Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon
Written by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr
Narrated by Colin Bryar, Bill Carr and Robert Petkoff
4.5/5
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About this audiobook
This program includes a preface read by the authors.
Working Backwards is an insider's breakdown of Amazon's approach to culture, leadership, and best practices from two long-time, top-level Amazon executives.
Colin started at Amazon in 1998; Bill joined in 1999. In Working Backwards, these two long-serving Amazon executives reveal and codify the principles and practices that drive the success of one of the most extraordinary companies the world has ever known. With twenty-seven years of Amazon experience between them, much of it in the early aughts—a period of unmatched innovation that brought products and services including Kindle, Amazon Prime, Amazon Studios, and Amazon Web Services to life—Bryar and Carr offer unprecedented access to the Amazon way as it was refined, articulated, and proven to be repeatable, scalable, and adaptable.
With keen analysis and practical steps for applying it at your own company—no matter the size—the authors illuminate how Amazon’s fourteen leadership principles inform decision-making at all levels and reveal how the company’s culture has been defined by four characteristics: customer obsession, long-term thinking, eagerness to invent, and operational excellence. Bryar and Carr explain the set of ground-level practices that ensure these are translated into action and flow through all aspects of the business.
Working Backwards is a practical guidebook and a corporate narrative, filled with the authors’ in-the-room recollections of what “Being Amazonian” is like and how it has affected their personal and professional lives. They demonstrate that success on Amazon’s scale is not achieved by the genius of any single leader, but rather through commitment to and execution of a set of well-defined, rigorously-executed principles and practices—shared here for the very first time.
A Macmillan Audio production from St. Martin's Press
Colin Bryar
COLIN BRYAR joined Amazon in 1998 — four years after its founding — and spent the next 12 years as part of Amazon’s senior leadership team as Amazon grew from a domestic (US-only) seller of books to a global, multi-dimensional powerhouse and innovator. For two of his years at Amazon, Colin was “Chief of Staff” to Jeff Bezos, AKA “Jeff’s shadow”, during which he spent each day attending meetings, traveling with, and discussing business and life with Jeff. After Amazon, he and his family relocated to Singapore for two years where Colin served as Chief Operating Officer of e-commerce company RedMart, which was subsequently sold to Alibaba. Colin is co-founder of Working Backwards LLC where he coaches executives at both large and early-stage companies on how to implement the management practices developed at Amazon.
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Reviews for Working Backwards
44 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I am biased because I think Amazon is creating negative environmental externalities and squeezing people until they have no health left to carry on.
The book would provide good insight into some of the common sense business practices, but for me personally leadership principles are another name for creating passive aggressive work environment. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5So much interesting ideas and perspective of what’s going on or and what’s being done with an Amazon to reach the level it’s reached today really inspiring