For those who have not seen it, there is an interview (terrible audio) with Jeff Bezos talking about his management style and philosophy. While the piece suffers from some common tropes, most obviously the conflation of management and leadership (see my Article Series — Leader-Manager to set the record straight), it does provide seven principles that the great business magnate sees as essential:
- You don't choose your passions; your passions choose you.
- Take pride in your choices, not your gifts.
- Be right a lot.
- Be stubborn on vision and flexible on details.
- Failure and invention are inseparable twins.
- Two pizza teams.
- Memos, not PowerPoints.
While six of the seven points are largely self-explanatory, though I recently wrote a piece on Memos, not PowerPoints, 'be right a lot' is one that deserves a little unpacking. Bezos acknowledges as much by giving a hat tip to the people who often follow up with 'is there some way I can practice being right a lot?' Yet despite acknowledging the need to delve into the principle, his answer is something of a non-answer: 'I do think that with practice you can be right more often.' Practice which entails people 'listen a lot', 'change their mind a lot', and 'seek to disconfirm their most profoundly held convictions'.
For a range of reasons I find this an unsatisfactory response, most notably because, as my old history master would opine, "practice does not make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect." If our understanding of the question is imperfect, or if we have the wrong question from the outset, our practice will be far from perfect.
To be fair, Bezos is on the spot and giving somewhat off the cuff remarks. To expand on his remarks, and fill in some of the blanks for how people can be 'right a lot', there is no shortage of self-help guidance. One particular attempt by Garrett Scott caught my eye, not so much for his thinking on the topic but because of one of the replies to his thread:
I've felt that the "are right a lot" thing is better said as "end up right a lot." Too many people misinterpret the outcome (being right) for the input (always having the "right" idea). Great leaders shed their ideas as quickly as they are demonstrated to be wrong.
Paul Gaffney
It struck me because it is the essence of why there is so much bad leadership and poor management — not to mention fleeting convictions — and why so many people are wrong a lot but still successful.
Input versus Output
There is no doubt that leaders in the present age, here I use the term to cover a myriad of approaches and sins, change their mind a lot. This is for a variety of reasons, few of which have anything to do with being right. Two key elements driving u-turns are the 24/7 media environment which demands instant answers, and that leadership has largely ceased being for something and is instead about not loosing support. Yet to step back from the political and look at the world of sport, 'being right' takes on a different and altogether more rational meaning.
For anyone who has enjoyed a game of pool at the local pub, there are two methods of play. The amateur — whack the cue ball at another ball and hopefully something goes into a pocket. The professional — name the ball and pocket, then put one into the other. In the former case, blind luck can see a person win and 'be right' — in the outcome sense of the concept. In the latter case, a person may lose the game, but their exercise of skill means that in subsequent rematches they will only be beaten by a better player.
Adapting this analogy to leadership and management and the outcome-based approach to being right becomes tremendously problematic. Not least because it fails to consider a slew of reasons why a person may achieve a beneficial outcome despite being measurably wrong on every conceivable input. Which means, as in the pool analogy, their success is not controlled and therefore unlikely to be repeatable over the long term.
The ends of an outcome based approach to being right is that we end up following successful people rather than people who are right. Something which explains why morally bad, and arguably criminally negligent, behaviour in politicians and business leaders is consistently rewarded at the ballot box and in the board room. At least until their success comes to an abrupt halt.
Causes for the failure to detect what is wrong are generally the result of category errors. In the context of being right, the error is seeing the concept of right as part of the category of 'outcomes', measured against the benefit to an individual or group, rather than 'inputs', measured against the quality of choices.
Once conceptualised in this way, whether we judge right as an input or outcome means a world of difference to the quality of the team, organisation, society, or world. This is manifest in a person being wrong in their positioning for the future, wrong in their analysis of the data, wrong measured by the horrendous consequences for key stakeholders. But, because they are judged on an outcomes approach, perhaps better called 'vested interests', are seen as right because they win the contract, grow the business, or achieve the promotion. This outcomes based approach that has seen many successful organisations, whose leadership was judged to be right based on financially successful outcomes, hauled before Royal Commissions. Events which are often defended as being 'only obvious with hindsight', but in truth could have been seen at the time had those with authority not made category errors in judging what constitutes 'being right a lot'.
Aside from prosecution by a Royal Commission, the danger in aligning oneself with an outcomes approach, or having it as the foundation for organisational leadership, is that I am yet to witness an entity so capable or lucky as to enjoy success in perpetuity. All people and organisations face adversity, and without a more secure foundation than outcomes to measure success, bad choices will be made that permit incompetence in roles, usher in toxic work environments, and create engines of chaos. Conversely, right courses of action are discarded because they do not yield the anticipated success.
Yet by judging right on inputs, we unlock the power of two other Bezos leadership principles — being stubborn on vision and being comfortable with failure.
For anyone who has sat a statistics, finance, or other formula-based exam, a tip is to always provide the formula and your workings, not just the answer. The reason for this is that if you make a mistake and enter the wrong data, the examiner can at least see that you understood the question, used the right solution to solve for the problem, but perhaps used 0.5 instead of 0.05 to arrive at your answer. In this context, the outcome was wrong but the solution was right — making long term success about reattempting. Put in an organisational context, we have the right strategy and plans, even if we have not yet got the expected outcomes. Therefore, we need to continue to invest in the program.
This process creates a virtuous circle and means it is rational to be 'stubborn' with our vision, because we know we are right. A process which I would argue is more perseverance than stubbornness. In such circumstances — judging our rightness on inputs rather than outcomes — we can make rational choices about the future. Secure in the knowledge that we have positioned rather than predicted our future, that our future is based on skill and not luck, and that we are people worthy to be followed. And that is the essence of great leadership.
Good night, and good luck.
