제프 베조스 2017 주주들에게 보내는 편지

박지웅 대표의 페이스북에서 가져온 것

대단한 명문이자, 큰 회사가 아니라 작은 회사들도 곱씹어봐야 하는 부분들이 많다. 인상깊은 구절만 보면..

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고객 중심의 접근이 가진 수 많은 다른 이점도 있지만, 바로 이것 때문입니다. 고객들은 늘, 아름답게, 놀라울 정도로, 만족을 모릅니다. 그들이 진정으로 행복해하고 사업도 성장일로에 있을 때에도 마찬가지입니다. 설령 고객들은 스스로가 정확히 무엇을 원하는지 알지도 못하지만, 아무튼 무언가 더 나은 것을 끊임없이 원합니다. 그러니 ‘고객을 만족시키겠다’하는 욕심이야말로 가장 강한 추진력이 됩니다. 고객 입장에서 무언가를 고민하고 만들어내게끔 하는 것이죠.

제품이나 서비스를 담당하는 사람이라면 반드시 고객을 이해하고 확고한 비전을 갖는 동시에 제품을 사랑해야만 합니다. 그 이후라야 베타테스트나 시장조사가 당신이 비어있는 부분을 찾는데 도움을 줄 것입니다. 고객 경험을 만들어내는 것은 진심, 직관, 호기심, 재미, 감정 그리고 취향에서 시작합니다. 어떤 조사에서부터 시작하는 것은 아닙니다.

아마존은 의사결정에서 (훌륭함보다는) 속도를 선택했습니다. 속도는 비즈니스에서 매우 중요합니다. 또한 속도는 업무환경 역시 재미있게 만들어줍니다. 이를 위한 몇 가지 팁을 공유합니다.

첫째, 모든 의사결정을 하나의 기법으로 하려고 하지 마십시오. 많은 결정들은 되돌릴 수 없는 것이 아닙니다. 양쪽으로 열린 문과 같죠. 자연히 어떤 의사결정은 아주 가볍게 해볼 수 있습니다. 만약 틀리면, 어떡할까요. 사실 이에 대해서는 지난 해의 주주서한에 좀 더 상세히 쓴 바 있습니다. (역주: 아마존은 되돌릴 수 있나 없나를 기준으로 type1, typ2 의사결정으로 나누어 운영한다고 한다)

둘째, 정보가 당신이 원하는 수준의 70%만 있으면 대부분의 의사결정은 할 수 있습니다. 90% 수준이 될 때까지 기다리는 것은, 보통은 늦습니다. 나아가 어떤 의사결정이든 틀렸다는 것을 빠르게 탐지하고 수정해나가는 것에 능해야 합니다. 이것에 익숙해진다면, 무언가를 틀린다는 것은 사실 그다지 뼈아픈 일은 아닙니다. 틀리는 것과 늦는 것, 당연히 늦는 것이 더 치를 대가가 큽니다.

셋째, 이 말을 기억하세요 - ‘의견은 다르지만, 해보기(disagree and commit)’ 이 말은 불필요한 시간들을 획기적으로 줄여줄 것입니다. 당신이 어떤 방향에 대해 확실한 신념을 가지고 있지만 주변에서 동의하지 않을 때, 이렇게 얘기해보는 것입니다.

‘좋아, 우리 모두가 이것에 대해 의견 일치를 이루기는 어렵다는 것을 인정하지. 하지만 한 번 믿고 해보지 않겠어? 의견은 다르지만, 해보는거지’

자, 여기서의 포인트는 누구도 합리적으로 일치된 의견을 이끌어낼 수 없는 상황에서도, 실행에 대한 동의를 얻어낼 수 있다는 것입니다. 이것은 부하직원에만 해당하는 것은 아닙니다. 보스에게도 동일하게 적용됩니다. 저 역시 항상 그렇습니다.

아마존의 제프 베조스가 2017년 주주들에게 보낸 편지 (번역글) [출처] 아마존의 제프 베조스가 2017년 주주들에게 보낸 편지 (번역글)|작성자 홍군

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손재권 기자님의 페이스북에서 가져온 것

오늘 아마존 제프 베조스 CEO가 주주들에게 보내는 편지 공개했습니다. . 연매출 1360억 달러(153조 6392억원), 시가총액 4276억 달러(483조 4018억원), 20년 역사의 거대기업 아마존이 갓 창업한 스타트업처럼 움직이는 비결이 담겨 있습니다. 
 일단 키워드부터 정리해봤어요. 
(1)고객 중심 회사 만들어라 : 기술 중심, 경쟁자 중심, 제품 중심 있지만 고객중심이 가장 핵심. 고객은 언제나 만족을 모르기 때문)
(2)프로세스에 함몰되지 마라 : 프로세스가 회사를 지배하는지 내가 회사를 지배하는지 반성해야)
(3)시장조사, 설문조사는 독이다 : 조사결과 55%가 만족한다고 해서 제품 출시하지만 47%는 불만족인 것을 놓친다. 
(4)직관을 발전시켜라 : 훌륭한 발명가와 디자이너는 고객을 깊게 이해하고 그 직관을 발전시키기 위해 엄청난 에너지를 들인다
(5)트렌드에 민감해라 : 강력한 트렌드를 포용하지 않으면 뒤쳐진다. 지금은 인공지능과 머신러닝이다. 
(6)빠르게 의사결정하라 : 고도의 의사결정을 늦게 하면 역동성 떨어져. 
(7)목표 불일치를 조기에 인식하라 : 각 팀은 다른 목표와 다른 견해를 가지고 있다. 의사 불일치를 인식하고 조기에 해소해야.

*기사나 요약보다 원문을 읽으시는게 좋을 것 같습니다. 비교적 쉬운 영어로 돼 있습니다. 특히 스타트업 대표님들은 필독인 것 같습니다. 기존 기업 경영자들은 자신들이 최고경영자여서 남들로부터 아무것도 배울게 없다고 생각하지 않는 이상 베조스의 경영 비결을 보고 반성하거나 오히려 극복하고 발전시켜볼 계기를 만들어보는 것도 좋을 것 같습니다. 
https://www.sec.gov/…/…/000119312517120198/d373368dex991.htm

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임정욱님 타임라인에서 가져온 글 -

제프 베조스의 20번째 주주서한. 항상 첫날의 마음가짐을 간직하기 위해 쓴다는 것. 항상 이 편지뒤에 20년전의 첫 편지를 첨부해 둔다는 것도 인상적.

첫날의 마음을 간직하기 위해 4가지를 열거. customer obsession, a skeptical view of proxies, the eager adoption of external trends, and high-velocity decision making. 고객중심주의, 당연한 것에 대한 의심, 외부 트렌드 적극적으로 수용하기, 빠른 의사결정.

뛰어난 경영자의 철학이라는 것이 이렇구나 하고 느끼기 위해서도 정독해볼만한 내용. 이 사람은 20년이 넘는 시간동안 어쩌면 이렇게 안주하지 않고 계속 열정을 불태울까 놀랍다는 생각이...

매년 이 글을 쓰기 위해서 얼마나 생각을 많이 하고, 많은 시간을 들여 글을 가다듬었을까 하는 생각도 해 봄. 매년 이 과정을 통해서 과거의 자신을 다시 성찰하고 또 자신의 생각을 정리해왔을 것.

한국의 어떤 경영자가 과연 자신의 경영철학을 주주들에게 전달하기 위해서 이렇게 매년 공을 들여서 글을 쓸까. 읽어보면 아마존이 지난 20년동안 그렇게 외부 비판에 시달리면서도 흔들리지 않고 계속 성장해왔는지 이해할 수 있음. 적어도 이제는 아마존을 의심하는 사람은 없는 것 같음.

2016 Letter to Shareholders

April 12, 2017

“Jeff, what does Day 2 look like?”

That’s a question I just got at our most recent all-hands meeting. I’ve been reminding people that it’s Day 1 for a couple of decades. I work in an Amazon building named Day 1, and when I moved buildings, I took the name with me. I spend time thinking about this topic.

“Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.”

To be sure, this kind of decline would happen in extreme slow motion. An established company might harvest Day 2 for decades, but the final result would still come.

I’m interested in the question, how do you fend off Day 2? What are the techniques and tactics? How do you keep the vitality of Day 1, even inside a large organization?

Such a question can’t have a simple answer. There will be many elements, multiple paths, and many traps. I don’t know the whole answer, but I may know bits of it. Here’s a starter pack of essentials for Day 1 defense: customer obsession, a skeptical view of proxies, the eager adoption of external trends, and high-velocity decision making.

True Customer Obsession

There are many ways to center a business. You can be competitor focused, you can be product focused, you can be technology focused, you can be business model focused, and there are more. But in my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of Day 1 vitality.

Why? There are many advantages to a customer-centric approach, but here’s the big one: customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great. Even when they don’t yet know it, customers want something better, and your desire to delight customers will drive you to invent on their behalf. No customer ever asked Amazon to create the Prime membership program, but it sure turns out they wanted it, and I could give you many such examples.

Staying in Day 1 requires you to experiment patiently, accept failures, plant seeds, protect saplings, and double down when you see customer delight. A customer-obsessed culture best creates the conditions where all of that can happen.

Resist Proxies

As companies get larger and more complex, there’s a tendency to manage to proxies. This comes in many shapes and sizes, and it’s dangerous, subtle, and very Day 2.

A common example is process as proxy. Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing. This can happen very easily in large organizations. The process becomes the proxy for the result you want. You stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you’re doing the process right. Gulp. It’s not that rare to hear a junior leader defend a bad outcome with something like, “Well, we followed the process.” A more experienced leader will use it as an opportunity to investigate and improve the process. The process is not the thing. It’s always worth asking, do we own the process or does the process own us? In a Day 2 company, you might find it’s the second.

Another example: market research and customer surveys can become proxies for customers – something that’s especially dangerous when you’re inventing and designing products. “Fifty-five percent of beta testers report being satisfied with this feature. That is up from 47% in the first survey.” That’s hard to interpret and could unintentionally mislead.

Good inventors and designers deeply understand their customer. They spend tremendous energy developing that intuition. They study and understand many anecdotes rather than only the averages you’ll find on surveys. They live with the design.

I’m not against beta testing or surveys. But you, the product or service owner, must understand the customer, have a vision, and love the offering. Then, beta testing and research can help you find your blind spots. A remarkable customer experience starts with heart, intuition, curiosity, play, guts, taste. You won’t find any of it in a survey.

Embrace External Trends

The outside world can push you into Day 2 if you won’t or can’t embrace powerful trends quickly. If you fight them, you’re probably fighting the future. Embrace them and you have a tailwind.

These big trends are not that hard to spot (they get talked and written about a lot), but they can be strangely hard for large organizations to embrace. We’re in the middle of an obvious one right now: machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Over the past decades computers have broadly automated tasks that programmers could describe with clear rules and algorithms. Modern machine learning techniques now allow us to do the same for tasks where describing the precise rules is much harder.

At Amazon, we’ve been engaged in the practical application of machine learning for many years now. Some of this work is highly visible: our autonomous Prime Air delivery drones; the Amazon Go convenience store that uses machine vision to eliminate checkout lines; and Alexa, our cloud-based AI assistant. (We still struggle to keep Echo in stock, despite our best efforts. A high-quality problem, but a problem. We’re working on it.)

But much of what we do with machine learning happens beneath the surface. Machine learning drives our algorithms for demand forecasting, product search ranking, product and deals recommendations, merchandising placements, fraud detection, translations, and much more. Though less visible, much of the impact of machine learning will be of this type – quietly but meaningfully improving core operations.

Inside AWS, we’re excited to lower the costs and barriers to machine learning and AI so organizations of all sizes can take advantage of these advanced techniques.

Using our pre-packaged versions of popular deep learning frameworks running on P2 compute instances (optimized for this workload), customers are already developing powerful systems ranging everywhere from early disease detection to increasing crop yields. And we’ve also made Amazon’s higher level services available in a convenient form. Amazon Lex (what’s inside Alexa), Amazon Polly, and Amazon Rekognition remove the heavy lifting from natural language understanding, speech generation, and image analysis. They can be accessed with simple API calls – no machine learning expertise required. Watch this space. Much more to come.

High-Velocity Decision Making

Day 2 companies make high-quality decisions, but they make high-quality decisions slowly. To keep the energy and dynamism of Day 1, you have to somehow make high-quality, high-velocity decisions. Easy for start-ups and very challenging for large organizations. The senior team at Amazon is determined to keep our decision-making velocity high. Speed matters in business – plus a high-velocity decision making environment is more fun too. We don’t know all the answers, but here are some thoughts.

First, never use a one-size-fits-all decision-making process. Many decisions are reversible, two-way doors. Those decisions can use a light-weight process. For those, so what if you’re wrong? I wrote about this in more detail in last year’s letter.

Second, most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow. Plus, either way, you need to be good at quickly recognizing and correcting bad decisions. If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure.

Third, use the phrase “disagree and commit.” This phrase will save a lot of time. If you have conviction on a particular direction even though there’s no consensus, it’s helpful to say, “Look, I know we disagree on this but will you gamble with me on it? Disagree and commit?” By the time you’re at this point, no one can know the answer for sure, and you’ll probably get a quick yes.

This isn’t one way. If you’re the boss, you should do this too. I disagree and commit all the time. We recently greenlit a particular Amazon Studios original. I told the team my view: debatable whether it would be interesting enough, complicated to produce, the business terms aren’t that good, and we have lots of other opportunities. They had a completely different opinion and wanted to go ahead. I wrote back right away with “I disagree and commit and hope it becomes the most watched thing we’ve ever made.” Consider how much slower this decision cycle would have been if the team had actually had to convince me rather than simply get my commitment.

Note what this example is not: it’s not me thinking to myself “well, these guys are wrong and missing the point, but this isn’t worth me chasing.” It’s a genuine disagreement of opinion, a candid expression of my view, a chance for the team to weigh my view, and a quick, sincere commitment to go their way. And given that this team has already brought home 11 Emmys, 6 Golden Globes, and 3 Oscars, I’m just glad they let me in the room at all!

Fourth, recognize true misalignment issues early and escalate them immediately. Sometimes teams have different objectives and fundamentally different views. They are not aligned. No amount of discussion, no number of meetings will resolve that deep misalignment. Without escalation, the default dispute resolution mechanism for this scenario is exhaustion. Whoever has more stamina carries the decision.

I’ve seen many examples of sincere misalignment at Amazon over the years. When we decided to invite third party sellers to compete directly against us on our own product detail pages – that was a big one. Many smart, well-intentioned Amazonians were simply not at all aligned with the direction. The big decision set up hundreds of smaller decisions, many of which needed to be escalated to the senior team.

“You’ve worn me down” is an awful decision-making process. It’s slow and de-energizing. Go for quick escalation instead – it’s better.

So, have you settled only for decision quality, or are you mindful of decision velocity too? Are the world’s trends tailwinds for you? Are you falling prey to proxies, or do they serve you? And most important of all, are you delighting customers? We can have the scope and capabilities of a large company and the spirit and heart of a small one. But we have to choose it.

A huge thank you to each and every customer for allowing us to serve you, to our shareowners for your support, and to Amazonians everywhere for your hard work, your ingenuity, and your passion.

As always, I attach a copy of our original 1997 letter. It remains Day 1.

Sincerely,

Jeff