Amazon's Jeff Bezos on profits, failure, succession, big bets
These aren't really "tough questions". Still, Bezos gives a good interview and makes Amazon sound like a good place to work. He's right-on with this:What really matters is, companies that don’t continue to experiment, companies that don’t embrace failure, they eventually get in a desperate position where the only thing they can do is a Hail Mary bet at the very end of their corporate existence.I've seen that first hand. It's ugly, especially because the best people leave companies where they don't get to innovate and own new things, so you're doing that "Hail Mary pass" with a lot of deadwood in your ranks.That said, I'm having a hard time reconciling his pro-innovation stance with Amazon's use of stack-ranking, which causes divisions to ossify and halts innovation. It seems hard, after a point, to innovate if you don't trust your own people. You'll have a core in-crowd that will toss you ideas for a while, but eventually they run out and lose the ability to keep pace.That's the question that I would want to see asked: how do you reconcile your ideals (which are admirable) with the reality of a company known to use stack ranking?