/By Sean

#232 Colin Bryar- Amazon’s former Vice President on Leadership Principles & Working with Jeff Bezos

Big Ideas

Colin Bryar was working at his own tech startup in the mid 90’s when he was introduced to another small startup, Amazon. Through working together, Colin recognized the uniqueness of Amazon and how it was being built by a truly visionary founder in Jeff Bezos. Colin was offered to join the team and he joined in March of 1998.

“Being Earth’s most customer centric company that was the very first thing that I heard Jeff talk about on my first day at Amazon and it’s true now today in 2021”

Colin talks about Amazon’s 14 leadership Principles they have ingrained in every aspect of their company. These processes and principles at Amazon have stood the test of time, worked in all company sizes, among various industries, and throughout different operating systems.

“You’ve got to weave those leadership principles and build your company from the ground up from those principles. You can look at any major Amazon process and see those leadership principles embedded and in action.”

Among his 12 years at Amazon, Colin spent 2 of the years as the chief technical advisor, otherwise known as Jeff Bezos’s right hand man.

“It was kind of like two years of business school. It was ten hours a day with Jeff for two years so that’s what my MBA is”

Colin co-wrote the book Working Backwards with fellow ex-Amazon employee Bill Carr which uncovers the ins and outs of the astronomical company that Amazon is.

“People who have been at Amazon for so long think ‘I think every company works this way’ and that’s not the case, I think Amazon has some very unique characteristics that are worth shouting about and I think people can learn a lot from them”

2:28 Daily Routines

Whenever Colin looks at a new opportunity he looks at three things:

The potential impact that it could make
The team and group of people he would be working with
Is it going to be fun doing some of the tasks involved

These three are equally weighted for Colin and he also likes to look at what things don’t matter as much when making a decision to pursue a project.

Colin talks about how he has been lucky enough to have mentors along the way with him to help him make decisions on what projects to work on.

“It helps to frame a problem first and then rely on peers and mentors to help guide through that decision”

4:34 The Importance of Balance & Eliminating Ego

Colin’s first job out of college was at Oracle as a consultant in the Pacific Northwest. Colin describes being put in situations that he ‘had no business’ being in but that he learned a lot from. Now that Colin has a family he says his decision making has shifted from focusing on “me” to focusing on “we”.

Balance is another factor that has evolved into importance in Colin’s career and he says the most successful people he has met in business have a good balance in their lives.

“Balance helps with creativity, focus, helps put things in perspective and ultimately make the right decisions”

Colin creates balance in his life through running and relying on others. Colin turns to running when he is stuck at a decision or needs to take a break from work.

“I’ll just keep running until I come up with some type of a resolution”

He also relies on mentors and peers, specifically his wife, to help provide guidance when he is stuck at a decision.

7:36 Asking For Help

Colin says it took a little while for him to admit the importance of help from others in the beginning of his career. When Colin found himself in the situations that he said earlier he ‘had no business being in’ he says he quickly learned that he needed to turn to others for help.

“It’s much better to ask for help earlier rather than later and you get to where you want to go faster that way”

8:41 Colin’s Early Career

Colin tells a defining story of his career when he was working for a large software company. What was supposed to be a status update, felt like an ambush to Colin. This experience was the determining factor for Colin to stop applying to business school and stay in it to make it right.

“No matter how bad things seem if you see a way out it may take a lot of time and effort but if you really do focus on what are the core issues and what the customer really is asking for, you can get there”

10:54 Mentors & Mentoring

Colin describes himself as an open book for when he approaches a mentor, asking any questions on his mind or even asking them what questions they think he should ask.

“If you can’t be honest in that type of a situation and open, you’re really just hindering your ability to solve the problem at hand”

When Colin is mentoring others, he encourages the conversation to be frank and honest. As a mentor, Colin says it’s important to recognize that you don’t have all the answers and it comes down to providing guiding principles for the mentee and letting them learn on their own.

“You want to stack the odds in their favor rather than tell them what to do”

After having a conversation with a mentor, Colin says that while it’s important to step away and process the conversation it is also important to move fast.

“If it’s easy to course correct then speed is probably more important and then recognizing when you’re on the wrong course just to change course but if it’s a bigger decision than you need to do a bit more research”

14:33 How Colin Joined Amazon

Prior to joining Amazon, Colin was working at a small startup in the mid 90’s that helped companies connect their internal data and expose it on the internet. The company was growing with clients such as Microsoft and Boeing, and a small startup company that we all know today as Amazon. Amazon asked Colin’s startup to join them and Colin said it was a tough decision because the startup was growing well on its own.

“The more we learned about what was going on at Amazon, how special it was, how it was growing, and the impact that we could make on one path versus the other and just the people we had come across so far at Amazon really impressed us so we decided to go with Amazon”

16:53 Amazon’s Separating Factor

Colin says that a stand-out quality of Amazon at the beginning was that everyone had a deep belief that they were making a big change and it was validated by customers. At the time Amazon was only selling books and shipping within the United States.

“When we had looked at a lot of different websites back then you could look at some websites and say they don’t really get the web yet, but you looked at Amazon and you could tell just by the homepage, they get it, they’re on to something”

18:15 Colin’s First Day at Amazon

Colin remembers his first day at Amazon in March of 1998. He went through an ‘orientation’ for about two hours in a small conference room with about ten others learning how Amazon works and looking over the employment agreement, and then a talk from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

“He said what we’re about at Amazon is the first thing we want to build Earth’s most customer centric company and then we want to be the place where people find and discover anything they may want to buy online”

Colin says that the first has definitely held true to this day and the second one was thinking too small compared to what Amazon is doing today.

“Being Earth’s most customer centric company that was the very first thing that I heard Jeff talk about on my first day at Amazon and it’s true now today in 2021”

19:46 Becoming Great Operators

Colin worked at Amazon for 12 years and two of the years as Jeff’s technical advisor. Colin describes Amazon as a different company every 18 months due to the company’s growth.

Colin describes 1998 Jeff as insanely focused and obsessed over customers.

“How Jeff changed and how I would say a lot of us changed at Amazon was becoming better operators”

21:20 Colin’s Strength

Sean asks Colin what he thinks someone who worked with him for ten years would say his strength is.

“I think that people would say whatever happens I know that Colin has my back”

Colin says that once they understand the mission of the company, he just wanted to help his team be as successful

23:02 Amazon’s 14 Leadership Principles

In his book, Working Backwards, Colin brings up Amazon’s 14 Leadership Principles. Colin says that these 14 principles aren’t in a hierarchical order but are woven in throughout everything Amazon does and everything Colin does in his career. Colin says that customer obsession versus competitor obsession is a principle that is front and center in Amazon. Another important principle of the 14 is long term thinking:

“Long term thinking which doesn’t always necessarily mean it takes a longer time to get you to where you want to go, long term thinking often gets you to your end goal faster than short term thinking does”

Invention is among the principles and as Colin says, “if you do experiments and you know that they’re going to work it’s not an experiment”

“Some of the things that I learned is being operationally efficient which means holding people and yourself to very high standards”

25:44 Weaving Leadership Principles in Amazon’s Processes

In order for leaders to instill their values in the team and make sure they are ingrained within the company, Colin says the first thing they can do is implement processor mechanisms to make sure that those leadership principles are reinforced.

Colin talks about several examples Amazon made sure to ingrain their leadership principles throughout the company processes.

The Bar Raiser process Amazon used for hiring that made sure candidates were being screened for leadership principles.
Focusing on customer metrics over output metrics

“You’ve got to weave those leadership principles and build your company from the ground up from those principles. You can look at any major Amazon process and see those leadership principles embedded and in action.”

29:04 Discovering Your Leadership Principles

For young companies, startups, and entrepreneurs, Colin says it is important to distinguish your leadership principles now before the company begins to grow.

“As you grow from 2 people to 10 people to 100 people, you’re going to get a culture whether you like it or not it’s just is it the one that you want”

Colin recommends asking the following questions to figure out your leadership principles:

What are the hard decisions that we’re going to face as a company moving forward?
What are the types of attributes in the people that we’re looking for who will help us make those tough decisions in the way we want them to be made when we’re not in the room?

“If you’re not tired of hearing them yourself as the leader or founder, you probably haven’t said it enough”

31:13 Applying Amazon’s Principles

Colin has seen the Amazon principles and foundations not work at companies where the leaders aren’t ready for a change or they have something that works better for them.

“The biggest hurdle quite honestly is people just aren’t bought into some of the things that Amazon does”

Colin says that the processes and principles at Amazon have stood the test of time, worked in all company sizes, among various industries, throughout different operating systems, so he suggests considering their ideas if you don’t have something in place in your company.

34:03 Slow Down to Speed Up

Colin says the slowing down is actually moving faster when it comes to building a company because you have to maximise the scarce resources that you have.

“You have to have conviction that what you’re doing is correct, sometimes if what you’re doing is not correct then sometimes you realize are we actually doing the right thing or do we need to change or pivot”

36:27 Amazon’s Use of Narratives

A large reason why Amazon has adopted using narratives instead of slidedeck presentations is to help them uncover the bottlenecks in their processes. Colin says that slides are usually the wrong way to present information and instead have a writer distill down everything in a crystal clear way. While it took the team a while to get used to writing and commenting on narratives, it is now ingrained in the company and is how Amazon approaches complex decisions.

“One way to recognize what the bottlenecks are is just changing the way you’re presenting and analyzing information”

These narratives are typically around 6 pages and the team reads the narratives silently to themselves at the start of Amazon ‘S Team’ meetings (S team is top leadership) and then dives into discussion. Colin points out how much more effective narratives are because they remove bias – a presenter’s performance can’t hinder or oversell their idea.

“You don’t even have to be in the meeting, you can read the narrative after and read the comments and know what’s going on whereas if you look at a slide presentation you really get very little information”

44:36 Colin’s Lessons From Being Jeff’s Right Hand Man

Colin was the chief technical advisor at Amazon which was the role as Jeff’s right hand man.

When Jeff first offered him this role, Colin asked him what the success criteria was and what Jeff was looking for because Colin knew the role was too important for him to attempt the role if he didn’t think he would succeed in it.

Colin explains the two things he ultimately learned from the role:

“I learned how to be a better operator and looking at not only Jeff but the ‘S’ team and I realized there are several different effective leadership styles” Among these leadership styles Colin picked what would work best for him.
Colin got to learn from Jeff more in the downtime that they had together whether it was traveling or between meetings and he could ask Jeff his endless list of questions

“It was kind of like two years of business school. It was ten hours a day with Jeff for two years so that’s what my MBA is”

47:54 The Importance of Colin’s Role

Before Colin took the role as Jeff’s right hand man, he talked with fellow peers, mentors, and Amazon colleagues Andy Jassy and Rick Dalzell.

“In some aspects I learned what I didn’t even know, I really got to see how larger organizations worked and how larger organizations worked with one another”

Colin mentions how it was interesting being involved in the conversations within Amazon and at the board meetings.

“People who have been at Amazon for so long think ‘I think every company works this way’ and that’s not the case, I think Amazon has some very unique characteristics that are worth shouting about and I think people can learn a lot from them”

Colin says if he were to be the chief technical advisor for anyone else in the past 100 years, he would choose Thomas Edison, Toyota’s Total Quality Management, or Henry Ford.

52:26 Sharing His Knowledge Throughout Amazon

During his time as chief technical officer, Colin knew it was a very special role and a unique experience to have working right alongside Jeff Bezos everyday. Colin recognized that many other teams within Amazon would only have meetings with Jeff a few times a year and so Colin would book end his day to share his insights with the teams outside of the top leadership ‘S’ Team.

“Not to tell them, here’s what I think Jeff wants to hear or say but really think through some of these tough issues and make sure that the right issues are covered whether it’s comfortable or uncomfortable”

54:10 Jeff’s High Standards

After spending ten hours a day with two years alongside Jeff, Colin says that outside of customer obsession one other thing that stood out about Jeff was how high his standards are of himself and his team.

“If you think you have high standards, when they’re not met and you don’t point them out then the bar is lowered”

56:05 Working Backwards

Colin co -wrote the book Working Backwards with Bill Carr

“Amazon really starts from the customer and works backwards from that. Sometimes things that you want to do for the customer you’re not good at yet so you need to build up those capabilities.”

Colin also talks about PRFAQ’s that Amazon incorporates within the organization. If you work for Amazon and you have a great idea, instead of pitching it to your manager you write a one press release to the customer of the idea and then include a FAQ for external and internal questions that may arise.

“If you read the press release and you’re not excited about using the feature or buying it as a customer then it’s “go iterate again””