The Amazon Way on leadership and leadership: John Rossman

Show Notes

Leadership and innovation lessons from Amazon
The communication tool that Amazon used to think clearly

Episode 177 (John is based in Washington state)

In this conversation with John Rossman, we explore:

• The Amazon principles of leadership


• How to drive innovation successfully


• The launch of Amazon's marketplace business


• How to build a trusted-customer experience


• How did Amazon push past the online ecommerce leader (EBay)


• Clarifying the mission and purpose of innovation


• How communicating and debating by memos leads to better thinking


• How Amazon made their meetings more productive


• Apply meeting hygiene


• Jeff Bezos' communication style

About our guest John Rossman:

A leadership and digital transformation expert, John Rossman is the author of four books on leadership and business innovation including the best seller "The Amazon Way". He is an early Amazon executive who played a key role in launching the Amazon marketplace business in 2002.

His next book, Big Bet Leadership, will launch in Feb 2024. You can get a free copy of the ebook by registering here

https://bigbetleadership.com/

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Excerpts from this conversation with John Rossman:

Communication, I believe is one of the oftentimes forgotten, or underplayed elements of what makes successful innovation or transformation.

Amazon has this culture of memo writing. And what we would do is we would write out any new proposal, any problematic situation, any new idea we wanted to do, we would write out and debate in memos. It takes both the writing and the debating to make these things work.

And so Amazon, they call that approach working backwards. So starting with the customer, starting with the outcome that you want, and working backwards.

And a lot of the work that I've done some since Amazon has been taking that philosophy and molding it and mixing it and adapting it into the client's situation. So I have a new book coming out in February of 2024, called Big Bet Leadership.

Part of the underpinnings of Big Bet Leadership is about thinking about outcomes and using memos to help articulate what we believe the problem is that we are solving - what we believe the future state is that we are going to create - what the couple of critical assumptions or operating capabilities are there doing that and then debating those that is essential communication within a core team that has to decide is this the right Innovation?

Is this the right idea? Is this the right big bet for us to do. And so that Amazon philosophy so back to 2002, the market the launch of the marketplace, I wrote the future press release for the marketplace business, there was one line in it that made all the difference to that line was...

A third party should be able to register, sell an item fulfil an order and delight a customer as though Amazon the retailer had done it without talking to anybody in the middle of the night.

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