Jeff Bezos stepped down as Amazon CEO yesterday.
While at Amazon, he is said to have relied upon these four decision-making principles.
- Most decisions fall into one of two categories: irreversible decisions and reversible decisions (for the latter, it's better to act quickly).
- Make a decision once you have 70% of the info you need (...because if you wait until 90%, it’ll be too late).
- Ask colleagues to “disagree and commit” in situations where no one (really) knows the answer, but you have a strong conviction that your idea is the best contender. (You'll ultimately get the answer(s) you need quicker this way.)
- Escalate misalignment issues as soon as you discover them to save time. (Otherwise, you'll waste too much time.)
To my mind, I think adopting this type of thinking is useful. But I think I’d add that there’s a third category of decisions that people at organisations typically make: recurring transactional/operational decisions, which demand consistency and are irreversible. Some examples of what I mean, that might resonate with people in this community, are: should we onboard this new customer? Is this meeting in the office safe to go ahead? Or...is a certain transaction (indeed) fraudulent? (These are obviously often the best candidates for automation.)
Does anyone here use a similar (or different) set of principles for decision making? I'd be very interested to know!Â
