Name: Working Backwards
ISBN: 9781250267597

Colin Bryar

Bill Carr

Working Backwards is an insider's breakdown of Amazon's approach to culture, leadership, and best practices from Colin Bryar and Bill Carr, two long-time, top-level Amazon executives...

Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

Working Backwards

Akshan Ish

Cassandra Tang

Good intentions don’t work. Mechanisms do.

The best way to fail at inventing something is by making it somebody’s part time job.

Leadership and management are often about deciding what not to do rather than what to do. Bringing clarity to why you aren’t doing something is often as important as having clarity about what you are doing.

Invention works well where differentiation matters.

Great overview of 'Being Amazonian' with detailed case study examples written in an easily digestable manner. Real life examples offered for frameworks. 

Heiki Riesenkampf

The book covers some important collaboration and product concepts started at Amazon and gives a little bit a backstory how they came about. I found the backstory more interesting than the methods since they are rather well known given you have already read business classics. Something to keep in mind that most of these methods would need to be readjusted to an earlier-stage setting.

Tuago

Important reading for business people as it teaches business strategies and product development plans from one of the most successful companies ever. Many things to learn on how to manage for scale and how to manage people and teams.

Keven Wang

Working Backwards is an insider's breakdown of Amazon's approach to culture, leadership, and best practices from two long-time Amazon executives. Colin started at Amazon in 1998; Bill joined in 1999. In Working Backwards, these two long-serving Amazon executives reveal and codify the principles and practices that drive the success of one of the most extraordinary companies the world has ever known. With twenty-seven years of Amazon experience between them, much of it in the early aughts—a period of unmatched innovation that brought products and services including Kindle, Amazon Prime, Amazon Studios, and Amazon Web Services to life—Bryar and Carr offer unprecedented access to the Amazon way as it was refined, articulated, and proven to be repeatable, scalable, and adaptable. With keen analysis and practical steps for applying it at your own company—no matter the size—the authors illuminate how Amazon’s fourteen leadership principles inform decision-making at all levels and reveal how the company’s culture has been defined by four characteristics: customer obsession, long-term thinking, eagerness to invent, and operational excellence. Bryar and Carr explain the set of ground-level practices that ensure these 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 authors’ in-the-room recollections of what “Being Amazonian” is like and how it has affected their personal and professional lives. They demonstrate that success on Amazon’s scale is not achieved by the genius of any single leader, but rather through commitment to and execution of a set of well-defined, rigorously-executed principles and practices—shared here for the very first time.

Yishan

Bailey Jennings

Taylor Murphy

Jon Eckert

Brock

Reshav Pandey

Sapan Parikh

'Essential for any leader in any industry' Kim Scott, bestselling author of Radical Candor In 2018 Amazon became the world’s second trillion dollar company after Apple: a remarkable success story for a company launched out of a garage in 1994. How did they achieve this? And how can others learn from this extraordinary success and replicate it? Colin started at Amazon in 1998; Bill joined in 1999. Their time at Amazon covered a period of unmatched innovation that brought products and services including Kindle, Amazon Prime, Amazon Echo and Alexa, and Amazon Web Services to life. Through the story of these innovations they reveal and codify the principles and practices that have driven the success of one of the most extraordinary companies the world has ever known, from the famous 14-leadership principles, the bar raiser hiring process, and Amazon’s founding characteristics: customer obsession, long-term thinking, eagerness to invent, and operational excellence. Through their wealth of experience they offer unprecedented access to the Amazon way as it was refined, articulated, and proven to be repeatable, scalable, and adaptable. Working Backwards shows how success is not achieved by the genius of any single leader, but rather through commitment to and execution of a set of well-defined, rigorously-executed principles and practices that you can apply at your own company, no matter the size.

Coleman McCormick

Jannis M

Yuval Shoshan

Ben Roberts

Simao Freitas

Pavan Kumar

Ryan Maher

Ketan Nayak

Working Backwards is an insider's breakdown of Amazon's approach to culture, leadership, and best practices from two long-time, top-level Amazon executives. Colin started at Amazon in 1998; Bill joined in 1999. In Working Backwards, these two long-serving Amazon executives reveal and codify the principles and practices that drive the success of one of the most extraordinary companies the world has ever known. With twenty-seven years of Amazon experience between them, much of it in the early aughts-a period of unmatched innovation that brought products and services including Kindle, Amazon Prime, Amazon Studios, and Amazon Web Services to life-Bryar and Carr offer unprecedented access to the Amazon way as it was refined, articulated, and proven to be repeatable, scalable, and adaptable. With keen analysis and practical steps for applying it at your own company-no matter the size-the authors illuminate how Amazon's fourteen leadership principles inform decision-making at all levels and reveal how the company's culture has been defined by four characteristics: customer obsession, long-term thinking, eagerness to invent, and operational excellence. Bryar and Carr explain the set of ground-level practices that ensure these 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 authors' in-the-room recollections of what "Being Amazonian" is like and how it has affected their personal and professional lives. They demonstrate that success on Amazon's scale is not achieved by the genius of any single leader, but rather through commitment to and execution of a set of well-defined, rigorously-executed principles and practices-shared here for the very first time.

Working Backwards Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

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