Why Jeff Bezos Refuses to Speak in Abstractions
Much has been written on Jeff Bezos. His leadership, his approaches, and his communication. I wasn’t sure that I would uncover anything new that hadn’t already been written about at length. So researching his communications became more of a test for me. “Would I see what others saw?”
But instead, while exploring a company wide letter about “Day 2” I found three fascinating tools that he used to sell his big idea. Today I’m going to explore just one of those tools and will follow up with the other two in the coming weeks.
What idea is Bezos selling?
Although we have similar haircuts, I cannot guess what it’s like to be Jeff Bezos. If I were to imagine, many of my thoughts would be thinking about how to make sure Amazon never fades into irrelevance. Imagine how that would feel to him — absolutely devastating. He calls out those fears early in this letter…
Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1. To be sure, this kind of decline would happen in extreme slow motion. An established company might harvest Day 2 for decades, but the final result would still come.
I really like how Bezos never treats his audience like they’re stupid but he’s always explains. Here, he doesn’t give his solution, he gives his readers the full landscape of options…
There are many ways to center a business. You can be competitor focused, you can be product focused, you can be technology focused, you can be business model focused, and there are more.
After laying out the options, Bezos re-centers again on what I would call the thesis of his career and the idea that he’s selling in this letter: customer obsession.
But in my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of Day 1 vitality.
He follows up this statement with an explanation and an example as to “why” customer obsession is his strategy, but we’re going to ignore those for today.
How does Bezos sell this idea?
So many things stood out to me about how Bezos communicates that this tool was easy to miss — but he uses it for almost 30% of his letter. Here’s the first example that caught my eyes…
We recently green-lit a particular Amazon Studios original. I told the team my view: debatable whether it would be interesting enough, complicated to produce, the business terms aren’t that good, and we have lots of other opportunities. They had a completely different opinion and wanted to go ahead. I wrote back right away with “I disagree and commit and hope it becomes the most watched thing we’ve ever made.”
What’s he doing here? It’s the ever so humble yet powerful example. Bezo’s letter is littered with examples. In the example above, he’s leading by example. He’s showing his readers exactly what it looks and sounds like. This example is something that every one who reads his letter, from the most senior to the most junior, can learn from.
He does it again a sentence later, but from the opposite point of view…
Note what this example is not: it’s not me thinking to myself “well, these guys are wrong and missing the point, but this isn’t worth me chasing.”
And then again shortly later…
I’ve seen many examples of sincere misalignment at Amazon over the years. When we decided to…
In this letter, Bezos recommends four strategies to prevent the drift away from customer obsession, the idea he’s selling in this letter. For each of these strategies, Bezos providers several examples — positive ones and negative ones — to make his ideas concrete and real.
In this relatively short letter from Jeff, I count at least 12 examples, and most of them aren’t broad examples, but very specific and detailed.
What can we learn?
An example is such a simple thing, we use them all the time, but there’s so much power in them. Our brains really struggle to process abstraction so examples become an anchor for the idea. Then those examples become proof for the idea. For example (ha, see what I did there) here’s Bezo’s claim:
...customers want something better, and your desire to delight customers will drive you to invent on their behalf.
Then here’s his example to prove it:
No customer ever asked Amazon to create the Prime membership program, but it sure turns out they wanted it…
And what I love about examples the most is that they’re often a story. Nothing drives understanding and retention like a story. When you use an example that’s a story, you force the reader’s brain to simulate the event, which becomes a huge aid in changing behaviors.
If you want to change behavior, you have to help your audience visualize that change. When you anchor your big idea to tangible examples you’re giving them the tools to process, and eventually, change.
