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Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon Kindle Edition
| Colin Bryar (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
| Bill Carr (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
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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.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherMacmillan
- Publication date18 February 2021
- Reading age18 years and up
- File size3435 KB
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Review
"Colin Bryar and Bill Carr have operationalized the core management practices that lie behind Amazon's success. In particular, their insights into how any successful leader can focus on narrative and metrics to take a short-cut to the truth are essential for any leader in any industry. You'll want to have your highlighter ready and keep this book close at hand for quick reference." --Kim Scott, author of Radical Candor
"Colin and Bill give us an insider’s view of Amazon during what was an extraordinary period of growth for the organization. Having partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) during my time at Red Hat and now at IBM, I can attest to their unrelenting commitment to customers. Leaders who want to foster customer obsession and drive operational excellence within their organizations should read this book." --Jim Whitehurst, President, IBM
"Working Backwards serves as a blueprint enabling leaders to implement guiding principles, operating rhythms and durable mechanisms that allow teams to scale effectively, even as your business expands at an accelerated clip. A must read for every entrepreneur or business leader focused on driving growth."--Mariana Garavaglia, Chief People & Business Operations Officer, Peloton
"Colin and Bill very precisely captured the unique corporate culture of Amazon and described many of the essential parts of Amazon’s approach to innovation. They offer a unique, insiders’ view of the company with many valuable lessons for large companies that want to reinvent their business models as well as for startups that want to scale rapidly. This is the definitive innovation playbook." --Serguei Netessine, Vice Dean and Dhirubhai Ambani Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at The Wharton School
About the Author
Bill Carr joined Amazon in 1999 and spent more than 15 years with the company. As Vice President of Digital Media, Bill launched and managed the company's global digital music and video businesses, including Amazon Music, Prime Video, and Amazon Studios. After Amazon, Bill was an Executive In Residence with Maveron, LLC, an early-stage, consumer-only venture capital firm. Bill later served as the Chief Operating Officer of OfferUp, the largest mobile marketplace for local buyers and sellers in the U.S. Today Bill 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.
From the Back Cover
An insider’s analysis of Amazon’s approach to culture, leadership and best practices from two long-time, top-level Amazon executives.
[quote to come]
Product details
- ASIN : B08GKYJVL1
- Publisher : Macmillan (18 February 2021)
- Language : English
- File size : 3435 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 305 pages
- Page numbers source ISBN : 1529033829
- Best Sellers Rank: #3,088 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #5 in Business Industries & Professions
- #13 in Commerce
- #49 in Industries
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors

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. Colin served as a Vice President at Amazon, and for two of his years he 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. Colin holds Bachelor of Science and Master of Engineering degrees in Operations Research from Cornell University.

Bill Carr joined Amazon in 1999 and spent more than 15 years with the company. As Vice President of Digital Media, Bill launched and managed the company's global digital music and video businesses, including Amazon Music, Prime Video, and Amazon Studios. After Amazon, Bill was an Executive In Residence with Maveron, LLC, an early-stage, consumer-only venture capital firm. Bill later served as the Chief Operating Officer of OfferUp, the largest mobile marketplace for local buyers and sellers in the U.S. Today Bill 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. Bill holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Colby College and a Masters in Business Administration from the Goizueta Business School at Emory University.
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Reviewed in India on 28 April 2021
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By Gaurav Vats on 1 February 2022
Overall i liked the first half much more than the latter.
By Pranab Sarkar on 28 April 2021
Great inside things of giant company
Top reviews from other countries
The book is an endless veneration of Amazon. Amazon, its employees, and especially Bezos are worshipped. Mistakes Amazon made are only mentioned to show how Amazon used them to improve their process. There's no mention of issues that Amazon had and continues to have problems with, such as user interfaces, as anyone who has tried to navigate the categories on the website or used the AWS console can testify.
The authors don't consider the harm that Amazon might be doing. They approvingly recount how an employee was forced to turn her car around and cancel her weekend based on a snap decision of a higher-up, with no consideration of the damage this might have done to her health or family life.
Supposedly Amazon is hugely customer-obsessed and strives desperately to "delight" their customers. This is hard to square with my experience of trying to get Alexa to respect my settings or Amazon Fire stick to stop autoplaying or showing me ads. The picture the book paints seems quite different to reality.
For non Amazonians, it's incredibly useful if you can get past the "Amazonian" thing. Adopting these practices will be valuable for any company, but I suspect many will resist as being "good for Amazon but not for us". I hope more can see beyond this superficial resistance.
The book made me laugh though, the author travelled 2.5 miles every night to support the business in the holiday period. Like a 5 minute car journey is a notable chore.
Working Backwards is, however, different in that the authors are two 'Amazonians' of relatively significant tenure describing relevant business practices that can be implemented to improve efficiency, increasing the chance of sustainable business growth.
A large part of what is presented can be argued as common sense. However, where Amazon has been different (and owes it's success to) is its ability to break from the comfort of convention when things arent working.
For example, meetings taking too long due to hundreds of slides being read verbatim? Rather than say "we should do something different next time", and (fast forward 6 months) nothing being done, Amazon just banned PowerPoint outright.
Due to corporate worry of failure (despite the ability to learn from it), few businesses will (and should) copy all of Amazon's approaches blindly. After all, if you copy someone, you're already five steps behind.
However, that should not stop you from picking up a copy and trying something new.














