations. We won't be. You know, we'll probably judge you a little if you leave, to be honest. but the truth is like we'd rather you leave than you stay here and complain about it. So part of it was hard work. The second thing though is Amazon was really great on pushing authority to do things down and giving autonomy to small teams. They had this idea called a two pizza team and the idea was that no team should be bigger that can be fed by two pizzas and that team should know what it's all about and be able to go do it itself.

56:35So what they tried, the way to understand Amazon is not, oh, a million employees, but rather a hundred thousand of these little teams. And so it was in many ways a collection of startups. Like my first team that built this version of Prime Video that failed at the demo was only seven people when it began. We were told, go figure out how to put Amazon in the online video business. Now, that same team today, the whole team globally would be several thousand, but it's still going to be divided into these little pieces working on each individual part of the larger system now. And that's what made Amazon strong is you had these little teams.

57:23Jeff, in fact, got a lot of pushback on this that's worth sharing. we brought in a VP from Microsoft, big platform company. And that guy had an argument with Jeff, who said, so many of these teams are repeating work. This independent team is doing things similar to this one. And this one's building overlapping technology. Why don't we have a platform team, you know, and we'll make everything central and organize it centrally. And Jeff thought about it and thought about it. And he wrote on the board a math equation, two is greater than zero. And he said, I'd rather pay to get two of something because I find when I force people to collaborate too soon, they gridlock and argue about priorities.

58:04And what I actually get is nothing. And so I'd rather pay for two than get zero. And if we're so lucky as to get two working things, that's a first class problem we'll deal with later, as opposed to trying to force central planning on this huge organization and getting nothing. Interesting. A lot of people talk about burnout and work-life balance. You were able to work at a lot of these companies for a long time. How do you work really hard to make a ton of money without burning out? Burnout is less, it turns out, about hard work. Although you can overwork to the point of physical exhaustion. It's more about losing your vision.

58:48You no longer know why. You no longer know where you're going. The great thing about Amazon, as I mentioned, is we had lots of autonomy. And so you could feel like I know my mission. It's to build Amazon Video, Prime Video, or it's to build the gaming efforts. And I'm in charge of my own destiny. I'm a little bit of a mini CEO and people under me own their own pieces. So I feel like I'm in control and sure I'm working really hard, but I'm not laboring without reward or clarity. And that's the bigger cause of burnout. Now, I guess one thing I share with people, you do have to set your own boundaries, not just at Amazon, but anywhere.

59:32It goes back to that corporations are driven by profit. And while you as a leader in a small company might be enlightened enough to say to somebody, hey, you're burning yourself out. Like, I'd rather you dial it down and not burn out. Big corporations are machines. And if I'm paying you$100 ,000 and you'll work 50 hours, great. But if you'll work 60, even better. And if you'll work 70, why wouldn't I let you? And the corporate machine doesn't have any sense of like, oh, you're working 110 and you're losing weight and, you know. The machine doesn't know. And so you have to protect yourself and say, you know, 60 is my limit because the corporate machine will just say, this is a great deal.

1:00:15You're working twice as much as anybody else for the same money. I love it. It will, in fact, lure you in because you'll say, oh, you're a high performer. I'll give you a raise and a promotion. And so it encourages you keep sacrificing your health and I'll keep paying and promoting you. it will never stop and it will drive you. It will let you drive yourself right off a cliff. So you have to draw that line. So how do you figure out what boundaries you need to set to still make a ton of money, but not burn yourself out? Well, uh, most work is wasted. So this is about calling your shots. Um, I would even challenge you, you know, what were you doing last Tuesday morning?

1:00:54Yeah, you don't know. Neither do I. The point being, um, only, most of our work is wasted. The way to be effective is to be better at ruthlessly looking at what's going to return money, where are the priorities. I know you talk to people correctly about have metrics, have a quick report that shows what's moving the needle and what isn't. Most people don't have that. And so they're just working on whatever came in in their email and And whatever someone else is asking for, they're not really dialed in on, I own this business, whether internal to a company or I own my own small business. What are my key metrics?

1:01:38And is this work really about that metric or is it just something someone else wanted me to do? It's such a great point. Yeah, I think the thing that helped me was I started calling. I call my CEO every day, who's Mark. I don't know if you've met him. You'd like him. I call him every morning. I say, this is what I'm working on. and obviously I have like longer term priorities and a to-do list and all of that but it's a check in with somebody else I'm like I think these are my top three priorities has anything changed in the business that I need to like pivot from this and because I can talk myself into just about anything or I can let the day happen to me and so my husband he prefers to talk to his little AI so every morning he's like I have the stack ranking give me my top three and then he sees if he's right or the AI is right on what he thinks he should be executed on that day.

1:02:23But otherwise, you become no longer the architect of your day, but rather a construction worker on the site. And you might be building the roof before the foundation, which is problematic. Or frankly, getting more water. But I thought you said something really interesting there, which is you're no longer in control of your day. You're letting your day happen to you or your exact words. That's where most people burn out and overwork is they're letting the day happen to them and they're very busy, but low impact. And that's the big difference between what gets people promoted. It's also what lets people work only.

1:03:04I think we probably both at least know of Tim Ferriss, I mean, for sure. The whole four hour work week theory, I never got down to a four hour work week, but the point was what's actually going to make a difference and what else is just filling up your day with someone else's nonsense. And that's why I asked, what did you do last Tuesday? In hindsight, if you were to go back and look at your calendar, maybe Tuesday you're like, oh, we nailed it. But maybe be like, you know, a week later, if I hadn't done that, it probably wouldn't matter. That auditing your past of how much did I waste and being relentless of I'm not going to let that happen again.

1:03:37I'm not going to let somebody pull me in to waste work makes a huge difference. You're an engineer by background, right? Yeah. I mean, it seems very systems thinking of you. And with our team, I was realizing, for instance, we held an event and we had one of our event planners. I saw she was potting succulents for the event. And I thought, wow, what is our prioritization that we think becoming florists is the highest priority for a business acceleration event? Like buy some flowers, hire somebody to bring them in. Wow, how have I miscommunicated so badly what our priorities are that that's where we're spending our time, right?

1:04:19And so it is interesting. You almost have to systems think everything you do every day as far as like, what are your main, we, I don't really believe in one North Star, because I think it could take your business too far in one direction or the other. We call them the two oars. So sort of what's our quantitative and qualitative metric to make sure we have like good top of funnel and good conversion in whatever we do. But every day I'm sort of asking myself, is the thing that I'm doing leading to one of the two oars? And if it's not, why do I think that's my top priority? I guess I'd be curious.

1:04:49I mean, I have to ask you about the goat, but like, what do you see Jeff Bezos do differently than everybody else as a leader? Yeah. So Jeff had a few things he really did differently. I think the biggest thing I take away is a little bit complicated, but he often said we need to be strategically patient, but tactically impatient. And what he meant by that was really valuable things take time to build. So his signature business, of course, is Amazon Web Services. Well, now it's over 15 years old. It took a long time to become this big billion dollar business and now hundreds of billions. So you had to work on it for a long time.

1:05:31That's being strategically patient. Tactically impatient, though, is he pressed those teams every day of what did you get done today? How did you move us closer? So it's feeling this urgency of how have I moved my business forward as far as I possibly can today? And yet realizing that building something of real value might take 10 years, building something of enduring value. He was really good at that. Um, you know, I learned so much from Jeff. I can certainly go on if you'd like. Yeah. Tell me more. So Jeff was often asked, and I think this is a really good question for the era of AI. He was always being asked as a technology leader, what's going to be different next year?

1:06:11What's going to be invented? And he's, he had this insight where he said, you know, that's an interesting question, but I prefer to try and think about what's not going to be different. because if I know something is going to be the same next year and the same five years from now, I can build a business on that without worrying about the sand shifting. So his big insight about Amazon's retail business, where you buy things as opposed to AWS, was, look, customers are always going to want three things. They're always going to want lower prices. They're always going to want more choices, more selection, more options.

1:06:50And they're always going to want more convenience, which sort of translated to faster delivery. So if you look at Amazon's history, it greatly broadened what it sells. It pushes to have the lowest price and it's sped up. First there was free shipping, but it was slow. Then there was Prime. Then there was one day Prime. Then there was same day. He said those three things are never going to change about people. And so I can build a business by focusing on what's not going to change. That's great insight. What did you personally take away from working with him? Like, how did he make you a better leader?

1:07:25Or what did you take where you're like, God, I've never heard that before. And now I'm going to do that. Jeff and his team developed the idea of focus on the customer, not the competition. Be relentlessly focused on what your customer needs and a competition will take care of itself. It will do it. It won't. So many people get so particularly in big business and Amazon can get into like, well, what's Microsoft doing and what's Google doing? And what do we need to do to stay ahead of meta? And that's all kind of churn. You're guessing you don't know you're starting these hype efforts because they're starting hype efforts.

1:07:59Jeff's viewpoint was, we have customers. What do they need? How do we invent something new on their behalf? So a signature invention there would probably be the Amazon Kindle. He could see like, oh, music has gone to MP3s. Movies are starting to go online. What's going to happen to books? Oh, they're going to become digital. People aren't going to want to read them on their computer. We need to do better. And that was his relentless focus on books are our business. We ought to figure out how to invent the next generation books. And that was him thinking about what does his customer need? You know, I saw this line from Elon Musk that I loved.

1:08:46It was basically like the line of something like as a leader of a company, your job is basically to see through the continuous compounding lies in the business and find the truth. And I think what he meant is like you have all these reports coming up to you that are a representation of what people want you to know and also what they think. And neither of those things may be total truth. And I could only imagine at a company as big as the ones that you've been at, how real that is. Like as a leader, how do you find the truth in your business units? And how do you figure out where the series of like compounding lies is, if you even agree with this sentiment?

1:09:28I completely agree with compounding lies. It's you said earlier, you could talk yourself into anything. Well, this is a company doing it on a larger scale, talking themselves into believing their own PR, talking themselves into. oh, this is a great idea. It's manifest destiny. I think the way Jeff partly got at this was driving hard on the numbers. So, okay, well, if it's manifest destiny, show me the numbers. What are the trends? Not only what's the market research, but then what are we seeing? He would wait a very long time for a business to go profitable if he could see the line. But if the line wasn't leading there, he would be very hard.

1:10:07I'm like, hey, this line never gets there. Like it never comes into, you know, what's the plan? You would drill really hard on the numbers. The second way, though, I think you figure this out is you go talk to people on the front line. You go talk to the individual engineers or the individual people delivering services, because all the managers in between are kind of reporting up things that make them look good. They're not trying to lie. Just no one wants to be the bearer of bad news. It's unpleasant. if you go all the way down. So I always maintain some contacts with people, many levels below me.

1:10:43When I had a big team, I would still talk to people who were five, six levels in this giant organization removed from me. And that's because they would tell me things that I, you know, just wasn't expecting or had no idea. And you get this little bite of reality that through all these layers of filters. You know, Jeff hated PowerPoint. And the famous story why it's old now, but when the space shuttle Challenger exploded, they went and found the PowerPoint slide had been used to justify the launch. And this PowerPoint had like seven levels of nested bullets and the tiniest bullet in the smallest font basically said we have a launch risk that could make it blow up and every bullet going outwards you can go find this slide made that a little nicer and of course bigger so if you look at the headline it's like launch readiness shuttle ready to go you know then it got slightly more real and smaller font of like some pre-launch issues.

1:11:55And as you got down, it finally, in the tiny event was like, hey, you know, if this goes wrong, it'll blow up. But all of the stuff above it had been, we're ready to launch. Looking backwards, it was clear, Jeff felt that the slideware had misled the decision makers. And he got that idea from a professor who reanalyzed it, but he brought that to us and said, we're not going to do that. We're not going to bury things in slides. Is it just easier to bury things in slides because of the graphic nature as opposed to in a brief all text is sort of equalized? That's partly it, but there's two more things going on.

1:12:34I want you to think a minute about the name Microsoft PowerPoint. Even if you use Google Slides, it came from PowerPoint. What was it about? Its name is about making powerful points. So it's a sales tool. so in that case and in most others the people running the slides a they're controlling the narrative and b they're using it to make their points so the amazon meeting style was to start with a six page narrative so six page narrative six pages of writing yes there's no way to make one thing bigger than the other but the other thing is this is a weird thing about our meetings everyone would sit quietly and read for 20 or 25 minutes out of an hour.

1:13:16And you'd see these, Jeff and everyone else with a pen making notes on the document. But it was a way to drive deep thinking without someone at the front of the room controlling the pacing and telling you what to think. Instead, you had to think on your own. And that, Jeff told me once, you asked what I learned from him. He said, whenever I read one of these documents, I stop on every sentence and ask, do I believe that? OK, now I'd read another. Do I believe that? And so he was constantly questioning, like, do I believe what this is saying? And there was no one in his ear kind of moving it along, saying, yeah, make a decision.

1:13:56You can see it's going to make us money. He could just think quietly to himself. It's really good. It's actually we did steal. I mean, everybody steals everything from Amazon, but we did steal this. Our leadership meetings were becoming really circular and they were losing all their signal to noise. And we were saying so many things, but really transferring very little knowledge. And so we started with a leadership brief. We only take 10 minutes to read it. So maybe we could expand upon that. But what happens after that? I don't think a lot of people talk about, we all have talked about the Amazon brief, but then who controls what happens next?

1:14:33And are there different people in the room that have different roles in the meeting? Good question. There aren't different people with different roles. Another thing I learned from Jeff, he always spoke last because he realized very quickly that even though he wanted strong leaders who would disagree with him, once the great Jeff Bezos says, I like this idea, everyone else is more or less going to line up behind that. And so fun story, we used to play a game, which is, can we get Jeff to speak out of term? Because we knew because we wanted our project approved or whatever, if we could get Jeff to say something, the rest of the room would kind of quiet.

1:15:14Damn. But Jeff knew, you know, Jeff was very good at staying quiet. And sometimes I'll talk about other people in the room. And sometimes the whole discussion would happen. And Jeff would come in at the end and say, I love this. We should do it. you go, oh, why'd we have to go through all that? But there was a good reason for it. Other times you would come into the end and say, no, this is not, here's my three thoughts. But other people in the room were expected, whenever you were in one of those rooms, you were expected to pretend it was your business and that your goal was to figure out what was being described in this document.

1:15:55And was it a good idea or not? And how could you improve it? And then give your best thinking. Now, it wasn't meant that you should just always talk. Some people wouldn't say a lot. Some people would. But there wasn't any particular speaking order. What would happen is after it was all read, we would actually say, it's another like super detailed thing. Should we go line by line? And so you would start reviewing the document from the top. And the person who owned the document or the meeting would be like, any questions on the first paragraph? If there were, you discussed them. Any questions on the second or any comments?

1:16:32And it was very methodical. And I think that's also why Jeff felt it was better than PowerPoint. I'm not sure exactly how many words are in six typewritten pages, but it's thousands. If you think about the typical PowerPoint deck, five or 10 words a slide, maybe 15 slides. I'm giving an update on my business that's, you know, 300 words. It's very superficial. But these narratives were very dense and they often had appendices as well, like extra information in case you had a question like, oh, here's the whole financials of the business or here's all the mockups. So it's very, very detailed. And would you do that at every type of meeting that you have at Amazon?

1:17:18It was not every meeting. It would kill you. But it was every meeting that was a big product decision or big product update. So it was our annual plan every year and any proposal for a new product, a new business. I started a couple different businesses at Amazon where I had to write these six pagers and say, I want to start a business. One of the businesses I helped start was our T-shirt printing business. So I had to justify like, hey, we've never printed T-shirts before. Why is this a good idea and why should we do it and what's going to be the consequences? And three of us worked together to create that six page brief.

1:17:58You know, now that's a more than billion dollar business at Amazon. But it started with a six pager. I mean, I'm sure you're used to it by now, but how cool is that? How many businesses you've built? I mean, I think I just used Prime Video last night. How many people do you think you've touched with Prime Video? It's got over 100 million, I think, active monthly users. Yeah. And then and that's I don't even know how many billions of dollars that things does. Then you've got this other business that does a billion dollars a year. How many billion dollar businesses do you think you've built inside of Amazon?

1:18:32I've tried to count that up before, because, of course, I'm curious. And I think it's about five, five or six billion dollar business, T-shirt printing, some of the sponsorship business at Twitch TV. so the gaming website um prime video prime gaming uh and i ran the amazon app store which was a billion dollar plus business so those are five different uh businesses and of course they're all over the place right the thing i love about amazon is video game you know uh social media sponsorships and t-shirts like you can work in so many varieties and that's why i say corporate life can be your training ground to then go out in the world when i think about my own business which is training and coaching one of the things i do is steal from video games video games um i'll try not go on too much length but they have this idea and free to play games you play any games on your phone ever a little bit?

1:19:34Not a gamer. Yeah, not a gamer. I mean, I do it just to see how they work so that our tools get better. Like I'll mess with Duolingo because the gamification is so good and it makes people actually want to learn something that's pretty miserable, aka languages. Yeah. So in most games, they have several levels where you can pay. You can pay a little bit to get something small and you can pay more. And the idea here is you're stratifying people from, I don't want to pay it all. I'm just going to, you know, sit back and play the free game to, oh, I'll spend a little bit of money because that's what I have or how much I like it to I love this.

1:20:08I want everything and I'm going to open my wallet and dump it all out for you. Well, the great thing about the virtual world is you can you don't have to have one price fits everyone. It's not like, you know, a Ford F-150 is$30 ,000 and that's the price. It's like you have the choice to sell the same truck for a thousand dollars to someone who that's all they'll pay and a million dollars to someone who wants the luxury version. I learned all that video games. I use it all in what I do today, where I have different offerings at different levels. The real point here, though, is the things I learned at Amazon make running my own small business way easier because I've seen this big scale.

1:20:53And I think that's probably you took some lessons you use here from all your time on Wall Street. Oh, yeah. I mean, there's no way this company would be successful. And we're still tired by the tail only five years in, you know. But if I hadn't been in corporate for a long time, because I learned how to take money and make more of it. I learned how to how do I have risk collars? What's an appropriate level of risk to make? How do I attract A players and keep them, especially the really good ones? And I mean, you're a perfect example. You're obviously hyper qualified, couldn't have started your own business, but you ended up staying at these companies for a long time.

1:21:31And so I guess one of my last questions for you might be like, what does it take to attract A players? How do you get people who are better than you to work for you besides just paying them millions of dollars? I think it's mission clarity. People want, you know, we talked again about Arthur Brooks. People want to know why what they're doing is going to be interesting, exciting, world changing. It doesn't have to be world changing in all ways, but it has to be somehow I'm making a mark that's going to be remembered. You mentioned Elon Musk. While I was at Amazon, I got a call to go work at SpaceX.

1:22:12I'm very transparent. So I went with a little bit of hesitation. I went told my boss, hey, I'm going to be gone tomorrow and I don't lie to you. I'm going to go interview at SpaceX. index and it was really funny because my boss said oh yeah i've talked to him about a job at tesla we didn't get along but you go see if it works for you i was like okay well you know the fact my boss had gone for an interview okay now i'm on good ground well it wasn't a fit for me either um but the point about a players is my explanation my boss was look elon musk is trying to put people on Mars, that's putting my name in the history books of the world.

1:22:52If that's the right job for me, I have to go for that. And even if I was worried my boss would be mad at me that I was going to go interview somewhere else, I said, look, I mean no offense, you know I love Amazon, but right now my job at Amazon won't put my name in the history books of the earth, and this job with Elon might. And so I have to go see. Now, wasn't the right fit, but I think that level of mission, I jumped in a heartbeat if it had been the right fit because of that chance to make such a difference. And I think people need to see that somehow, which is you're not just paying me for my time.

1:23:33If you just want me for my time, you're going to have to pay a lot more. It's got to be so much money that I'm telling myself, well, the difference is my yacht's going to be amazing, right? So who wants a yacht? That I don't understand. I mean, much love to Bezos. I guess, you know what? If I was as famous as he was, I'd probably want a yacht because people never leave you alone. But the monetary thing's never been that interesting for me, actually. I like money. Don't get me wrong. I like it a lot. I want it. Love our company, make it a lot of it. But if that is the only reason why to keep working, that would be super boring to me.

1:24:05And that's not his reason at all. you have to understand for people like jeff all all all costs are zero right he spent i think 500 million on that yacht he's worth you know 200 billion more like all costs are zero so what's the difference but that's not why he works um he's trying to make he's in fact said he's trying to work on things that only his grandchildren will see value from he's trying to work on things with a long-term horizon uh now whether or not you agree with him and what his priorities separate issue, but he's driven by a vision of the future he's trying to create. One, he doesn't even believe he'll survive the suit.

1:24:43Yeah, that is another level. How can you tell if somebody is an A player or not? I mean, how many people do you think you've interviewed? Over 10. I've interviewed, Amazon keeps good records on this. I've interviewed over 2 ,500 people. I've gone through, I estimate about 10 ,000 resumes, but I know I've done 2 ,500 interviews in my career. So how do you tell who is going to be an A player, who is not? Oh, I wish I could do it perfectly. Because of course, I've mis-hired people. The biggest thing we've learned to look at, and with leaders you can do this more because they have some sort of track record, is almost always looking what they have done predicts what they are going to do.

1:25:20So how much can you dig into that? My favorite trick for figuring out A players is everybody knows to give three references, if you ask. my trick was I would call a reference and say, Hey, who else knows this person that I could call? And that way I would get out of their list of chosen references because they know somebody else who knows them. And they'd be like, Oh, well, Cody worked with him. And then I would call you and you're not expecting a call. You haven't agreed to give a reference, but I'd say, I am considering hiring, you know, whatever Mark Smith. Uh, I know you worked with Mark. Would you give me a little bit of insight?

1:25:55And usually you'd be the one if you're like, Mark is awesome. Whereas you're like, well, I could talk about Mark. That was my real way to tell who was an A player is what were people who weren't sort of the listed references going to say about them? Plus, what were their accomplishments? It's not even the interview process. It's like the follow-up process afterwards for references that really shows. In the interview, you also get information. Basically, in the interview, I'm getting enough information to know, are you worth making all those calls? Right. Do I see the signs that you've done good work?

1:26:33You can explain your work. You face hard decisions. So I was often hiring leaders. A big question to your point about hard feedback is, have you ever had to let someone go walk me through that? Because it's sort of a watershed moment for a leader. Have they sat down across from someone and said, I'm sorry, but today is your last day with our company and dealt with that because it's the ultimate hard message. So it risks the person freaking out. I remember an employee that we terminated who started shattering things at his desk. And fear of that reaction means it's very hard. So if people have gone through that, it's one big signal.

1:27:24So I would get some of those signals in the interview. But then the final follow up was, are they really that good? I remember at least one case early in my career at Amazon where we got we were discussing the candidate at the end of the day and we realized we had missed something. and I called the candidate at his hotel and said, hey, we missed something. Can I come to your hotel and ask you a few more questions? Sadly, we didn't end up hiring the candidate. Another super interesting case, we were debating an executive candidate, a vice president, and Amazon had this idea of what was called a bar raiser.

1:28:05So a bar raiser was someone who wasn't going to work with the candidate. They sat outside the team and their job, because they weren't invested in the hire, they didn't have a hole to fill. They could sit outside it and really evaluate the process. Well, the team was debating, was unsure. And I Googled the guy and the first result was him bad mouthing his previous company. You know, and, but again, this is digging beyond the interview, right? You got it like in the interview, he seemed like a well-spoken person and we were getting close to hiring. And then when I just said, Hey, why don't we stop for a minute?

1:28:42Look at this. Like everybody read this link. He was done. Um, so another rule, never you asked what you can do to really, you talked about gossip. Well, gossiping about your company. Whenever I speak about things, Amazon doesn't do well. I'm very diplomatic about it. A hundred percent. Because Amazon made my life. And I understand that in a company that size, there have been bad managers because there's literally a million managers in the company. I'm sorry, 100 ,000 because there's a million employees. You're going to have some bad eggs and they've done some awful things. But overall, a company is miraculous and they're also transparent.

1:29:25This is our hardworking culture. If that's not you, please move on. Yeah, I totally agree with that. I feel the same way. like if if you say one negative thing about your employee like your past employer in the interview even if it is joseph stalin like i don't want to hear about it because you always know the best predictor of future behaviors past so if you're talking badly about this you're going to talk badly about us and that's just sort of how it goes and you know even hopefully when i talk i'm like well this employee did this but that was my fault because i didn't catch it so you know that taking ownership portion is so important if you actually want to be perceived as a winner.

1:30:03Yeah. You know, and I know when we, I worked at Vanguard and Goldman and State Street, all really big companies. Enormies. Right. Nothing as big as Amazon, but I don't talk badly about them except to say when I wasn't a culture fit. Like Vanguard for me was too communal and they have a culture of, if you stay there forever, you're very unlikely to get fired and you can have really continuous growth, but quite slow for comparative to a Goldman, which would be very fast. But if you're not very good, you're gone, you know, 20 % every year. And I preferred the Goldman to the Vanguard. Now, does that mean Vanguard's bad?

1:30:44No, it's an incredibly profitable company forever. But Goldman just fit me. And so I do think it also shows like really incredible a player mentality for you to say like this culture just wasn't the right culture for me yep like and that's exactly there'd be a lot of people who'd be like Cody how can you speak well of a place that cut 20 % what a brutal you know capitalistic awful blah blah blah and trying to lure you in to say oh yeah they were awful no that was who they were it was well known yeah is that great behavior well that's that's kind of your choice like no one made you work at Goldman No, exactly.

1:31:22So if you opt in, deal with it. And if it becomes too much for you, go somewhere else, which obviously ultimately you did, whether it was for that reason or more opportunity. Yeah. But don't trash them for who they are as long as they're not lying about it. Right. If they're saying, oh, we always take care of everybody and then cutting 20 percent, then then that's a place you might call them out. That goes back to what you talked about before, which is the leadership transparency aspect is the most important. And that sort of runs all the way through to a company. The last thing we always talk about when we hire, I always anti-sell them.

1:31:56I tell them all the terrible things that'll be about working here because the last thing I want is them to change their entire livelihood, come here and then be shocked at what they get. And that would be a real tragedy. It's a double tragedy because they're unhappy, but now you've invested and brought someone in and you have to fill your role again. And it's much better to tell people, here's all the ugly stuff. And in fact, there is psychology, interestingly, that if you tell people all the ugly stuff and they say, I can handle that, then when it bothers them, they'll be like, well, I chose it.

1:32:26They'll actually do better. That makes sense. OK, so let's end on this. There's someone listening right now who is growing in their corporate career. They get to take one piece of advice from this podcast. What is the one thing you would give them from all of your lessons at some of the best companies of our age? I think know what you want, know where you're going and work with your manager to get there. Right. Make it make a deal, build that relationship and say, look, I want to go here. How can I help you and you help me get there? That almost always works. So underrated. Your Twitter is amazing.

1:33:07Your ex is amazing. I love following you there. Is that where you like people to go to follow along or if they want coaching or more greatness? I think the best place to find me is LinkedIn because it's the sort of professional network. I write there every day. And in fact, the original writing is on LinkedIn and is transported to Twitter. So I'm glad you love the Twitter, but it's a mirroring of LinkedIn because I serve corporate professionals and that's where they are. I want to thank you for being here because I am taking notes and thinking about what I want to do differently right after this.

1:33:38So I know for the person listening, they're going to do the exact same thing. I think it's really rare, and you already know this, for people who are corporate and really successful to then go share this stuff, not normal. I know you've gotten backlash for it. And I know you've also gotten incredible things for it. So just thank you for sharing and sharing without being too politically correct, because that's not very useful to people who are in the midst of all this today. So thank you again.

1:34:09Thank you.