Transcription
Put me in front of a whiteboard and I can come up with a hundred ideas in half an hour. And early in Amazon's history, Jeff Wilkey came to me one day. He worked for Amazon for a quarter of a century, but this is when he probably knew me only for a year. And he said, "Jeff, you have enough ideas to destroy Amazon." And this was such a shocking idea for me.
And but and and uh, you know, I as a founder, I had the great luxury of always being able to hire my tutors. My they would hire these experienced senior executives, brilliant people like Diego and Jeff Wilkkey. And there there were several others too. And and I would listen to them and they would teach me. And Jeff said, "You have enough ideas per minute, per day, per week to destroy Amazon."
I was like, "What do you what do you mean?" He's like, "You have to release the work at the right rate that the organization can accept it." And he was a manufacturing uh expert. And so, you know, his view of the world was every time I released an idea, I was creating a backlog, a queue, work in process. And because it was just stacking up, it was adding no value. And in fact, it was creating distraction. And so he said, "Look, you have to figure out when to release these new ideas at a rate that the organization can accept them."
And this was I mean this sounds so obvious, but it was not obvious at the time to me. And this was a profound insight for me. And so I started prioritizing the ideas better, keeping lists of them, keeping them to myself until the organization was ready for the ideas. And then I also started figuring out how can I build an organization that can be ready for more ideas. That's about having the right senior team and the right leadership and getting those people the executive bandwidth so they could do more ideas per unit time.
And so and and that is what we built. We built a company that's very good at inventing and doing more than one thing at a time. And you do want to build as the company gets bigger, you do want to be able to do more than one thing at a time. But that idea of releasing the work was very profound for me. And it made it made us operationally more effective while still being inventive.