Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon)

26:11A lot is in your control. And what is in your control is to start practicing those next level skills, start working with your leadership on, where can I take on a strategic project? How can I become more of an inventor? I teach some about how to sort of systematically be invented. It's not pure magic. You know, Edison said it's what, 1 % inspiration and 99 % perspiration. You can learn the 99 % and the 1 % isn't as hard then. So you start showing those next level traits and as I describe it most succinctly, how do you make yourself the person who will be chosen out of the eight? And you can be chosen, there are several ways to move up.

26:54Your boss can leave or be let go. They can be promoted to another role. But another way is I have several, I coach now and I have several clients recently. I was just talking to a client yesterday. Her two peers were let go. They were all the same level. Her two peers were let go and she was given their teams. And you know, she expressed that her boss have been told you have too many, you have too many senior managers for the size of your organization. We need to do some change in the organization. Clean house and put all your people under the folks who have potential. Well, obviously she must be one of those people because she still has her job and has more people and more to do.

27:40And unfortunately her peers are shopping for new employment. So be that person and that's where the magic loop comes in. Be that person. I was just talking actually to a senior PM leader who pointed out that with this kind of lean environment of a lot of flattening of orgs and a lot of layoffs, this is becoming increasingly hard, exactly what you're describing. There's just less spots because companies are running more lean and so you just kind of have to wait. I think part of this advice you just shared, which is the classic demand. Do the job before you have the job makes all the sense in the world because once people see that you can do it, obviously they will feel a lot more comfortable putting you in that position.

28:18And they'll be looking, you know, I always remind people as a leader, I want the best people under me I can have. It's not that I don't wish to promote you. If you think about my job, this helps people, right? I have selfish motivation to promote you. A lot of people think like, oh, the boss of their holding me down. Well, maybe some bosses are, but why wouldn't I want stronger, more capable direct reports? Why wouldn't I want people under me who can do more of my job? Frankly, that's the only way I can do less of my job. Plus this pressure you're always getting from your reports are like, hey, I'm like, ready to get promoted.

28:52Is this time yet? You mentioned this word inventiveness and I was just listening to Jeff Bezos on Lex Friedman. And I don't know if you heard this, but he Jeff Bezos described himself most as an inventor more than anything else that he does. Is that something that you think about? Is that influenced by Jeff Bezos anyway? That idea of being an inventor as a leader? I'll say a couple of things about that. First, I know you talk to my old boss Bill Carr, who wrote working backwards. What I don't know is if he shared with you that after he published it, he actually realized there was a better title.

29:26He wishes that he had called the book The Invention Machine because what Jeff was trying to do with Amazon was create the most inventive company, the company that would systematically out invent others. And so while working backwards as a great title, Bill and Jeff think they should have called it The Invention Machine. When I joined Amazon, I did not think of myself as an inventor, but I saw that we had these leadership principles think big and invent and simplify that pushed on that. And I said, I'm in trouble. I don't know how to do this. And I sat down and thought about that. Like, what am I going to do?

30:06It seems like that's required. And I figured out how to become systematically inventive. So I now hold over 70 patents as one benchmark of inventiveness and they were all created during my 15 years in Amazon. And the way I did that, inventiveness actually isn't that hard. I teach about this. And to invent systematically, first you do need to be somewhat of an expert in whatever area you want to invent. So like, Lenny, if you and I say, let's get together and we're going to invent cancer drugs. We have the problem that were neither of us as far as I know is a biologist, a doctor. We don't have the right background.

30:46We don't know what we're doing. So we would just be fumbling around, I guess, with a bathtub full of chemicals, hoping. It's probably not going to work out that well. So you have to be something of a knowledgeable expert. But then the second thing people don't do, is they don't spend dedicated time actually thinking. They feel like, oh, invention is just going to come to me. When I want to invent, I get away from all my devices. I go in a room with the problem I have and I force myself to actually concentrate on, what do I know and how can I invent? And the most straightforward way to invent is not to somehow come up with something completely new, but instead to put together two things that exist.

31:28And so my example of this, I have a patent I talk about a lot for a drone delivery for Amazon, but the drone doesn't fly from the warehouse. Instead, a truck with no top drives slowly around the neighborhood and the drones go back and forth from the truck. As opposed to the driver stopping it every house, you can have four or six drones hitting everything in the neighborhood. And the way I came up with this idea is one day I was thinking about drones and delivery, but I loved military history. And so I was thinking also about an aircraft carrier. And I was thinking, is there a way to have an aircraft carrier for drones?

32:12And from that, it was very quick for the light bulb to go on and say, well, what about a truck? And so I am this patent and we haven't seen this become reality yet. I'm waiting for my idea to become part of Amazon's drone delivery system, but I think ultimately it will. That is badass. I'm imagining returns come back to the truck and we're using that rope thing that just captures them with that little hook. Yeah, well, there's no reason that, you know, same thing when you want to return something as opposed to taking it to the UPS store or whatever, you just put it on your porch and on your phone on your app, you know, maybe you take a picture of it so that the drone can recognize the box where you put it in a designated spot.

32:58And you push a button and the drone takes your return away. Like, yes, there's no reason. Can't wait for that. And it takes your dog backs and it sometimes is part of it. My dog's too heavy. Thank you. My dog's not. There's like an owl in our backyard that we sometimes or he's going to come grab our dog. On this idea of invention, this is really interesting. I didn't plan to talk about this, but for someone, like, say, a PM on a team that wants to get better at invention, innovation, big thinking, is there a practice you find helpful here? Like, is it block off two hours? Get a pen and paper and just think about it.

33:32The specific two adjacent things working together. So that's part of the process is put in dedicated time. The interesting thing I would say is you don't mean that much time. Two hours is great, but you only need two hours once a month. People think invention takes all this time. The thing is, once you have one good idea, it often takes years to express that. So you had the idea to have a newsletter. I know some of the history of your newsletter. You've been working on the expression of that idea for years now. Jeff and Amazon had ideas like, let's have prime shipping. Well, prime is still getting better and still being worked on.

34:09It's a 20 -some -year -old idea. You know, the Kindle, a decades -old idea now, still getting better. So the point here is, you don't need very many good ideas to be seen as tremendously invented. Like Elon Musk, Tesla, he can kind of like, dust off his hands and be like, I am now an Edison like inventor. So he keeps doing it, but you don't need that many inventions. This touches on something else, Jeff Fezos shared on the podcast, that most of his innovation and work is in the optimizing phase. It's not that here's the idea. It's the making it cheaper and better and faster. And that's where most of the good stuff comes from.

34:49Like in this point of Tesla, you all have this idea. And now the hard work is actually making it scalable and cheap enough. For people to use, not just like an electric car. With the idea of Jeff saying that invention is really a lot of the incremental and optimization, I completely agree with that. To invent, well, you need a base idea, but then there's so much of the work is making that idea real. And again, Prime is a great example of this. The Amazon Prime Program was a great example of, okay, we want fast free shipping. We want this program. That was a one time idea that they did build. But now Prime is expanded.

35:32First, it was two day in the US, then one day in the US. Now it's same day in the US. But also they added Prime Video, Prime Music, Prime Gaming. There's actually something like 25 things you get free with Prime. Most people have no idea because you get free photo storage. This ongoing list and all of that is that incremental optimization to make it better, better, better, better. And of course, Jeff's goal, which you probably heard him say, was to make Prime and no brainer. To where you would be irresponsible, really, not to be a member. I know you have an awesome Jeff Bezos story that I want to get to.

36:08But before we do that, one more question along this line of career advice and progression. So I read somewhere that you've interviewed over 2 ,500 people over the course of your career. And so kind of going back to the beginning of a career or at least getting a job, what have you found is most helpful in standing out as a candidate when you're interviewing and just essentially getting hired? What advice do you have for people that may be going through an interview process right now? There's a lot of evidence that suggests that the number one and two factors in any interview are appearance and enthusiasm.

36:40And it doesn't mean you have to be beautiful. But show up somewhere looking like you're interested in the job, not in your pajamas. And most importantly be enthusiastic. People want to work with people that want to work with them. So if you seem very judgmental of the company and like, you have to sell me on it, you're going to turn them off. I look at every interview of whether or not I really want this job. I might have decided I don't want the job. I still want the offer. And so I come to any interview I do, leaned in and talking about how excited I am to be a part of this opportunity and what I know about the company.

37:20Beyond those cosmetics, the biggest thing I see particularly at higher levels is people talk about what they have done but not why it mattered. They don't talk about the impact. See, a leader is not hiring someone to just do work. They're hiring someone because they have a problem where a need. And so if you can show them, look, here's the things I've done that have made a difference. Here's the things I've done that have helped my past employers where I've had an impact. So I didn't just do work, that makes you a worker. Someone who has an impact is more of a leader. And leader doesn't need to mean people manager, just a higher level, right?

38:02I have done something that solved the big problem and here's how it changed the company or customer outlook. That's what I'm looking for in an interview is are you bringing me an understanding of the business that shows you contributed to the business or you're just telling me how hard you worked? Awesome. On that first piece, now that most interviews I imagine are over Zoom in terms of enthusiasm and looking professional. Is there anything you've found that you people may not be thinking about in those two buckets? Oh yeah, you know, show the person full -time dedication. So unless you really don't have any choice, don't take an interview from a car, don't have your camera off.

38:44You know, eye contact is still a real thing. Body language is still a real thing. Gestures like I'm making now with my hands. They're part of your presentation. And so be fully present and try to project through the camera a little bit of, I'm excited to be a part of this and I appreciate the opportunity. I often tell people the best way to prep for an interview might be a good night's sleep and a pot of coffee that being fully engaged and energetic is a huge lever. Awesome and I think basically the feedback there is don't over obsess with the content. There's a lot of value in just how you come across.

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40:40That's Arcade .software slash Lenny. Now let's take a little trip to failure corner. This is something that I do more and more on this podcast. Talk about people's failures in their career and their learnings. And you have a fairly great story of failing the great Jeff Bezos and surviving to tell the tale. Could you share that story? I do. It's both like a highlight and a low light. I had been at Amazon about six years. I had become a director and I was responsible for launching Amazon's App Store. And so we were building an Android -based App Store to go on Google phones and eventually on the Kindle tablets.

41:22And we got to launch day. And at that time, Jeff used to write a letter introducing new products. He would write a letter that said, Dear customers, today Amazon's proud to launch Blah -blah -blah and it's got these great features. And I hope you really enjoy it. Thanks, Jeff. And we would take down all the sales stuff on www .amazon .com and that letter would fill the whole screen. And so he had written a Jeff letter. And this Jeff letter emphasized a particular feature of our product that he really liked. So that something that made it a little different. And that specific thing was we had a button called Test Drive that you could click on and it would open the app in a simulator in your web browser.

42:10So you could check out the app and interact with it before putting it on your phone. So he thought this was really cool and he was all about it. Well, my team had built all this technology. We had Test Drive working. It was kind of a hard piece of technology if you think about simulating any of thousands of arbitrary apps. And we worked all night to launch it. And it wasn't quite working at 6am. We were still debugging. Now you know engineers very well and I'm sure most of your listeners know about engineers. Even if that's not their discipline, we always think we're this close to finding the last bug.

42:49So about 6 .15am, I get a message from Jeff that says, Hey, I woke up. Where's the letter because it was supposed to go live at 6am right after the markets in New York would have opened at 9am Easter. And he said, where's the letter? And I write him back and I say, well, we're working on a few problems. But what I'm thinking in my head is getting a shower, getting a shower. I just need 20 minutes, getting a shower. It's for Jeff to get in the shower. Yeah. And like 30 seconds later, I have an email back that says, what problems? And at this point, I have to start explaining and you know, I end up explaining that we're having a problem with a database.

43:35And we're debugging this database problem. And he's like, wait, there's a database in your design. We're trying to eliminate all workable databases and move to AWS. Why do you even have this? And you know, he's just getting more and more frustrated and angry. And he starts copying in my boss and my boss's boss who's with Jeff Wilkie, the CEO of retail. And they start asking me questions. And it's just this snowballing, you know, but like 730 in the morning, Jeff is clearly angry. And there's this list of other people waking up and feeling like, well, Jeff is angry. So my job is to be even more angry.

44:11And it's just raining in on me. Oh man. So what did I do? The interesting is, what do you do in the, when you know, in the future richest man in the world is mad at you. He wasn't quite rich as man in the world yet, but he was headed there. So the first thing I did was I owned it. I said, yes, it's it's it's not working. It's my fault. I will deal with it. I took ownership. And the second thing I did was start updating him very proactively and saying, here's where we are. Like 8am, this is exactly where we are. This is what we're going to do in the next hour. And this is when you'll get your next update.

44:52Like I will update you again at 9am. So here's our plan. And even though Jeff had sort of lost trust in me, like it's down and it's not right and I'm mad, given that he agreed with the plan, he was willing to give me 60 minutes. And then I would update him again and say, okay, this is what we've done. And this is what we're going to do. And we'll update you again at 10am. So I was buying life one hour at a time. Now the other thing I did, and this is a good thing about Amazon, as more and more leaders got copied into this angry thread, they started reaching out in in back channel and saying, we've all been under Jeff's eye of Sauron.

45:33We know it's miserable. What can we do to help? And essentially, Andy Jassy's organization, which was AWS at that time, and his CTO, a guy named Werner Vogels, said, you're having a database problem. Let's get you some principal engineers from the AWS database team. And these principal engineers showed up at 9am roughly, and they looked at our design. We had made some fundamental mistakes in our database usage. And they said, you know, it's too complicated to fix this. We're just going to give you like 500 AWS machines so that your crappy design will run anyway. Like that's the immediate fix. And I'm like, okay, well, I guess if you have 500 databases lying around because your AWS is a great solution, and that's what they did.

46:27So the next step is we fix the problem. A bunch of us work together very hard to get the problem all fixed. Now it took all day, and Jeff was still frustrated because the opportunity to sort of control the messaging and the media by having his letter up had passed. People would notice our launch and the articles had been written. And so Jeff was still very mad. So we fixed the problem, but Jeff now had no trust trust in us. The weekend went by, he was using the system like looking for bugs because he's like, oh, this team's not reliable now. Ethan's not reliable. I better check it myself. So you have the CEO checking on you.

47:11And I he found a problem. And email me like Saturday night at 9 o 'clock. I was doing this and it broke. And luckily I was able to tell him exactly what happened by like 930. Anyway, the next part of the story is that following week, I had a meeting with him on another topic. So I was part of this small group that was trying to figure out how to build a competing browser. You may not remember, but Amazon had a browser called Silk for a while. And I was invited to this meeting, but I wasn't a critical participant. So you may know this idea from Scram where they say some people are pigs and some are chickens and the chickens are sort of observers.

47:54I was a chicken in this meeting. And that turns out to be a great analogy because I was thinking, should I chicken out not go? Like I could skip this meeting with the CEO who's angry at me. But when I had that thought, I realized, you know, if I can't face the CEO, I'd better pack my desk. Like that's the end. So I went to this meeting early and Jeff always sat in the same chair. So I knew where he would sit when he came in. So I sat down right next to his chair and I thought, I don't know, let's find out. And so the meeting goes by and of course in my mind, Jeff is totally ignoring me, like not even looking at me.

48:30But I think that's just me projecting because remember, I wasn't central to the meeting. So at the end of the meeting, everybody gets up to leave. He turns and looks at me and says, so how are you doing? I bet it's been a hard week. And I thought, oh, okay, we're going to talk. And I said, yeah, you know, I just sort of answered him with, of course, it's been hard, but here's what we're doing and here's what we're going to do in the future. And we had a very human conversation. And I didn't believe Jeff would have forgotten that I let him down. But it was clear he had forgiven it. So I was still going to have to, as it turns out, re -earn his trust.

49:10But the thing I did that's key for people to learn from is it's really easy to flay him. He had been flaming me, right? Writing angry emails. Angry emails are easy. Stidding free feet from someone and being angry with them face to face is hard. And when faced with, I can either start ranting at this person who reports to me, or I can say something nice, he chose to say something nice and that rebuilt our relationship. So the end of the story is two years later, I was promoted to vice president. So even though I had failed the CEO on this very public watch, where he was very definitely mad at me.

49:59I re -earned the trust. I showed I had learned the lessons of how to launch more reliably without outages. And I was promoted. And so I share that story because I think it, what I want people to understand is if I can get away with publicly failing one of the richest, the most famous inventors on earth and then get promoted and finish my career at Amazon very successfully, you can dig out of any hole. You just have to manage it, right? That is an amazing story. Okay, so there's a lot of lessons that I want to pull on here. One is just if you get caught in a situation like this where something completely fails, what I took down as you were talking.

50:42One is admit, yes, this is a huge problem, own it. This is not, like, don't try to deflect. Two is the way I describe what you did here is something I call puritizing and communicating, where you puritize here's what we need to do. And then communicate, here's our priorities. And I love that you have this like every hour, here's the latest, here's the latest. So make it, make people understand you are on it and you will continue to keep them updated. Because I imagine one of the worst fears is I have no idea what's happening here. I'm going to go in and start micromanaging. You're exactly right.

51:13I'm trying to hold off micromanagement. I'm trying to give them like, okay, I believe with this and I can wait an hour. And then I can wait another hour because that team seems to be honest. So I'm trying to rebuild trust one hour at a time and avoid having three or four levels of management all come in and start helping. And then I love this other piece of advice of kind of meet them in person, try to take it off offline essentially, which I know you did later, but that's such a good point that it's hard to be as mad and angry and flamey in person. People are just going to be like, okay, I get it.

51:45Let's try to figure this out. Amazing. Is there anything else? Those are the three that I took away just like if you're caught in that situation in the moment, is there anything else that you found to be really helpful? I mean work hard and fast, right? You do have to fix the problem. My team had been up all night. I had to start sending people home to sleep and shifts. We had to pull in all this help. And so it was a very hard weekend. You know, when you have a mistake, it's on you to pull out the stops even if it's uncomfortable to recover from it. And again, this is not the time to be like, well, you know, it's the weekend now and my team, you know, will hit it Monday.

52:26Like that would have been like, I'd have been out the door so fast. You know, I would have had like the comic Wiley Coyote skid marks as I bumped down the street. So I would say that's important. It's just it's part of showing ownership. The other part of this is something I went through for a while when I was starting to become a more senior leader is I had a lot of imposter syndrome and the fear that if I messed up, everything would crumble. People would see that I don't actually know what I'm doing and I'm not really ready for this level of seniority. And so there's a fear of like one big mistake.

52:58It's over. Clearly, this was an example of a huge mistake and it was not over for you. Is there any lessons there that you take away of just like you can mess up and still do well, even if it's this level of mistake? I think a lot of people in my position would have quit. They would have let the shame. I was just a little bit bullheaded where I'm like, yeah, I messed up, but like I'm still I know I'm still a good person and a good worker. Yes, I made a mistake, but I'm going to move on. You know, part of the story I haven't told that you might enjoy is I mentioned that Jeff Wilkie was Jeff's number two at that point.

53:34Jeff Bezos, number two person and he was my skip level. Well, he during this process, he came physically into our offices and he wanted to talk to me. And my manager, who was vice president, said, hey, Jeff, this is my team. I own it. If you have any criticisms, say it to me, you know, you don't mean to talk to my team. And Jeff Wilkie said to my boss, whose name was Paul, Paul, that's excellent leadership. I really appreciate what you're doing. Please step out of the way I want to talk to Ethan. You're doing a great job, Paul. Now step aside and then he kind of read me the riot acts. And the rest of that funny story is I was so happy with how well my meeting with Jeff Bezos went.

54:22I pat him myself on the back and I'm going to go face Jeff Wilkie now. I'm going to schedule a meeting with him and do the same thing. You know, I've got this down. So I go to meet with Jeff Wilkie, figuring like I'm going to run the same playbook. I'm going to look him in the eye and all will be forgiven. And Jeff Wilkie looks at me and says, Ethan, when you launched this, did you know you were gambling with the result? Did you know it might not work? And I said, yes, we had immediate commitment to launch on that day. And I thought shooting for the day was more important than perfect certainty.

54:54And he said, well, two things. First, you were wrong. You were wrong to prioritize day over our reputation. You let Amazon down in public. And that was a mistake. He said, second though, at least you knew you were gambling. If you hadn't known you were gambling, we'd be discussing your departure. And I'm like, okay, here I thought I was rolling in this meeting. Like I'm going to run my relationship playbook. And he's evaluating whether or not to keep me. The bullheadedness is even after he had told me he had been considering firing me. Mike, well, he isn't. So I'm just going to go forward. And a lot of that, that stubbornness of sure I made a mistake.

55:42But like I'm not going to live in shame about it. I think is what people can take away. I think a lot of people feel they're more dead in the water than they are because everybody makes mistakes. Jeff Jeff in Firephone, which it's like his, that'll be an albatross around his neck. Jeff in Firephone will be a phrase of anybody who knows Amazon for the rest of his life. Yeah, we talked about on the Working Backwards podcast. And why didn't Working Backwards work for the Firephone? We talked about it. I love that these quotes and lines are so seared in your brain. You can remember it like word for word exactly what they were.

56:21I'd relive that moment many times. And then just along the lines of working right out of the hole is the essentially what you did just succeed for two years and do great. And that's that was the key there. I know I think I did have to learn. I've always been sort of an operational cowboy. Meaning I like to go fast and loose. I prioritize speed. And I really had to step back and say, okay, Amazon, Amazon at this level and scale doesn't like that. So I've taught myself a new phrase which was fear the New York Times headline. Like be aware that if Amazon is down, it goes up on every news website immediately.

57:02And so if Amazon has some kind of mistake, it's on Wall Street Journal and CNN. And so as a leader, I had to think is what I'm doing going to generate a New York Times headline because if it is, I'd better be really careful. And that's that's what I taught myself is like, you can't be paralyzed. But you do, I taught my whole team like, we don't want to be in the New York Times for the wrong thing. And that was the lesson. Along the line of the lessons, last question here, just what's something that you took away from the way you approached it that you shouldn't should have changed or should have done differently that you just you've done differently since, you know, obviously like don't like you mentioned this idea of don't promise a date that you're not that certain you're going to hit.

57:51I guess is there anything along those lines? I have two things here. First, Amazon loved in the past. They love surprise launches. They love the idea of we're going to be quiet quiet quiet because basically it was a reaction. I think to Microsoft where they felt Microsoft always talked about what was coming and then pushed the dates back. And so there was this whole thing about vapor where an Amazon wanted to be the other way, which is we won't say anything and then it will just be there. The problem I came to say is the biggest thing I learned with surprised launches is that you're surprised by what doesn't work.

58:23And so I shifted the approach to let's do a lot of beta testing. We always, even if others don't agree, fight and say, you're right, we're not going to have a surprise launch. Some of our beta testers, even if they sign NDAs are going to leak. And that's a that's a better outcome than launching something that doesn't work. That's one lesson. The other lesson is this thing that broke in front of Jeff Bezos. Ultimately, it was a new college graduate engineer who wrote that code. And he had been left alone to write part of our user interface. But he had written it in such a way that it didn't scale.

59:11Now, we didn't give him any help or oversight. We left him on his own because we were busy focusing on other pieces of the problem. And shortly after the disaster, he left the company. And the mistake I made was not reaching out to him and really reassuring him. I'm like, yes, you wrote the bug, but that's not on you. The system failed you and we don't see you bugs happen. So the thing I regret in this whole thing is not realizing that even though no one in the team ever yelled at him or whatever, he knew it was his bug. And he obviously saw me and others sort of taking a beating. And so he left.

59:58And I wish he hadn't done that. And I wish more than that I had stepped in. I didn't realize what he was feeling. It's interesting. The lesson there isn't catch that person sooner and notice these links in the chain that may break, but it's more just be there for that human that have this challenge that people may not be focusing on. Because we lost a good person and he probably felt very bad about it. And we all feel bad when we make mistakes. That can be prevented. But he felt undue responsibility, I think. And that I really regret. This is actually a really good example of ownership. You mentioned this term ownership.

1:00:40And that connects to Amazon has these leadership principles. I think there's 14 of them. One of them is around ownership. And apparently you help craft the actual language for that principle, which I think is a huge deal with in Amazon. I imagine very few people have a say over how to define and describe and say these principles. Could you just talk about this principle that you contributed to, how it came to be that you helped actually write it? Amazon is now kind of on its fourth version in my mind. Maybe there's more, but it's fourth major revision of its leadership principles over its 25 plus year history.

1:01:18And when it was going from version one to version two, Jeff and his leadership team sat down together and actually in version one, there were three different lists. They were like leadership principles in core values and something else. I don't remember. And they were like, three lists is stupid. Let's make one list. Well, ownership, the term had been a part of one of those lists. But when they merge everything, they took it out. And this guy, Jeff Wilkie, I mentioned the number two and the leader of retail, he brought a bunch of us, a bunch of his directors. He brought the proposed list to us in a meeting and said, Hey, this is the proposed new version.

1:02:01You have any comment. And we all sat around and talked and said, Where's ownership? Ownership is missing. So we we told him he said, look, ownership is missing. We think it should be there. And he said, well, why don't you propose a draft? And so about a half dozen of us sat around and rost out a draft of how we felt ownership should be written. And I proposed these six words, which are an owner never says, that's not my job. Maybe that's seven words. So I proposed this specific language as a part of it. And we sent off this draft and months go by, we hear nothing. And then one day the leadership principles are announced.

1:02:47And ownership is back in. It's been modified. But that an owner never says, that's not my job is a part of the leadership principle. And it's remained to this debt. And what I love about that is it's probably the most because Amazon has, you know, one and a half million employees who live by the leadership principles, it's probably the most impactful thing I've ever written. Wow. So those seven words are the most impactful thing you've ever written. I love that. And I totally get that. I'm really looking at the principles right now and it comes right at the end of that principle willing to the 14 leadership principles.

1:03:22Is there another principle that you really love or one or two? I don't know. It's probably hard to pick your favorites. I'm a huge proponent of bias for action. Bias for action says speed matters in business and, you know, many decisions are reversible. And so it's important to go faster. And I think people don't understand that in a competitive environment, being right is good, but being quick is necessary because if there are 10 startups working on an idea, some of them will gamble and they'll make bad gambles and they'll go out of business. But some of them will gamble and make an early bet and be right.

1:04:00And if you're not moving quickly, you'll be beaten by the people who maybe got lucky. And so you've got to have a process that values speed values. What can we do today? What can we commit to today? So I really like bias for action. Now that is what got me in trouble with Jeff, right? I was I was willing to gamble. So it has to be in balance, but that's my other favorite. I was again, that Jeff Bezos interview with Lex Freeman. He was talking about how with this with Blue Origin, his with the way Amazon, he thought about Amazon as customer obsession. That was like the core goal and and differentiator of Amazon with Blue Origin.

1:04:37He wanted to be decisiveness. Yeah, basically leading into this bias for action, like fully, which is really. Yeah, I saw that part of the interview and I thought, wow, you know, that's exactly right because again, rockets blow up and they have people on them like you've got to get it right, but you also have to keep moving because there's always one more thing you can safety test. So how do you balance it? Yeah, it's interesting. With rockets, if like that's the one that you pick, it's a pretty bold to be all move forward kind of thing. I'm reading. So this principle again, going back to ownership.

1:05:15So you basically suggested this phrase, you didn't hear anything, and I'll say it becomes part of the whole thing. Do that feel weird that they never told you or I don't know if they give you credit for that or it's like, no, it's great. Yeah, you know, I wouldn't even claim credit for it except I kept a copy of the email that says, even things that should say, blah, like I have the written proof, because it's not about the credit. I'm very happy and proud that those words were kept, but in Amazon, I doubt if Jeff knows I wrote those words, you know, it's not like I've ever told him, like, hey, do you know you kept my words?

1:05:51Like that's not appropriate. It's just a fun anecdote. And it does show, I guess, something people can learn from that though, you can influence way up in a company if your ideas are good. You know, and also when we challenged, Jeff Wilkie was a strong, opinionated leader who didn't necessarily always love being challenged. And so when we first told him like, well, we think you're missing ownership, he was like, you know, like you're staying at the whole S team can't get its leadership principles, right? I mean, it wasn't exactly that way, but he was very much like, well, is this really necessary?

1:06:30Why do you think it's necessary? And his challenge to us to write it was kind of framed as like, well, if you're so sure, it's good, show us, right? And so, yeah, but again, I'm stubborn. I'm like, all right, let's write it. And we did. That's funny. That's not a great example of leadership where he's like, hey guys, I need your feedback on this thing, but like, no, don't actually tell me anything's wrong. Well, yeah, yeah, I mean, for a bunch of directors to kind of critique the work of people to levels higher. He wanted it, but you know, then he's sort of naturally resistant to it. We're kind of, you know, poking it as baby.

1:07:14It's unlikely that there's something huge missing in terms that there was. Yeah. And I guess just on these principles, people may not know this, but this is where disagreeing commit comes from. It's actually have backbone disagreeing commit. We talked about this on the podcast about working backwards. I also love leaders that write a lot that comes up a lot. And I love that just like to be successful, you need to be right. He can just, you know, project confidence. He can't just be in a bunch of meetings and ship things. You need to be right to be successful. And that one's been rewritten to carefully say, you know, it's always interesting.

1:07:45What is the history of the edits, which you wish you could see the edit history on these? That one got modified to say leaders, something about leaders work to disc and for actively work to disconfirm their beliefs. And the key there is it was trying to get at the idea that you've got to be very open and always be questioning, yes, I think I'm right. But what's the new evidence? What am I learning? What's changing? And in fact, that act of, it also says they seek diverse perspectives. And that was a way of getting at what's called, you know, DEI, diversity equity and inclusion. That's a subtle nod towards if everyone in the room is a 50 -year -old white man, you may not really be making the right overall decision for Amazon's customer base.

1:08:37You may be making the one for like 50 -year -old white suburban Seattle lights. Right. And so it's just some of these every word in those has been studied as an invisible word inside the company. Amazing. Okay, let's move on to the final area I wanted to spend a little time on. And this is called Contrarian Corner. I'm curious if you have any contrarian opinions about things that basically that other people believe that you don't believe, something you see that many people don't see. Is there anything that comes to mind? Yeah, I think a place where I'm currently very contrarian is the return to office movement.

1:09:17You know, many leaders at my level appear or publicly favor the need to get back into the office potentially full -time. And I'm contrarian on this because of innovation. Specifically, I looked it up. You can check my facts on Wikipedia. The first purpose built office, the first building ever built to be an office was built in 1726 in London. And so we're about 300 years into learning how to use offices well. And what that means is offices aren't going to get much better. Like, what's the last major thing you can think of that got better in offices? You might say, well, open offices, but a lot of people will say that's not even a good idea.

1:10:03These big rows of desks and loud pits. With working from home, we've only been doing that for a few years since the pandemic began. And at all since the internet started 20 years ago, which one is likely to have more opportunity for improvement? There's so many things we haven't explored with remote work. And I think the people who say, oh, you know, back to the office, it's because we know it works. Well, we know what it is. But I have so much more faith in the opportunity to improve the remote experience. And so I think long term, it's going to try up. The one other place where I'm a huge contrarian is doing business on a handshake.

1:10:44I understand companies need lawyers and, you know, I have an attorney for certain things. But, you know, I coach people, most of the people I coach, there's no India in place, there's no contract in place. They pay me through PayPal and I do good coaching for them. I think too much of the world is contract driven. And we've lost the idea of your word being your bond. And like, you can actually trust me to follow through on my commitments. And I'm a contrarian there. I realize I will occasionally get burnt. Someone will behave in a way. You know, they'll, they'll let me down. But I think when we're always suspicious of people, that's a high cost.

1:11:26And the other place I'm contrarian is just doing business on faith. That reminds me, Sam Altman has a similar philosophy of just like trust people and assume it'll all be okay. Sometimes you'll get burned, but on balance, it'll end up being much better for you and everyone around you. I didn't know that Sam said that, but I strongly agree with it. Yeah. Although he had some challenges recently, I don't know if it's working great, but it ended up great for him. So anyway, okay, we've actually reached our very exciting lightning round before we get there. Is there anything else you wanted to touch on or share or leave listeners with?

1:12:01No, I really enjoyed this conversation. You know, I could talk about careers forever. And I love doing that. But I think we've covered a ton today that will really help people. So I'm good. Let's hit the lightning round. All right, with that, we reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready? I'm ready. Ethan, what are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people? Two or three books. My number one recommendation is a book called DisciCiv. It's by Chip and Dan Heath, and it's about the science of making better decisions. The reason I recommend it so much is it will make your career better because leaders are decision makers, but also your personal life.

1:12:41So I apply it at least as much in my personal life as I do in my professional life. My second book, my second most recommended book is Leadership and Self Deception, much less known than decisive, a little bit harder to approach. It's by a group, a research group called the Arbenger Institute. And it's about how to the self deception is we cause a lot of our interpersonal problems while blaming them on others. And it walks through how are you part of the problem you're having with somebody else? And what can you do about it? The third and final book was recently brought to me by someone I work with that you know Jason Yume.

1:13:21That book is the Almanac of Navalrabicon. And Navalrabicon is an angel investor responsible for angels list. But what I love about that book is he has a recipe. He really boils down how to be successful while loving what you do. And he says, no one can be a better version of you. Don't try to copy me and be, oh, I'm going to be like Ethan or I'm going to be like Lenny. Instead, figure out what you uniquely do best that you love because no one can copy you being you. And that's your defensible sort of career value. And I really like that mental mom. Yeah. And of all has so many insightful messages.

1:14:07And you can read all these on his Twitter, Holy Dish Twitter. And so on. He's made a book out of his tweets basically. He's such an interesting news. That's right. Awesome. What is a favorite recent movie or TV show you really enjoyed? So I grew up on a farm. And so all the Taylor Sheridan, you know, 1923 and Yellowstone. And I all of those series of we've watched everything he's put out. You know, we do kind of laugh. Like, wow, if you argue familiar with Yellowstone at all, absolutely. A lot of a lot of death. Yeah. We, at one point, my wife and I were watching it, we would start betting like, so the episode is starting.

1:14:45How many people will die in this episode? You know, like, yeah, this ranch in Montana, but yet somehow, you know, they're always killing people. How does this work? That's what your life was like is what I'm hearing. Favorite interview question that you like to ask candidates. I think my favorite interview question is tell me about a time where you needed to disagree with your management, where you needed to stand up or, you know, fight for a position against higher leadership or people in power. Because I think that's really hard to do. I'm normally interviewing leaders. And I think, you know, having a bunch of people to just say, yes, isn't helpful.

1:15:28You need people to have, you know, as you said, have backbone disagree and commit. So that's what I'm normally looking awesome. Is there a favorite product you recently discovered that you really live? It's silly, but my favorite product that I've discovered recently is the Chucket, which you use to whip a ball for your dog like a quarter mile. It basically extends your arm. And it's just fine to send a ball soaring like way further than you could ever throw it. You feel like, wow, look at me. I'm a major league pitcher. It's because I have this three three foot lever arm and I understand physics.

1:16:06You know, if we look at tech products, there's so many I love it. It's too easy to say chat GPT and stuff. So I won't go there. Awesome. My dog does not love chasing balls. I haven't had a reason to buy that, but I've never thought about just the joy of flicking a ball really far. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to share with folks find useful and work during life? I happen to be a Christian and the motto that I think about the most is to whom much has been given from him much will be required. And so I think a lot about what is my social responsibility? What, you know, I've been very lucky.

1:16:44I grew up on a farm in Ohio. Now I wasn't a farmboy. My father was a chemist, but I grew up, you know, in like upper middle class settings and I've ended up being extremely successful able to retire from my job at 50 to kind of coach and teach. What do I owe to pay forward? So those words are, you know, obviously ancient spiritual tax, but they're the ones I take away and think the most about what's my responsibility? As an example of someone that to whom much has been given, but because he's worked so hard, Jeff Bezos is starting a space business as you know. If you had the chance to go to space, would you, would you go?

1:17:22Well, I of course saw his interview where he talked about how he thought about the safety and the conversation he had to have with his mother. I would like to go to space. I'm not willing to pay what I think the current tickets are, but yeah, I would take the risk. So, you know, what's the risk of that ride? One in a hundred, one in 50, even more that you won't come back? I would probably take the gamble. So you've been an early adopter like where along that curve would you be, early adopter, laggard? Well, I'm old enough that I remember when the challenger space shuttle exploded. And I said, you know, I would get on the next one.

1:17:59And I said, they're never going to be more careful than the next one. So I'll get on the next one. So, you know, I think I would, I would get on anyone I was offered because of the chance. Unlike Jeff, who claims he wasn't scared, I would probably be really terrified, at least it lived off, right? So, I mean, why you're up there? It's great. Everything either goes wrong going up or coming down is not the middle. Ethan, I think we're going to help a lot of people with their career. I think we're going to help them work through failure, become better owners. Thank you so much for being here. Two final questions.

1:18:33Working folks find you online if they want to reach out. Also, just share what you do now in case people could use that help. And then how can listeners be useful to you? So the best place to find me online, I do all my writing on LinkedIn. It's where the professional community is. So Ethan Evans on LinkedIn, my actual handle there is Ethan Evans VP for my history as a vice president. That's the best place to find me. I do have a substack newsletter. I do teach through the Maven platform, but all of those are linked off LinkedIn. And really, how readers help me, they comment on what I write because I miss things.

1:19:09I am one person's perspective. So I actually have a process where I take in all the comments people write, all the different perspectives, all the different exceptions or special cases or examples. And that's how I improve my own thinking is I read every comment and think, okay, what did I miss? What could I have said better? How can I incorporate this if I ever talk about this again? Just to give you another opportunity to plug the stuff you do now, what do you help people with in case people can value? Could you use the stuff that you offer? You said you coach, you have a course, what sort of stuff?

1:19:40I focus on two topics, career development. So how do you grow in your career, the whole magic loop, and how do you attain promotion or attain a new role, arrays at that, your goal? And then leadership specifically, I teach a course that's been very popular called stuck at senior manager breaking through to executive, which is how to get out of that sort of stuck. I'm working really hard. I'm pretty good. I'm managing 25 or 50 people. But how do I get to the big chair? How do I get to the, you know, the division level leadership? And what do I need to change? It's that whole what got you here won't get you there.

1:20:16And I love to see people succeed at that. You know, people write me back and say I did get a job. I did get promoted. I did get a raise and that's that's my fulfillment. Amazing. Ethan, thank you so much for being here. Thank you, Lenny. And I got to say, you are very good at this. You're so smooth and you just do a great job interviewing. It's been really been a pleasure. I really appreciate that. And so are you. Thank you. Bye everyone. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast app.

1:20:52Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's podcast .com. See you in the next episode.