According to news on December 18, from founding Amazon nearly 30 years ago to building it into a technology giant with a market capitalization of US$1.5 trillion today, Jeff Bezos has learned many lessons about leadership and human nature in the process. Bezos gradually realized that people "are not really truth-seeking animals." Rather, “we are social animals.” This fundamental insight, he believes, has implications for the structure of a company and indeed any organization.
Bezos made the comments in a recent interview with MIT research scientist and podcast host Lex Fridman. He points out that throughout human history, telling the truth has often gotten people into trouble.
"Let's go back 10,000 years ago and you lived in a small village." "If you can get along with other people, you can survive and reproduce. But if you are the one who tells the truth in the village, you may be beaten to death with a stick in the middle of the night."
The reason, he went on, is that "truths often make people uncomfortable, they can make people embarrassed, they can be upsetting... They can also make people defensive, even if it's not intentional."
However, "telling the truth" may also be the biggest difference between a company's success and failure. For this reason, Bezos believes that "any high-performing organization must have a mechanism and culture that supports truth-telling." This includes Bezos’ space tourism company Blue Origin, to which he will apply valuable lessons learned from Amazon. Bezos resigned as CEO of Amazon a few years ago.
One strategy he suggests that works well in meetings: Let the most senior person speak last and the more junior person speak first, allowing everyone to be heard by decision-makers in an unfiltered way.
"I know from experience," "If I speak first, even very strong-willed, very smart, very judgmental attendees are going to think, 'Well, if Bezos thinks this, I came to the meeting thinking something else, but maybe I'm wrong.'"
He also believes that leaders should openly discuss the difficulties of telling the truth with their teams. "You have to remind people that doing this is uncomfortable and inconsistent with our nature as humans, which is to survive primarily by being social animals and being friendly and cooperative," he said.
He noted that even in science, which "tells the truth" and "has very formal mechanisms," there are senior and junior scientists, so "there is a hierarchy among humans and, to some extent, seniority matters."
He recalled a moment in Amazon's history when customers complained about long wait times after calling the company's service number, but metrics presented at the meeting showed wait times of less than 60 seconds. In one meeting, Bezos made a direct call in the presence of a customer service executive. The wait time for this call was over 10 minutes.
Bezos explained: "This is a strong indication that there was a problem with the data collection and we were not measuring the right things. You know, this set off a chain of events where we started to measure it correctly."
He also warned that two things stand in the way of finding the truth: compromise and stubbornness. In the former case, the dissenting parties may simply have very different ideas about what the right decision is. "There are a lot of mechanisms in place in our society and within companies to resolve these types of disputes. A lot of them, I think, are really bad. A very bad way to reach an agreement is to compromise," he said.
Regarding stubbornness, Bezos said: "They are just engaging in a war of attrition. Whoever is exhausted first will surrender to the other side."
Bezos believes that avoiding these pitfalls requires being proactive. "You have to seek the truth even when it's uncomfortable. You have to get people's attention so that they have to accept your ideas and they have to work towards real solutions to the problem," he said.
At Amazon, Bezos has always been known for his emphasis on speed, agility and effective decision-making. His former vice president and chief of staff Colin Bryar previously revealed that Bezos never held individual meetings with his direct reports. Instead, he encourages his direct reports to get together for four hours a week to make decisions together so they can learn to work together effectively, especially when a crisis arises.
Bezos maintains the philosophy at Amazon that "every day is the first day of a startup," which means operating the company at the speed of a startup, with a risk-accepting mentality and an entrepreneur's mentality.