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That’s an interesting observation because Jeff Bezos also seemed to delegate a lot. It seemed that the S-team (Amazon’s term for their top executives) basically

That’s an interesting observation because Jeff Bezos also seemed to delegate a lot. It seemed that the S-team (Amazon’s term for their top executives) basically ran the entire company, which admittedly frees up a lot of Jeff’s time to focus on whatever seems most important to him. I also hadn’t heard about him sending fixers in; was that an escalation to sending a question mark email or was it part of the normal process? I know you’re probably aware of this but for other people reading this discussion I feel I should elaborate: if some problem at Amazon, usually customer-facing and often a complaint from an actual customer, landed in Jeff’s inbox and caught his attention, he would forward the email to whoever was responsible for the situation, adding “?” as his sole commentary. I think he just forwarded the email to one of the S-team and it would get passed down the org chart until it reached the relevant manager but everyone in that chain would keep the issue at front of mind until it was resolved. And if you were the manager that actually owned the issue, it was now your top priority. The expectation was that not only would you address the customer’s immediate problem but that you would root-cause the problem and address it as categorically as possible. Come to think of it, maybe this is a good example of founder mode.

vasilipupkin 2y ago
well, then founder mode is a meaningless thing because the essay seemed to suggest doing the opposite of "think he just forwarded the email to one of the S-team and it would get passed down the org chart until it reached the relevant manager"
- philwelch 2y ago
  My understanding is that Jeff Bezos would remain involved in the followup
  - swiftcoder 2y ago
    Yeah, the key bit here is that you would remain under the microscope till you could demonstrate to the entire management chain that the problem was actually solved - and with the Bezos question mark came an implicit guarantee that the resources/authority to actually solve issue would be made available.
    - vasilipupkin 2y ago
      all this implies trust in the management team, right? to tell Bezos that it's really solved. The opposite of what the essay is arguing, that these managers tend to be fakers and can't be trusted.
      - swiftcoder 2y ago
        Indeed. And I think the essay comes with the implicit assumption that founders are bad at spotting snake-oil execs (which may be warranted in general, but isn't in Amazon's case)
      - philwelch 2y ago
        Except it doesn't sound like his style was to "trust the management team to tell him that it's really solved". It sounds like his style was to "dive deep" and make sure the problem was solved. If you put in the work and understand the business deeply enough, nobody's going to successfully bullshit you.
        vasilipupkin 2y ago
        Come on. There is no way CEO of a huge company like Amazon can really know every detail. At some point he’s gonna just have to trust someone at the company.
        philwelch 2y ago
        You’d be surprised—the founder of a huge company like Amazon is likely to be an outlier in terms of how many details he actually can know. The more you learn about the biographies of exceptional leaders the more you realize that many of them actually had a hard, concrete understanding of what their organizations did that often exceeded that of the people who actually did the work on a day to day basis. But part of being a founder is that by the time the company outgrows what you can personally keep track of, you’ve cultivated a core of people around you whom you’ve thoroughly vetted as trustworthy. Besides, the goal here is not that Bezos knows every detail; it’s that he knows enough of the details that a subordinate isn’t going to be able to bullshit him. And once he has trusted subordinates with a long history of not bullshitting him, he can offload some of the “understanding details” to them, so however difficult it was to try and bullshit Bezos, it’s going to be even harder to bullshit a team of Bezos and a trusted lieutenant. And ultimately you can develop a skill or a technique for not being bullshitted even without knowing any of the relevant details ahead of time. Just as there are techniques to bullshitting a person, like handwaving and glossing over inconsistent or inconvenient details, there are also counter-techniques for not letting people bullshit you, like demanding all of the inconvenient details that people seem to be glossing over or trying to hide.
swiftcoder 2y ago
Bezos delegated, but he also followed up aggressively, and the whole company reporting structure was designed to enable that. When I worked there, Bezos held a weekly S-team meeting where the execs all came fully briefed to answer any questions about ongoing issues in their departments. That flowed on down the chain: Andy Jassy had an AWS-wide meeting the day before to gather the relevant data from each of his teams, and that meant that every major AWS team had an internal rollup meeting on Mondays to prepare for Jassy's meeting... Most of the question mark emails seemed to target more specific issues (mostly customer pain points). The fixers were more for big organisational or tech problems. If your division was significantly behind schedule on a product launch, or your production system had significant failure rates, you were liable to have a Senior Principal engineer and/or a new VP airdropped into your org, with significant leeway to get shit done

vasilipupkin 2y ago

well, then founder mode is a meaningless thing because the essay seemed to suggest doing the opposite of "think he just forwarded the email to one of the S-team and it would get passed down the org chart until it reached the relevant manager"

philwelch 2y ago
My understanding is that Jeff Bezos would remain involved in the followup
- swiftcoder 2y ago
  Yeah, the key bit here is that you would remain under the microscope till you could demonstrate to the entire management chain that the problem was actually solved - and with the Bezos question mark came an implicit guarantee that the resources/authority to actually solve issue would be made available.
  - vasilipupkin 2y ago
    all this implies trust in the management team, right? to tell Bezos that it's really solved. The opposite of what the essay is arguing, that these managers tend to be fakers and can't be trusted.
    - swiftcoder 2y ago
      Indeed. And I think the essay comes with the implicit assumption that founders are bad at spotting snake-oil execs (which may be warranted in general, but isn't in Amazon's case)
    - philwelch 2y ago
      Except it doesn't sound like his style was to "trust the management team to tell him that it's really solved". It sounds like his style was to "dive deep" and make sure the problem was solved. If you put in the work and understand the business deeply enough, nobody's going to successfully bullshit you.
      - vasilipupkin 2y ago
        Come on. There is no way CEO of a huge company like Amazon can really know every detail. At some point he’s gonna just have to trust someone at the company.
        philwelch 2y ago
        You’d be surprised—the founder of a huge company like Amazon is likely to be an outlier in terms of how many details he actually can know. The more you learn about the biographies of exceptional leaders the more you realize that many of them actually had a hard, concrete understanding of what their organizations did that often exceeded that of the people who actually did the work on a day to day basis. But part of being a founder is that by the time the company outgrows what you can personally keep track of, you’ve cultivated a core of people around you whom you’ve thoroughly vetted as trustworthy. Besides, the goal here is not that Bezos knows every detail; it’s that he knows enough of the details that a subordinate isn’t going to be able to bullshit him. And once he has trusted subordinates with a long history of not bullshitting him, he can offload some of the “understanding details” to them, so however difficult it was to try and bullshit Bezos, it’s going to be even harder to bullshit a team of Bezos and a trusted lieutenant. And ultimately you can develop a skill or a technique for not being bullshitted even without knowing any of the relevant details ahead of time. Just as there are techniques to bullshitting a person, like handwaving and glossing over inconsistent or inconvenient details, there are also counter-techniques for not letting people bullshit you, like demanding all of the inconvenient details that people seem to be glossing over or trying to hide.

swiftcoder 2y ago

Bezos delegated, but he also followed up aggressively, and the whole company reporting structure was designed to enable that. When I worked there, Bezos held a weekly S-team meeting where the execs all came fully briefed to answer any questions about ongoing issues in their departments. That flowed on down the chain: Andy Jassy had an AWS-wide meeting the day before to gather the relevant data from each of his teams, and that meant that every major AWS team had an internal rollup meeting on Mondays to prepare for Jassy's meeting... Most of the question mark emails seemed to target more specific issues (mostly customer pain points). The fixers were more for big organisational or tech problems. If your division was significantly behind schedule on a product launch, or your production system had significant failure rates, you were liable to have a Senior Principal engineer and/or a new VP airdropped into your org, with significant leeway to get shit done