Book SummaryWorking Backwards, by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of Working Backwards

If you want to start a successful business, many would argue that Amazon is the one to imitate. In just a few decades, Amazon has grown from an obscure internet startup to a household name, raking in hundreds of billions of dollars by offering a vast range of products and services. Authors Colin Bryar and Bill Carr explain exactly how Amazon achieved its meteoric growth and argue that any company can follow in its footsteps.

In Working Backwards, Amazon insiders Bryar and Carr detail the specific guiding principles and business practices that Amazon used to become such a dominant force in so many industries. Bryar worked as Chief of Staff to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos for two years, picking up many of Bezos’s business...

Working Backwards Summary How Amazon Established a Culture of Success

According to Bryar and Carr, Amazon is more successful than other, more traditional businesses because they consistently do things differently than traditional business wisdom would dictate. Consistently doing things differently is more difficult than it sounds. As a company grows, it becomes impossible for one leader to directly ensure that workers throughout the organization persistently follow an unconventional path to success.

Bryar and Carr explain how Amazon solved this problem once the company began to scale up: First, managers wrote a list of guiding principles that embodied everything effective about their unique organization. These are rules of thumb intended to shape employee behavior at every level of the company.

Then, Amazon managers designed their internal business practices so employees would act in line with those guiding principles. In other words, they provided workers with models for how to do their jobs that required them to follow the company’s principles. Bryar and Carr assert that any company can use this process to establish a productive company-wide culture.

Building Your Culture Around Virtues and Rules

In _[What You Do Is Who...

Working Backwards Summary Amazon’s Tools for Strategy Development

We’ve established that Amazon found success by specifying guiding principles and designing the company in a way that aligned with those principles. For the rest of this guide, we’ll explain this second part in more detail—how Amazon designed their company’s business practices to reinforce their principles. Some of these practices are meant to encourage Amazon employees to work backwards, while others are meant to reinforce some of Amazon’s other important guiding principles.

In this section, we’ll discuss four tools Amazon’s workers use for strategy development; that is, to identify what to do to succeed. This not only includes tools to help them envision the customer experience (working backwards) but also tools to help them create and refine the customer experience after they’ve defined it.

• Tool #1: The Product Development Proposal
• Tool #2: The Deep Thinking Document
• Tool #3: The DMAIC Process
• Tool #4: Big-Picture Planning

(Shortform note: In Working Backwards, the authors explore each of Amazon’s tools for success in a separate chapter. This is useful, as they’re fairly autonomous—they can be implemented independently of one another, and they’re more easily...

Working Backwards Summary Amazon’s Tools for Building Productive Teams

So far, we’ve discussed a handful of tools that Amazon uses to rapidly develop strategies with the greatest chance of success. In the final section of this guide, we’ll explore two more tools Amazon uses for consistent success—this time, tools that Amazon uses to build productive teams that can execute the strategies they develop. These tools are meant to reinforce more of Amazon’s guiding principles.

• Tool #1: Rigorous Hiring Process
• Tool #2: Single-Responsibility Teams

Tool #1: Rigorous Hiring Process

The first tool for building teams we’ll discuss is Amazon’s uniquely rigorous hiring process. Amazon strives to perfect their hiring process because of another one of their guiding principles: Only hire applicants with the potential to be better than the existing team.

According to Bryar and Carr, hiring top talent is important because the quality of new hires determines your organization’s culture. As your company grows, new hires will quickly outnumber veteran team members and make up the vast majority of the team. If your lenient hiring process leads to new hires with low standards for their work, it can create a permanent culture of low standards across...

Shortform Exercise: Compare Your Organization to Amazon

In Working Backwards, Bryar and Carr offer a very specific model of a successful company. Consider how your organization compares.

First, think about what Amazon does better than your organization: Which of their tools would have the greatest positive impact on your organization if implemented, and why? Describe how different your organization would look after implementing this tool. (For example, perhaps your organization runs ineffective meetings and would benefit from integrating Deep Thinking Documents. By skipping unfocused presentations, workers at your organization could save time and avoid having to work late.)