Book Review: “Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon” by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr 4/5
“Secrets from inside Amazon" - the subtitle draws attention, but don't dismiss its clickbait nature - secrets are indeed revealed and are truly valuable.
Amazon is a giant company with more than 1.3 million employees, so learning how they achieve this is interesting. Their culture helped them innovate and become great in domains they weren’t experts in from the start. They did not start as a technology company, yet the success of AWS (their cloud services) outshines their original retail business.
This book consists of two parts: the first explains what it means to work at Amazon, with highlights of their principles, processes and culture, and the second part puts theory into practice and tells us stories of how they build successful products like Kindle, Prime, Prime Video, and AWS.
When describing how to operate at Amazon they focus on their: leadership principles, hiring process, internal communication rules, and their approach to creating new products called “Working Backwards”. They start their innovations by writing press releases, whereas a traditional approach would finish with a press release.
The chapter I liked the most was “Narratives and the Six-Pagers”. It explains why and how they banned PowerPoint and moved to a written form, limited to 6 pages (hence the name). It enabled them to clearly formulate ideas. Clear writing was one of the ingredients that catalysed their success. If I had read this book earlier, I would have included this example in my talk.
If you are interested in innovations and how companies operate then this is a good book for you. You can get the gist of it thanks to an interview with Colin Bryar, one of the authors, when he was a guest of the podcast Supermanagers.
