What I learned from Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr.
An insider's guide to the principles and practices that drove Amazon's meteoric rise.
Colin Breyer and Bill Carr joined Amazon in the late 1990s, at a time when it was making the transition from a small company that used doors for desks to one of the fastest growing and most respected companies in the world.
In working backwards, these two long serving Amazon executives reveal and codify the principles and practices that drive the successes of one of the most extraordinary companies the world has ever known, with 27 years of Amazon experience between them, much of it in the early two thousands, a period of unmatched innovation that brought products and services, including Kindle, Amazon Prime, Amazon Studios, and Amazon Web Services, to life.
Breyer and Carr offer the first insider's account of the practices that set Amazon apart, with lessons and techniques for applying Amazon's 14 leadership principles to your company or career.
The authors illuminate how the principles inform decision making at all levels and reveal how the company's culture has been defined by four customer obsession, long term thinking, eagerness to invent, and operational excellence.
Breyer and Carr explain the set of ground level practices that ensure these characteristics are translated into action and flow through all aspects of the business.
Working backwards is a practical guidebook and a corporate narrative filled with the author's in the room recollections of what being amazonian is like and how it affected their personal and professional lives.
They demonstrate that success on Amazon scale is achieved through commitment to its set of well defined, rigorously executed principles and practices shared here for the very first time.
And that is an excerpt from the front cover of the book that I want to talk to you about today, which is working inside stories and secrets from inside Amazon, written by Colin Breyer and Bill Carr.
And I want to do this bonus.
This book is a bonus episode because there's a sequel to what may be the most insightful biography I've ever read.
That's the everything store, written by Brad Stone.
Not only do you get a good idea of the early life of Jeff Bezos, what he was like as a young person, why he made the decision to quit his job at the age of 30 and start Amazon, but you also get a lot of his.
He probably has the most unique ideas out of any entrepreneur that I've covered.
And so that author is releasing in the next few weeks a book called Amazon Unbound.
And I think a good way to prepare for that book is by reading this one.
So let me go ahead and jump into a couple.
There's a couple interesting parts I found in the introduction that I want to bring to your attention.
So Sarsoft is saying, why is Amazon worthy of study?
And it says, to say that Amazon is an unconventional company is an understatement.