Post Category → Business Psychology

Communication is Failure

An interesting discussion last week over on the Pickax retailers episode of the Exponent podcast . Ben and James were discussing Ben’s hugely popular Amazon article The Amazon Tax.

It is a great discussion and well worth the listen, especially about how in many ways Apple and Amazon resemble their org charts. Apple has a single P&L – and they go all in for perfectly integrated appliances that fit perfectly into their ecosystem. Amazon is like AWS, an assembly of modular “primitives” (storage, compute, DB) all interacting through very well defined protocols and interfaces. So much for Steve Sinofsky’s “don’t ship the org chart” !

One thing I learned is that Amazon’s Jeff Bezos considers communications to be a sign of failure. Increased communications signals issues a failure to define interfaces. At Amazon they do not use PowerPoint because Bezo’s says “the details get lost between the bulletpoints”. Instead they use Word documents for meeting briefings. Maximum 6 pages . No powerpoint in Amazon meetings only maximum 6 page Word doc because if you cannot explain it in writing you have not thought about it enough to justify a meeting.

Love that.

The Four Elements of Leadership

Michael Lombardi, former General Manager of the Cleveland Browns and current member of the coaching staff on the New England Patriots enumerated four elements of leadership:

  • Management of attention, aka plan. Systems and processes are offshoots of management of attention.
  • Management of meaning, aka communication – explain the plan.
  • Management of trust – consistency and no double standards.
  • Management of self – self-criticism and humility. Honesty. Admit mistakes and correct course.

He also quoted Bobby Kennedy – “Guide your life by principle not ambition”. Not sure if its accurate but I like the quote.

From The Knowledge Project podcast

Decision Engineering

Tim Van Gelder, arguably the worlds greatest authority on critical thinking, asks “What is Decision Engineering?”:

 My favorite definition of the engineer is somebody who can’t help but think that there must be a better way to do this. A more comprehensive and workmanlike definition is given by Wikipedia:
“Engineering is the application of scientific, economic, social, and practical knowledge in order to invent, design, build, maintain, research, and improve structures, machines, devices, systems, materials and processes.”
The activities mentioned above seem to fit this very broad concept: we were engaged to help improve or develop systems – in our case, systems for making decisions. It is therefore tempting to describe some of what we do as decision engineering.”…Decision engineering is applying relevant knowledge to design, build, maintain, and improve systems for making decisions.”
“Relevant knowledge can include knowledge of at least three kinds:
  • Theoretical knowledge from any relevant field of inquiry;
  • Practical knowledge (know-how, or tacit knowledge) of the decision engineer;
  • “Local” knowledge of the particular context and challenges of decision making, contributed by people already in or familiar with the context, such as the decision makers themselves.”
…in order to improve a particular decision system, a decision engineer might use approaches such as:
  • Bringing standard engineering principles and techniques to bear on making decisions
  • Using more structured decision methods, including the application of decision analysis techniques
  • Basing decisions on “big data” and “data science,” such as predictive analytics
…In short, I like this more general definition of decision engineering (in four words or less, building better decision systems) because it seems to get at the essence of what decision engineers do, allowing but not requiring that highly technical, quantitative approaches might be used.”

Source: What is Decision Engineering? | Tim van Gelder