There’s an excellent profile of Jeff Bezos and Amazon in this week’s New Yorker, by Charles Duhigg, and the whole thing is worth reading. One paragraph in particular stood out to me:
Most firms have a mission statement that even the C.E.O. has trouble remembering. Amazon employees, Freed discovered, studied the Leadership Principles like Talmudic texts. During his first few years, he occasionally pulled colleagues, and even Bezos, aside to ask questions. What, for example, does “leaders are right a lot” really mean? Bezos explained, “If you have a really good idea, stick to it, but be flexible on how you get there. Be stubborn on your vision but flexible on the details.” Executives at other companies tended to lay out definitive plans. But Bezos urged his people to be adaptable. “People who are right a lot change their mind,” he once said. “They have the same data set that they had at the beginning, but they wake up, and they re-analyze things all the time, and they come to a new conclusion, and then they change their mind.”
Being stubborn on the vision but flexible on the details is such a good way to approach work at an office. The big picture matters — have a sense of where you want to go, and what you want to deliver. But those little details? The tools you use, the timeline for a project, all of the minutiae — those can always change. Don’t get tied up by the little things. Be flexible, and let your team drive the details.
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That’s a photo of an Amazon Kindle at top. It was taken by Amanda Jones for Unsplash.