Good Employees Follow the Rules. Great Employees Break Them.
Because the rules are meant for those who aren't as smart and brave as you. Seriously.
Welcome to the Scarlet Ink newsletter. I'm Dave Anderson, an ex-Amazon Tech Director and GM. Each week I write a newsletter article on tech industry careers, and specific leadership advice.
I just came back from quite a bit of travel. Wisconsin (where I go every year, and upload those yearly family water-skiing photos), Moldova, Paris, Switzerland (you’ll likely see quite a few photos over the coming weeks from here), and Germany. As a small FYI, Germany was for my wife running in the Berlin Marathon. Which was pretty cool for her. Another major completed. I am wimping out and only doing ultra’s these days. Which is a funny thing to say, I suppose. Our next ultra is scheduled for April 2025 (Gorge Waterfall 50k), but we’ll see if we can find another sooner. If so, I’ll be sending more photos!
I spent 12 years at Amazon, all of it in management. If you ask jaded engineers what managers do, they’d certainly say something about how managers create bureaucracy, and slow down those people who do the actual work.
Which is unfortunately true of bad managers. But I honestly think good managers (and good leaders in general) should literally do the opposite.
Look at my definition of manager in that article.
Management is the responsibility to coordinate and organize resources (usually people) to achieve an objective or set of objectives. In short, a manager must ensure the work is organized, everyone knows their role, and resources are on track to achieve their objectives. This responsibility typically comes with organization given authority.
A good manager is laser focused on creating business value. They might use some bureaucracy. But their goal is to achieve business objectives.
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What are business objectives, and why does Dave feel the need to clarify?
Let’s be clear about what I mean by objectives. Because I don’t mean goals. I’ll use metrics as an example.
Let’s say that you're responsible for the checkout pipeline of an ecommerce website. Company bureaucracy (the leadership team) looked at your checkout pipeline, and said that we’d probably have increased sales conversion if you shortened the checkout workflow.
They set a CEO level goal for you to reduce the checkout workflow from 5-page loads to 4-page loads.
The goal is for you to decrease the page loads necessary to buy a product.
The business objective is to increase sales.
You do some initial testing, and it turns out that merging some of those fields (and making it a 4-page checkout pipeline) actually decreased conversion rates. In fact, some early testing suggests that a 6-page workflow your designer came up with actually converts better.
In a small startup, there’s no problem. You simply say that you realized that 6-page checkout pipelines are better, and move forward.
In a large company, there’s a serious issue. Because there are layers of rules and processes encouraging you and your organization to meet your goals.
At Amazon, we had S-Team goals. Our finance group had them recorded, and there were regular reports on who was meeting or not meeting these goals. If a goal turned out to be a bad idea, there was incredible corporate momentum encouraging you to achieve the goal anyway.
I know because more than once I tried to change an S-Team goal. I was not always successful.
If this were your company, would you want someone aggressively changing the checkout workflow to 4-page loads, simply to achieve the goal they’d agreed on? Of course not. So we know that no one wants the wrong thing to be achieved, but the bureaucracy makes it difficult to use your skills and common sense.
Why do we have bureaucracy?
It’s hard to organize large groups of people. In a small startup, you can share information easily.
“Hey all, latency is like super duper important. We’re absolutely convinced that faster pages creates higher conversion rates. So can we all make sure we don’t do anything to make our webpages slower?”
“Sure thing dude!”
In a small company, that works fine. You know and trust your co-workers, and you can share values and priorities easily.
At Amazon, I was in a room where Jeff Bezos elaborated on how critical latency is. He talked about Amazon internal tests which proved that some number of milliseconds decrease in latency directly correlated to higher conversion rates. He told this room full of senior leaders (VPs and SVPs) that it was absolutely critical that we speed everything up.
Yet months later, I still regularly ran into employees who didn’t know that latency was considered important.
“Who cares if it slows down by 50ms? No one will notice!” I bet customers would like my feature more.
Do you know how we let them know that latency was important? We created S-Team level goals for latency improvements. This meant I didn’t need to re-educate every one of the hundreds of employees I ran into. Instead, I could simply point at the goal, and they’d realize that they had to make latency a priority.
So a major point of bureaucracy is to scale leadership. Jeff Bezos can’t talk to every engineer, so he had management teams and goals with goal reviews and status update meetings.
And then an engineer trying to launch their feature says, “I’m pulling out my hair. I can’t get anything done with all this bureaucracy!”