Essay · 12 min read

2016 Letter to Shareholders (High-Velocity Decision Making)

Jeff Bezos · Amazon (aboutamazon.com) Free Beginner

This is the primary source, not a blog summary of it, and it does both jobs your answer needs in about two pages: the one-way vs two-way door distinction and 'disagree and commit', in Bezos's own words. Read the section titled 'High-Velocity Decision Making' and steal three lines verbatim for your team: decide most things at 70 percent of the information you wish you had, treat reversible calls as two-way doors an owner walks back through, and 'I disagree and commit' is a real, sincere yes after being heard, not a shrug.

  • Sort every decision into one-way doors (irreversible, deliberate slowly) vs two-way doors (reversible, decide fast); the failure mode is running the slow process on the fast decisions
  • Decide at ~70 percent of the information you want; waiting for 90 percent means you are being slow, and being slow is more expensive than being wrong when you course-correct well
  • 'Disagree and commit' is a two-way street: the owner voices real conviction, the team is genuinely heard, then everyone commits out loud, so consensus is never the bar
Open on aboutamazon.com ↗

It answers 3 questions

  1. How do I make decisions fast without either dictating everything or drowning in consensus?
  2. As my team grows, how do I stop being the human bottleneck that every decision and approval waits on?
  3. Two of us disagree on how big the opportunity is. How do we resolve a market-size argument between cofounders?

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