Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) - YouTube
发布时间 2024-01-13 20:00:21 来源
People think invention takes all this time, but you only need two hours once a month. The thing is, once you have one good idea, it often takes years to express that. So you had the idea to have a newsletter. I know some of the history of your newsletter. You've been working on the expression of that idea for years now. Jeff and Amazon had ideas like, let's have prime shipping. Prime is still getting better and still being worked on. It's a 20-some-year-old idea. You know, the Kindle, a decades-old idea now, still getting better. The point here is, you don't mean very many good ideas to be seen as tremendously inventive.
人们认为发明需要花费很长时间，但其实你只需要每个月花两个小时。问题在于，一旦你有一个好的想法，通常需要多年来表达出来。所以你有了做一份新闻简讯的想法。我了解你的新闻简讯的一些历史。你已经花了几年的时间来表达这个想法。Jeff和亚马逊有像“让快递更快”这样的想法。Prime服务仍在变得更好，仍在不断地改进。这是一个有20多年历史的想法。你知道，Kindle是一个几十年历史的想法，仍在不断改进。这里要说的是，你不需要很多好的想法来被视为非常有创造力。
["The Time of the Year"] Today, my guest is Ethan Evans. Ethan is a former vice president at Amazon, executive coach, and course creator focused on helping leaders grow into executives. Ethan spent 15 years at Amazon, helped invent and run, prime video, the Amazon App Store, prime gaming, and Twitch Commerce, which alone is a billion-dollar business for Amazon. He led global teams of over 800, helped draft one of Amazon's 14 core leadership principles, holds over 70 patents, and currently spends us time, executive coaching and running courses to help people advance in their career, build leadership skills, and succeed in senior roles.
《一年之中的时光》今天，我的特邀嘉宾是伊桑·埃文斯。伊桑是亚马逊的前副总裁，执行教练和课程创建者，专注于帮助领导者成长为高管。伊桑在亚马逊工作了15年，曾协助创立和运营Prime Video、亚马逊应用商店、Prime Gaming和Twitch Commerce，其中后者已经成为亚马逊的一个价值十亿美元的业务。他领导着超过800人的全球团队，帮助起草了亚马逊的14项核心领导原则之一，拥有超过70项专利，并目前将时间投入到执行教练和开设课程中，帮助人们提升职业发展，构建领导能力，并在高级职位取得成功。
In her conversation, Ethan shares an amazing story of when he failed on an important project for Jeff Bezos and what he learned from that experience. We spent some time on something called the Magic Loop, which is a very simple idea that I guarantee will help you get promoted in advance in your career. We also get into a bunch of other career advice, primarily for senior ICs and e-managers. We get into advice for standing out in interviews, plus some of Amazon's most important and impactful leadership principles, and much more, I learned a lot from Ethan, and I'm excited to bring you this episode. With that, I bring you Ethan Evans after a short word from our sponsors.
在谈话中，伊桑分享了一个惊人的故事，当时他在为杰夫·贝索斯做重要项目时失败了，以及他从那次经历中学到了什么。我们花了一些时间讨论一种叫做魔术循环的东西，这是一个非常简单的想法，我向你保证它会帮助你提前晋升。我们还谈到了一些其他关于职业发展的建议，主要是针对资深个人贡献者和电子经理。我们谈到了在面试中脱颖而出的建议，还有亚马逊最重要和有影响力的领导原则，等等。我从伊桑那里学到了很多东西，我很高兴能为你们带来这一集。就这样，我带给你们伊桑·埃文斯，接下来是由我们的赞助商发表的一小段广告词。
Let me tell you about a product called Sidebar. The best way to level up your career is to surround yourself with extraordinary peers. This gives you more than a leg up. It gives you a leap forward. This worked really well for me in my career, and this is the Sidebar ethos. When you have a trusted group of peers, you can discuss challenges you're having, get career advice, and just gut check how you're thinking about your work, your career, and your life. This was a big trajectory changer for me, but it's hard to build this trusted group of peers. Sidebar is a private, highly vetted leadership program where senior leaders are matched with peer groups to lean on for unbiased opinions, diverse perspectives, and raw feedback. Guided by world-class programming and facilitation, Sidebar enables you to get focused, tactical feedback at every step of your career journey. If you're a listener of this podcast, you're already committed to growth. Sidebar is the missing piece to catalyze your career. 93% of members say Sidebar helped them achieve a significant positive change in their career. Why spend a decade finding your people when you can meet them at Sidebar today? Join thousands of top senior leaders who have taken the first step to career growth from companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta by visiting sidebar.com slash Lenny. That's sidebar.com slash Lenny.
让我来给你介绍一个叫做Sidebar的产品。职业晋升的最佳方式就是让自己周围充满非凡的同行。这不仅让你走在前面，更是让你飞跃前行。 这对我在职业上非常有效，这也是Sidebar的理念。当你有一群可信赖的同行时，你可以讨论自己遇到的挑战，获得职业建议，以及检查一下自己如何思考工作、职业和生活。这对我来说是一个重大的转折点，但要建立这样的信任团体并不容易。Sidebar是一个私密且经过严格审核的领导力项目，资深领导者与同行小组匹配，可以依靠他们提供中立意见、不同的观点和直接的反馈。 在世界级的课程和引导下，Sidebar让你在职业生涯的每个阶段都能获得专注的、实用的反馈。如果你是这个播客的听众，那你已经在为成长做好准备了。Sidebar是激发你职业发展的缺失环节。93%的会员表示，Sidebar帮助他们在职业生涯中取得了重大积极的变化。为什么要花十年时间找寻你的同行，当你可以在今天就在Sidebar认识他们呢？加入来自微软、亚马逊和Meta等公司的成千上万的高级领导者，点击访问 sidebar.com/Lenny。这就是 sidebar.com/Lenny。
Let me tell you about a product called Sprig. Next gen product teams like Figma and Notion rely on Sprig to build products that people love. Sprig is an AI-powered platform that enables you to collect relevant product experience insights from the right users so you can make product decisions quickly and confidently. Here's how it works. It all starts with Sprig's precise targeting, which allows you to trigger in-app studies based on users' characteristics and actions taken in-product. Then Sprig's AI is layered on top of all studies to instantly surface your product's biggest learnings. Sprig's surveys enables you to target specific users to get relevant and timely feedback. Sprig replays enables you to capture targeted session clips to see your product experience firsthand. Sprig's AI is a game changer for product teams. They're the only platform with product level AI, meaning it analyzes data across all of your studies to centralize the most important product opportunities, trends, and correlations in one real-time feed. Visit Sprig.com slash Lenny to learn more and get 10% off. That's sprig.com slash Lenny.
让我给你介绍一个名为Sprig的产品。像Figma和Notion这样的下一代产品团队依靠Sprig来构建用户喜爱的产品。Sprig是一个由人工智能驱动的平台，使您能够收集来自正确用户的相关产品体验见解，以便您能够迅速而自信地做出产品决策。下面是它的工作原理。一切都始于Sprig的精确定位，它允许您基于用户的特征和在产品中采取的行动来触发应用内研究。然后，Sprig的人工智能会覆盖在所有研究之上，立即呈现出您产品的最重要的发现。Sprig的调查使您能够针对特定用户获得相关和及时的反馈。Sprig的回放功能使您能够捕捉针对性的会话片段，直接查看您的产品体验。Sprig的人工智能对产品团队来说是一个改变游戏规则的因素。他们是唯一一个具有产品级人工智能的平台，意味着它会分析所有研究数据，以将最重要的产品机会、趋势和相关性集中在一个实时feed中。访问Sprig.com/Lenny了解更多信息，并享受10%的折扣。就是sprig.com/Lenny。
"The Fed Like, do they have an unfair advantage that they had more time? You know, but I was very hopeful that the advice would resonate that way because I put a lot of work into simplifying it and making it really easy to understand and follow. So I'm very pleased it has, but I was hopeful it would do so well. Well, I will say sometimes they keep growing. So this isn't necessarily the terminal point for the post. The final position, yeah. Okay, so for people that haven't read this post or maybe for folks that have maybe could use a refresher, let's spend a little time here. Could you just briefly describe this idea of the magic loop that you wrote about? Yeah, absolutely. So the magic loop is how to grow your career in almost any circumstance, even with a somewhat difficult manager. It does assume that you're working in some environment, you know, normally as an entrepreneur or with a boss.
美联储，他们是否有更多时间而拥有不公平的优势？你懂的，但是我真的很希望我的建议能够产生共鸣，因为我花了很多时间简化它，使之易于理解和遵循。所以我非常高兴它确实起到了作用，但我也希望它会做得更好。嗯，我会说有时候他们会继续成长。所以这并不一定是这篇文章的终点。最终的位置，是的。好的，那么对于那些还没有阅读这篇文章的人，或者也许对于可能需要一点复习的人，让我们花点时间在这里。你能简要描述一下你写的这篇关于"魔法循环"的想法吗？是的，当然。魔法循环就是如何在几乎任何情况下发展自己的职业，即使遇到一些困难的管理者。它假设你在某种环境下工作，通常是作为企业家或是与老板合作。
But the basic idea of the magic loop is five steps and they're very easy. The first one is you have to be doing your current job well. It's not possible to really grow your career if you're not considered at least performing at a solid level. Now it doesn't mean you have to be the star on the team at this point, but what you can't have is your boss wishing that you were different. Like, oh, you know, Ethan's not very good. So you have to talk to your manager and find out how you're doing and address any problems. So step one is do your job well. Then step two is ask your boss how you can help. You know, speaking as a manager and I've talked to hundreds of managers, very few people go and ask their manager, what can I do to help you? What do you need?
魔术循环的基本理念是五个简单的步骤。第一步是要把当前的工作做好。如果你的工作表现不佳，你就无法真正发展你的职业。这并不意味着你必须成为团队中的明星，但你的老板不能希望你变得不同。你需要与你的经理交谈，了解自己的表现情况，并解决任何问题。所以第一步是把工作做好。然后第二步是询问你的老板你能如何帮助。作为一名经理，我与数百名经理交谈过，很少有人会去问老板，“我能为您做什么？您需要什么？”
And so just asking sets you apart. And it begins to build a relationship that we're on the same team that I'm here as a part of your organization to make you successful, not just myself. Step three is whatever they say, do it. So you dig a big hole if you say, what could I do to help you? And they say, well, we really need someone to like take out the trade sheets today. And you're like, oh, I didn't mean that. I wanted exciting work. I don't want to do, you know, sort of this maintenance work or whatever. So do what they ask, help out, even if it's not your favorite work. Once you've done that though, and maybe you do that a couple times, the fourth step is where the magic comes in. You go back to your manager and say, hey, I'm really enjoying working with you. I'm wondering, is there some way I could help you that would also help me reach my goal? And whether that goal is to change roles or get a raise or get a promotion, you say, you know, my goal is I'd really like to learn this new skill.
因此，仅仅是询问就足以使你与众不同。这开始建立起一种关系，表明我们是同一团队的成员，我在这里是为了让你成功，而不仅仅是为了自己。第三步是无论他们说什么，都去做。如果你问：“我能帮你做些什么？”他们说：“我们真的需要有人帮忙整理交易表格。”而你却说：“哦，我并不是指这个。我想要一些令人兴奋的工作。我不想做这种维护性的工作。”所以要做他们需要的事，帮助他们，即使这不是你最喜欢的工作。做了这些之后，第四步就是魔力开始施展的时候了。你可以回到你的经理那里，说：“嘿，我很享受与你一起工作。我想知道，有没有什么方式可以帮助你，同时也能帮助我实现我的目标？”无论你的目标是换个职位、加薪还是晋升，你可以说：“我的目标是我真的很想学习这个新技能。”
Is there something you need that would also help me learn this new skill? And the reason this works is managers help those who help them. It's just human nature. We all do that. Generally, they're very open to meeting you halfway and saying, sure, you know, I need this. We can rearrange it. We can find a way to meet your goals over time. Now, for step four to work, you do have to know what is your goal. So you have to be clear on what it is you want. Well, that part's up to you. And then step five is the easiest step of all. It's just repeat. So like lather rins repeat with your shampoo. Step five is once you're working with your manager towards your goal and discussing where you're going and you're helping each other, the magic of the loop is just go around and around.
有没有什么你需要的东西，也会帮助我学习这项新技能？而这种方式有效的原因是管理者会帮助那些帮助他们的人。这是人类的本性。我们都会这样做。一般来说，他们非常乐意和你妥协，说，当然，我需要这个。我们可以重新安排。我们可以找到一个方式来实现你的目标。现在，要让第四步奏起作用，你必须知道你的目标是什么。所以你必须清楚自己想要的是什么。这部分取决于你自己。然后第五步是最简单的一步。就是重复。就像用洗发水时一样，涂抹、冲洗、重复。第五步是一旦你和你的管理者共同朝着目标努力，并讨论你们的去向，互相帮助，这种循环的魔力就会一直循环下去。
I was going to ask you why is it that you call it the magic loop? Also, we kind of dive right in, but what is the goal of this? I guess it's pretty clear maybe at this point if just this helps you advance in your career, but whatever you want to share along those lines. Yeah, okay. Very fair. So I called it the magic loop because I pioneered it with my audience a few years ago. And it worked so well that people were writing back in and saying, how do I turn this off? Like I'm in over my head now, my boss has asked me to do all these cool things and I feel like I can't catch up and I've already been promoted once and I need time to like digest it. And it just seemed like it worked like magic. It worked in almost every circumstance. There are of course exceptions where you have very exploitative managers who are like, oh, it's great, you're working harder. Keep doing that.
我本来想问你为什么你把它称为魔法循环?同时，我们有点跳进去了，但这是为了什么目的呢?我猜在这一点上可能很清楚，如果只是帮助你在职业生涯中取得进步，但无论你想分享什么都可以。是的，好的。那么我把它称为魔法循环是因为几年前我与我的观众一起开创了它。它效果非常好，以至于人们写信给我说，我怎么才能关闭它?我已经无法应付了，我的老板要求我做所有这些很酷的事情，我觉得自己赶不上，我已经晋升了一次，我需要时间来消化它。它似乎像魔法一样奏效。几乎在所有情况下都有效。当然也有例外，比如有些非常剥削性的经理会说，哦，太好了，你工作更努力了。继续这样做。
I won't do anything for you. But those are rare. And then the purpose, yeah, it's to help you get satisfaction in your career. A lot of people are unhappy with their jobs. Many people want to move up a level or get paid more, not everyone.
我不会为你做任何事情。但这种情况很少见。然后，这个目的，是帮助你在职业生涯中获得满足感。许多人对自己的工作感到不满意。许多人想要晋升或获得更高的薪水，但并非所有人都是这样。
Some people want to change what they're doing, they're bored. This is a path to all of that because it's forming a partnership with your leadership to say, look, I'll help you, but I need you also to help me. And most good managers are very open to that. When we were working on this, one of the piece of feedback I had was, I feel like I could just tell my manager, hey, I want to grow in my career. What can we work on to help me get there? And your feedback was like, most managers are not that good and not that thoughtful about their employees' careers. Can you just talk a little bit about that?
有些人想改变他们正在做的事情，他们感到无聊。这是通往这一切的道路，因为这是与领导形成合作伙伴关系的一种方式，告诉他们，我会帮助你，但我也需要你帮助我。大多数优秀的经理都对此非常开放。当我们在这方面努力时，我得到的反馈之一是，我觉得我可以告诉我的经理，嘿，我想在我的职业生涯中有所进步。我们可以做些什么来帮助我实现这个目标呢？而你的反馈是，大多数经理并不那么出色，也不那么深思熟虑自己雇员的职业生涯。你能简单说说这个问题吗？
Because people may be hearing this and be like, why do I need to do this? This seems like a lot of work. You know, if you have a great manager, you may not need to do nearly as much formality. They may have given you good feedback so you don't need to ask for feedback. They may have offered you opportunities to step up and you've said yes to some and maybe no to others. That's fantastic.
因为有些人可能会听到这个，会问，为什么我需要这样做？这似乎是很麻烦的。你知道，如果你有一个很棒的经理，你可能不需要做那么多的形式主义。他们可能已经给了你很好的反馈，所以你不需要再去寻求反馈。他们可能已经为你提供了机会，让你能够迈出一步，你可能有时候会接受，对于其他一些可能会说不。这是非常棒的。
I designed a magic loop for the people who either don't know what to do or their manager is either not that good or just very busy. Remember, lots of managers have great intentions to help their employees, but they get busy with their own lives, their own work, all the things they're focused on, even also their own career. The manager is often busy thinking about their own needs.
我设计了一个魔法循环，适用于那些不知道该怎么办的人，或者他们的经理要么不太好，要么就是非常忙碌。记住，许多经理都怀着帮助员工的良好意图，但是他们忙于自己的生活、工作、专注的事情，甚至还有自己的职业。经理往往会忙于考虑自己的需求。
And so they just, they mean to get to you next week and next week drifts on for a year. What has come up since this has come out that you would want it either at two or tweak or help people better understand? I imagine a lot of, there's some criticism. I imagine there's a lot of yes, yes, yes. This really works.
所以他们只是打算在下周联系您，但下周却变成了一年。自从这件事发生以来，有什么让您觉得需要调整或帮助人们更好地理解吗？我想有很多批评。我想也有很多人说，是的，是的，这真的有效。
Two things I'd love to clarify. The first is many people ask me, why do I have to do this? Shouldn't my manager notice what I'm doing? Shouldn't my manager help with my career? Shouldn't my manager be planning for me? And what I say about that is what your manager should do and $4 will get you a cup of coffee at Starbucks.
有两件事我想澄清一下。首先，很多人问我，为什么我必须要做这件事？难道我的经理不应该注意到我在做什么吗？难道我的经理不应该帮助我的职业发展吗？难道我的经理不应该为我做规划吗？我对此的回答是，你的经理应该做的事情，也就值得四美元在星巴克买一杯咖啡。
The point of this loop is it's in your control. It is true that a good manager would do all those things I just mentioned, but not all managers are good. And some of them need some help. And the thing I would just say about the magic loop is it's in your control. And so you can be sort of upset that your manager isn't perfect, but move on from that and take control of your own situation. That's the first thing I'd say.
这个循环的重点是它在你的控制之下。确实，一个好的经理会做我刚才提到的所有事情，但并非所有经理都很好。有些人需要一些帮助。关于这个“魔术循环”，我只想说的是它在你的控制之下。因此，你可以有点生气你的经理不完美，但要释怀，掌控自己的处境。这是我想说的第一件事。
The other big extension I would make is look, if you are a manager or a leader of any type, you can initiate the magic loop from your side. So you can talk to your employees and say, hey, what are your career goals? Would you like to form a partnership where you step up to new challenges and I help you get to your goals? I had a lot of success forming this kind of partnership with my employees, where as they saw growth and success, they really leaned in and like, oh, the system works, you're actually investing in me.
另一个我想要补充的重要内容是，如果你是一个经理或者任何类型的领导，你可以从你这一边开始启动魔法循环。你可以和员工交谈，说，嘿，你的职业目标是什么？你想不想建立一个伙伴关系，挑战自己并让我帮助你实现目标？我和员工建立这种伙伴关系取得了很大成功，他们看到了成长和成功，真的全力以赴，感受到，哦，这个系统有效果，你真的在投资我。
Now I'll work extra hard and I'm like, yes, and we can grow your team or grow your opportunity. And it was very win-win. So I'd give people a little bit of social proof. You mentioned some of the folks you've worked with on this. Can you share some stories or stats or anything to help people understand how helpful this ended up being to folks you've worked with?
现在我会更加努力工作，我觉得我们可以帮助你扩大团队或者扩大机会。这是个双赢的局面。我会向人们展示一些社交证据。你提到了一些你合作过的人，你能分享一些故事或数据之类的来帮助人们了解这种合作对他们有多大帮助吗？
Yeah, absolutely. I'll tell one story from each end of the spectrum. And what I mean there is entry-level people and then sort of high-level executive leaders. I had an entry-level person write me back and say, look, when I learned about the Magic Loop, I was at a company and not doing very well.
是的，当然。我将讲述一个故事，从两个极端分别讲起。我指的是初级员工和高级管理人员。我曾经收到过一封初级员工写给我的回信，他说，当我了解到魔法循环时，我正在一家公司工作，但表现并不好。
I started applying it. They offered me a $30,000 raise and a bigger job. And I turned it down because I got hired at this other company that was offering me even more. And I went there and they've promoted me also. And he was one of the people who wrote in and said, his exact words were, a year ago I was made redundant.
我开始申请。他们给了我3万美元的加薪和一个更大的职位。但我拒绝了，因为我被另一家公司录用，他们给了我更高的工资。我去了那家公司，他们也提拔了我。他是那些写信的人之一，他的原话是，一年前我被裁员了。
So he's in the UK, redundant is their word for laid off. A year ago I was made redundant. I got this first job and I got an offer for an increased salary. And then I got the second job. And I got an increase when I joined that was even bigger. And he was in that situation of like, now I need to sort of slow down and digest all of that. On the complete other end, one of my best people I ever worked with joined my team at Amazon is what we would call an SDE2, which in Amazon is a level five employee.
所以他在英国，"redundant" 是他们用来表示被解雇的词。一年前我被裁员了。我得到了这份第一份工作并且收到了一个涨薪的提议。然后我得到了第二份工作。当我加入时我得到了一个更大的涨薪。他处于这种状态，现在需要慢下来消化这一切。另一方面，我曾经合作过的最好的人加入了我的团队在亚马逊是我们称之为SDE2，在亚马逊是一个五级员工。
He grew with me kind of following this process to a senior engineer, then he switched to management and ran a small team. Then he became a senior manager and he relocated with my organization. He opened a new office and another city was eventually promoted to director running his own office of a couple hundred people. And this was over the course of about eight years. He went from a mid-level engineer to an executive with a team of 800 people. We had this, now he was a very hard worker, but over the eight years we just saw all this progress. And then eventually he moved on, he founded his own startup, sold that and now works as an executive vice president at one of the major sort of online banks.
他跟随着我走过这个过程，从一名初级工程师成长为高级工程师，然后转向管理，领导一个小团队。接着，他成为了一名高级经理，并随我的公司调任了地点。他开设了新办公室，随后被晋升为总监，管理着自己的办公室，拥有数百名员工。整个过程大约历时八年。他从一个中级工程师发展为管理800人的团队的高管。我们看到他非常努力工作，八年间取得了巨大的进步。最终，他离开了，创办了自己的创业公司，将其出售，现在担任一家主要的在线银行的执行副总裁。
And so, you know, his career in some sense has exceeded mine, but during that eight year span, he just grew so much. And this is the process we followed. Wow, those are excellent examples. What levels does this help you with? At what level is this most useful and does it kind of tape around it? I don't know if you get to VP level, do you still try using Magic Loop?
所以，你知道，从某种意义上说，他的职业生涯已经超过了我的，但在那八年的时间里，他进步很大。这是我们所遵循的过程。哇，这些都是很好的例子。这对你有什么帮助？在哪个层次上最有用？它是否会相应调整？我不知道如果你达到副总裁级别，你是否还会试着使用魔术循环呢？
So I think it works anywhere from the start of your career to pretty far into it. I think at my level, I finished my career as a vice president at Amazon. It does Peter out in the sense of the active. And what I mean by that is you're still doing the same thing, but you don't have to talk about it. Your managers are expecting you to step up and recognize challenges. They're expecting you to ask for resources when you need them. And you don't sort of have this level of explicit conversation around what can I help you with. They're expecting you to anticipate what's needed.
我认为这种工作方式可以在职业生涯的任何阶段都使用，直到非常高的阶段。在我看来，我在亚马逊担任副总裁时已经结束了我的职业生涯。但也可以说它会逐渐减弱，意即变得更加被动。我的意思是，你仍然在做同样的事情，但不需要再多谈论它。你的经理们希望你能够主动面对挑战。他们希望你在需要的时候主动要求资源。你不再需要明确讨论“我能为你做些什么”，他们期望你能够预见到所需的事情。
So in the newsletter we did together, I wrote about how over time you go from asking your manager, how can I help to suggesting to your manager, these are some things I see that seem like they need to be done. Would you like me to do them? To just seeing what needs to be done and sort of keeping your leader in the loop and saying, hey, I noticed that we have this problem, I fixed it, I noticed we have this opportunity, I've started program against it.
在我们一起制作的新闻简报中，我写了关于随着时间的推移，你会从询问经理“我该怎么帮忙”变为向经理建议“我觉得有些事情需要处理，你希望我去做吗？” 再到仅仅看到需要做的事情，然后保持领导者的信息同步并说，“嘿，我注意到我们有这个问题，我已经解决了，我也发现了这个机会，我已经开始针对它制定方案。”
I think at the executive level, it's much more you being proactive and just sort of keeping your leader in the loop. I think in the post, the way you described this step is this is advanced mode, don't jump straight to this. Don't just start suggesting things because you may get it wrong. Yeah, well, it's all a matter of rapport and trust. A huge part of career success is how much trust you have mutual respect with your leadership. When they get to their confident that you're gonna make the right decisions, their confidence will let you go. But yeah, when you're brand new or you're new to a manager, if you just jump in, you may either not work on the things they value or even find yourself working across purposes and that isn't the right place to start.
我认为在高管层，更重要的是你要主动沟通并让你的领导保持在圈内。在职位上，你描述这一步骤是高级模式，不要直接跳到这一步。不要随意建议事情，因为你可能会犯错。是的，这一切都取决于人际关系和信任。事业成功的一个重要因素是你与领导之间的信任和相互尊重。当他们确信你会做出正确的决定时，他们的信心会放手让你去做。但是当你是全新的人或是对一个经理新手时，如果你只是跳进去，可能会不合作或甚至发现自己在背道而驰，这不是一个正确的起点。
Awesome, okay, just to close out in this conversation. Maybe just you touch on this, but why is it that you think this is so important and effective? Why do you think this works so well? People may not recognize like I see, this is the key to this. Well, I think it's two things. First, I mentioned how rare it is. Managers, how rare it is for managers to be offered help. If you're a manager, you'll recognize this. If not, feel free to talk to any manager you know, whether you're own or somebody else.
太棒了，好的，我们就在这个对话中总结一下。也许你已经提到了这一点，但你为什么认为这么重要和有效？为什么你认为这样会取得很好的效果？人们可能并不认识到，我觉得这是关键。我觉得原因有两个。首先，我提到了这种帮助是多么罕见。对于经理来说，获得帮助是多么罕见。如果你是经理，你会认识到这一点。如果不是的话，可以随意找任何你认识的经理，无论是自己的还是别人的，进行交流。
Ask them how much they worry and how much they feel overwhelmed and wish someone would give them a hand. Management can be a lonely job because you feel like you're responsible for everything. You know, so having an ally, it's just a huge weight off people's shoulders. And then I think a lot about social engineering. The social engineering here is just the simple, you help me, I'll help you. Like, it doesn't have to be exploitative. It's just we help those people who help us.
问他们有多担心，有多容易感到不堪重负，希望有人伸出援手。管理工作可能是孤独的，因为你觉得自己对一切负责。你知道的，所以有一个盟友，会让人感到巨大的解脱。然后我想很多关于社会工程学。这里的社会工程学就是简单的互相帮助。就像，它不必是剥削性的。我们只是帮助那些帮助过我们的人。
And that's built in this sort of human survival. And I think this loop works so well because it's just leaning a little bit into that behavior. On so many relationships with managers are oppositional. Oh, you tell me what to do. And I kind of, I'm kind of like a kid in high school who's trying to figure out how do I skip as many classes as possible and turn in as little homework and still get by with a D. That relationship won't build your career.
这种行为内在于人类的生存。我认为这种循环之所以如此有效，是因为它只是轻微倾向于这种行为。许多与经理的关系都是对抗性的。哦，你告诉我该怎么做。我有点像一个高中生，试图弄清楚如何尽量逃课、尽可能少做作业，但还能靠着拿到及格分。这种关系无法建立你的职业生涯。
Some people approach their jobs as my goal is to do the least I can and still collect my paycheck. That's an approach if you're okay with like where you are. It's not what I coach though. I assume people want to grow. Okay, so maybe just as a closing question for people that are listening and want to start putting this into practice, slash or stuck in their career and are just like, okay, I see here's something I can do. Could just again just summarize the loop briefly.
有些人对待工作的方式是尽量做得最少，只是为了拿工资。如果你满足于现状，那么这种方式也可以接受。但这并不是我倡导的方式。我认为人们都希望得到成长。那些正在聆听并想要开始实践，或者在事业上感到困惑，发现有一些可以做的事情的人，最后可以简要总结一下这个循环。
Sure. So step one, make sure you're doing your current job well. The way I explain this is when you go to your manager and ask, what could I do to help? You don't want their answer, even if they don't say it quite so bluntly to be, do your effing job. Like you need to be doing that already. So be doing a good job. And unfortunately, a good job is in the eyes of your manager in this case. You may think I'm doing great work, but if your manager doesn't, they're the ones sort of you need to build as an ally here. Once you have that, go ask how you can help, do whatever your ask, and then go back to your manager and suggest or ask, I would like to meet this goal. Can I keep helping you? Or what could I take on that you need that would also help me meet this goal?
当然。首先要确保你当前的工作做得很好。我解释这一点的方式是，当你去找你的经理问，我能做什么来帮助你？你不希望他们的回答，即使他们没有那么直截了当地说出口，也不要是，先好好干完你的工作。就像你本该已经在做的。所以要做好工作。不幸的是，在这种情况下，做好工作是由你的经理来决定的。你可能认为自己工作做得很出色，但如果你的经理不这么认为，他们才是你必须要争取做盟友的人。一旦你做到这一点，去问问如何能帮助，按要求去做，然后回到经理那里建议或询问，我想要实现这个目标。我可以继续帮你吗？或者你需要我承担什么任务，以帮助我达到这个目标？
And that's where you start to try to bring your two sets of aims together. What do you need done? But how can I get to my goal and let's do those things together? And then you just repeat this loop. You build trust, you build the relationship. And with all good managers and even a lot of moderate managers, they appreciate the help so much, they really lean into that. I think there's two really important elements of this that you haven't even mentioned necessarily that I think are part of the reason this works so well. One is this forces you and your manager to identify the gaps that are keeping you from the next level, which a lot of is like, it's often vague and then you get to performance review and then your manager's like, you're still not good on this and this and that.
这就是你开始尝试将你的两组目标结合在一起的地方。你需要完成什么任务？但是如何实现我的目标，让我们一起做这些事情？然后你只需要重复这个循环。你建立信任，建立关系。对于所有优秀的管理者甚至许多中等管理者来说，他们非常感激这种帮助，他们真的会全力支持。我认为这有两个非常重要的要素，你甚至没有必要提到，我认为这就是这种方法如此有效的原因之一。其一是这迫使你和你的经理找出阻碍你达到下一个层次的差距，这在很大程度上是模糊的，然后到了绩效评估时，你的经理会说你还是在这方面做得不好。
And you're like, you never told me that that's the things you're looking for for me to get promoted. So I think there's this implicit, like here's what you need to work on to get to the next level, which I think is part of step four. And then you actually detaching this that it's important to share your goal to your manager. Here's what I want. I want to get promoted. A lot of times they don't know that and you helping them understand here's what I want, help me get there and go as long way. So there's a lot of things. Yeah, managers often fall into the trap. They chose to become managers. So they assume one of two things about you.
然后你说，你从来没有告诉过我那是你希望我达到的条件。所以我觉得这是含蓄的，就是告诉你需要努力的方向，以便晋升到下一个层级，我认为这是第四步。然后你实际上要告诉他们这确实很重要，与经理分享你的目标。这就是我想要的。我想要晋升。很多时候他们不知道，而你帮助他们了解这就是我想要的，帮助我实现目标。这样做会产生很大作用。所以有很多事情。是的，经理们经常会陷入陷阱。他们选择成为经理，所以会对你有两种假设之一。
They either assume that you want to keep doing exactly what you're doing forever, just maybe make a little more money. So you're an artist, you want to keep drawing forever. You're a lawyer, you want to keep writing contracts forever. Or they assume that, hey, I became a manager, I'm very proud of my career, that must be what you want. And these assumptions are natural, right? We tend to view by default that like our path is great and everyone would want to be us.
他们要么认为你想要永远坚持做你正在做的事情，只是可能赚更多的钱。所以如果你是一个艺术家，你想永远画画；如果你是一个律师，你想永远写合同。或者他们会假设，嘿，我成为了经理，我为我的职业感到自豪，这一定是你想要的。这些假设是很自然的，对吧？我们往往默认认为我们的道路很棒，每个人都想成为我们。
Now, of course, some good managers don't do that, but if you clarify and express your goals, you remove that ambiguity. I actually had a period in my career where I specifically did not want to get promoted. I was very happy where I was and I just wanted to keep doing this awesome IC role. Is that something at all you see where people are just like, I'm good, I don't need to get it promoted and then is this helpful in that in any way? Or is it like not as big a deal?
当然，有些优秀的经理并不这样做，但是如果您澄清并表达自己的目标，就能消除这种模糊性。事实上, 我职业生涯中有一个阶段，我特意不想升职。我在原来的职位上非常快乐，只想继续做这个很棒的专业技术角色。您是否见过有人认为自己已经很好了，不需要升职的情况？这种态度是否有帮助？还是说这不是很重要？
So first, I reached a point in my career where I was no longer pursuing promotion either. And I wanted to do other things. And so I've lived that myself and I've used the same loop, but I used it to go do what I wanted to say, this is now what I want and how do we get there? How do we create a role where I'm adding value appropriate to my level, but I'm doing this other work, it's fun, I moved into gaming and I really wanted to do that. Second, I think it is still helpful because there's something you want, probably. Maybe you want to work on different kinds of projects or maybe you want to work with a different higher performance team or maybe you want to rebalance your life and say, hey, I love what I'm doing, but how can I be a star performer for you but within these boundaries?
首先，我在职业生涯中达到了一个我不再追求晋升的阶段。我想做其他事情。我自己经历过这一点，我也使用了同样的循环，但我用它去做自己想做的事情，这是我现在想要的，我们如何实现？如何创建一个角色，使我在适当水平上增加价值，但我在做其他工作时，这很有趣，我转向了游戏，我真的很想做那个。其次，我认为这仍然是有帮助的，因为你可能想要某些东西。也许你想在不同类型的项目上工作，也许你想和一个更高绩效的团队合作，也许你想重新平衡自己的生活并说，嘿，我喜欢我所做的工作，但我如何在这些边界内做一个表现出色的员工呢？
So if you truly have, the perfect job is just as it is, you may not need the magic loop, but I know so few people if you're like, nope, there's absolutely nothing I could improve about my role. Yeah, I think that your point of view, your goal doesn't have to be promotion, it could be work on a different part of the org, try something totally, maybe transition to a new function that could be pretty cool. Awesome. So along the same lines of career progression, you work with a lot of senior manager types, kind of the level of like L7 and one M2-ish and you share with me that one of the most frustrating parts of their job and that specific portion of their careers, they get stuck at that level and they don't move up and it becomes really annoying and they're not sure how to break out of that. What advice do you share with folks like that that may be listening? Yeah, so it's common to get stuck there and there are a few reasons for it. First, there are a lot of senior managers. If you think of your average director, they may have six to eight reports, how many more directors are needed? So there's a choke point. Second, that choke point is worse than the current economy. And in the past, maybe a lot of companies, Amazon, Google, Apple, et cetera, were growing very rapidly. And so it wasn't just you were waiting for some other director to leave, the teams were getting bigger.
所以，如果你真的拥有完美的工作，你可能不需要魔法循环，但我知道很少有人会像你那样说，没错，我的角色绝对没有任何可以改进的地方。是的，我认为你的观点是，你的目标不必是晋升，可以是在组织的不同部分工作，尝试完全不同的事情，也许转向一个新的功能可能会很酷。真棒。所以在职业发展的同样轨道上，你和很多高级经理类型一起工作，有点像L7级别和一个M2级别，你与我分享了他们工作中最令人沮丧的部分之一，就是他们被困在这个水平上，无法升迁，变得非常烦人，他们不知道如何突破这种困境。你会给像他们一样的人什么建议呢？是的，被困在那里很常见，原因有几个。首先，有很多高级经理。如果你想一下你们平均主管可能有六到八个报告，还需要多少更多的主管呢？所以存在一个瓶颈。其次，在目前经济形势下，这个瓶颈比以往更糟糕。在过去，也许很多公司，比如亚马逊、谷歌、苹果等，都在迅速增长，所以不仅是你在等待另一个主管离开，团队也在变得更大。
I experienced this at Amazon where over a nine year period, I went from managing six people to 800. And so I went from a senior manager all the way to a vice president. And I described, it's some sense just riding the elevator. Like the elevator was going up and as long as I managed to stay on it, I was going to arrive at vice president. But the other thing that causes people to get stuck is the difference between a senior manager and a director is kind of how you lead and the work you're doing. And you can get as far as senior manager by being really strong in your function and being really good at getting things done. As a director, it becomes much more, and as a VP beyond that, it becomes much more about influence, coordination with others, and letting go of sort of being in all the details yourself.
我在亚马逊经历过这种情况，九年间，我从管理六个人发展到管理800人。这样，我从一名高级经理晋升到了副总裁。我描述过，有一种感觉就像坐着电梯。就像电梯一直在往上走，只要我能坚持在上面，我就能到达副总裁的位置。但导致人们卡在某个阶段的另一个原因是高级经理和主管之间领导方式和工作内容的差异。你可以通过在自己的职能方面做得很出色、完成任务很好来成功当上高级经理。但成为主管后，情况会变得更多，而成为副总裁后，更多地是关于影响力、与他人协调以及放手让自己不再深入所有细节。
And so senior managers really have to change some behavior. I often reference the book by Marshall Goldsmith, what got you here won't get you there. Not only because it's a great book classically on this problem, but because the title tells the story, all the great traits that got you to this one level kind of won't get you to the next level where you're more expected to be thinking in strategic terms, thinking longer term. So to someone that may be in that role today and they're not moving up, is there anything they can do? This point about just like, there's no roles for you. Like there's only so much you can do there. Is the advice just like wait until an opportunity arrives? Is it run this magic loop until something happens? Is there anything you can do?
因此，高级管理人员确实需要改变一些行为。我经常参考马歇尔•戈德史密斯（Marshall Goldsmith）的著作《成功陷阱：50个阻碍你成功的毛病》。不仅因为这是一本经典的解决这个问题的书，而且因为书名已经说明了一切，那些让你达到当前水平的优点可能无法让你进入下一个更需要你以战略方式、更长远思考的水平。所以对于今天可能仍在那个位置上并且升迁无望的人来说，有什么办法吗？这种情况下，只有等待机会到来吗？是不是只能一直循环等待，直到发生什么？有什么办法可以做到更好呢？
I would be honest with people and say, some patience is required. You know, at this level, there is some notion of do we need a director? Do we need a vice president? Do we have a challenge at that level that needs that person? And so promotions at this level, I often teach have two components. The first component is, can I eat and do that job? Am I qualified? Do I have the skills? But the second piece is do we have such a job that needs that? However, there is a lot you can do. A lot is in your control. And what is in your control is to start practicing those next level skills, start working with your leadership on where can I take on a strategic project? How can I become more of an inventor? I teach some about how to sort of systematically be inventive. It's not pure magic. You know, Edison said it's what, 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.
我会对人们诚实地说，需要一些耐心。你知道，在这个层次上，有一些观念，我们是否需要一个主管？我们是否需要一位副总裁？在这个层次上，我们是否有需要一个能胜任那个职位的挑战？因此，对这个层次的晋升，我经常教导有两个组成部分。第一个组成部分是，我是否能胜任并完成那份工作？我是否具备资格？我是否具备技能？但第二部分是，我们是否有这样一个职位需要那样的人？然而，你可以做很多事情。很多事情是在你的控制范围内的。在你控制范围内的事情是开始练习那些下一层次的技能，开始与你的领导合作，看看在哪里我可以承担一个战略项目？我如何能够变得更有创造力？我教一些关于如何系统地具有创造力的方法。这并非纯粹的魔术。你知道，爱迪生说过是什么，1%的灵感和99%的汗水。
You can learn the 99% and the 1% isn't as hard then. So you start showing those next level traits. And as I describe it most succinctly, how do you make yourself the person who will be chosen out of the eight? And you can be chosen, there are several ways to move up. Your boss can leave or be let go. They can be promoted to another role.
你可以学会那99%的技能，剩下的1%就不那么难了。然后你开始展现出那些更高级的特质。简而言之，你要如何让自己成为八个人中被选择的那一个呢？你是可以被选择的，有几种方式来晋升。你的老板可能离开或被解雇。他们也可能被提升到另一个职位。
But another way is I have several, I coach now and I have several clients recently. I was just talking to a client yesterday. Her two peers were let go. They were all the same level. Her two peers were let go and she was given their teams. And, you know, she expressed that her boss had been told, you have too many, you have too many senior managers for the size of your organization. We need to do some change in the organization. Clean house and put all your people under the folks who have potential.
另一种方式是我有几个，我现在在做教练，最近有几个客户。昨天我刚和一个客户交谈过。她的两个同事被解雇了。他们都是同一级别。她的两个同事被解雇了，而她接管了他们的团队。她表示，她的老板曾被告知，你有太多高级经理人，超出了你组织的规模。我们需要对组织进行一些变革。整顿一下，让所有的人都归于那些有潜力的人名下。
Well, obviously she must be one of those people because she still has her job and has more people and more to do. And unfortunately, her peers are shopping for new employment. So be that person. And that's where the magic loop comes in. Be that person. I was just talking actually to a senior PM leader who pointed out that with this kind of lean environment of a lot of flattening of orgs and a lot of layoffs, this is becoming increasingly hard, exactly what you're describing. There's just less spots because companies are running more lean.
显然，她一定是那些努力工作的人之一，因为她依然保持着工作，并且负责的人和任务更多。不幸的是，她的同事们正在寻找新的工作。所以要成为那样的人。这就是魔法循环的作用。要成为那样的人。我刚刚与一位高级项目经理领导交谈，他指出在这种环境下，组织结构变得越来越扁平，裁员增多，情况正如你所描述的那样越来越困难。因为企业正变得更加精益。
And so you just kind of have to wait. I think part of this advice you just shared, which is the classic, do the job before you have the job. Makes all the sense in the world because once people see that you can do it, obviously they will feel a lot more comfortable putting you in that position. And they'll be looking, you know, I always remind people as a leader, I want the best people under me I can have. It's not that I don't wish to promote you. If you think about my job, this helps people, right?
所以你只能等待。我认为你刚才分享的建议的一部分就是经典的“在得到工作之前先做好工作”。这完全合乎情理，因为一旦人们看到你能够胜任，他们显然会感到更加放心让你担任那个职位。他们会尽力寻找最优秀的人才来支持我。作为领导者，我希望手下有最优秀的人才。我并不是不愿意提拔你。想想我的工作是帮助人们的。
I have selfish motivation to promote you. A lot of people think like, oh, the boss is there holding me down. Well, maybe some bosses are, but why wouldn't I want stronger, more capable, direct reports? Why wouldn't I want people under me who can do more of my job? Frankly, that's the only way I can do less of my job. Plus this pressure you're always getting from your reports like, hey, I'm like, ready to get promoted. Is this time yet? You mentioned this word inventiveness and I was just listening to Jeff Bezos on Lex Friedman.
我有自私的动机想要提拔你。很多人认为，哦，老板在那里拖着我。也许一些老板确实如此，但我为什么不想要更强大、更有能力的直接下属呢？我为什么不希望手下的人能够承担更多我的工作？坦率地说，这是我能够减少工作量的唯一方式。再加上你总是从手下那里得到的压力，比如，嗨，我准备好晋升了，现在是时候了吗？你提到了“创新力”这个词，我刚刚听到杰夫·贝索斯在Lex Friedman的节目中说到。
And I don't know if you heard this, but he, Jeff Bezos described himself most as an inventor more than anything else that he does. Is that something that you think about? Is that influenced by Jeff Bezos anyway, that idea of being an inventor as a leader? I'll say a couple of things about that. First, I know you talked to my old boss, Bill Carr, who were working backwards. What I don't know is if he shared with you that after he published it, he actually realized there was a better title.
我不知道你是否听说过这个，但杰夫·贝索斯将自己最多描述为一名发明家，而不是其他任何身份。你是否考虑过这点？是否在一定程度上受到了杰夫·贝索斯的影响，作为一个领导者对于成为一位发明家的想法？关于这个问题，我想说几点。首先，我知道你曾经与我的老板比尔·卡尔谈过，我们都在往回看。我不清楚的是他是否告诉你，在他发布之后，他实际上意识到有一个更好的标题。
He wishes that he had called the book, The Invention Machine. Because what Jeff was trying to do with Amazon was create the most inventive company, the company that would systematically out invent others. And so while working backwards is a great title, Bill and Jeff think they should have called it The Invention Machine. When I joined Amazon, I did not think of myself as an inventor, but I saw that we had these leadership principles think big and invent and simplify that pushed on that.
他希望把这本书起名为《发明机器》。因为杰夫想要用亚马逊创造出最具创新力的公司，一个能够系统性地超越其他公司的公司。虽然“逆向思维”是个很好的标题，但比尔和杰夫认为他们应该把它命名为《发明机器》。当我加入亚马逊时，我并没有把自己视为一个发明家，但我发现我们有这些鼓励大胆思考、创新和简化的领导原则在推动着我们。
And I said, I'm in trouble, I don't know how to do this. And I sat down and thought about that, like, what am I gonna do? It seems like that's required. And I figured out how to become systematically inventive. So I now hold over 70 patents as one benchmark of inventiveness. And they were all created during my 15 years at Amazon. And the way I did that, inventiveness actually isn't that hard.
我说，我遇到了麻烦，不知道该怎么办了。我坐下来考虑了一下，我要怎么办？看起来好像必须要这样做。然后我想出了如何系统化地创新。所以现在我持有超过70项专利，作为创新的一个标准。这些专利都是在我在亚马逊工作的15年里创造的。而我做到这一点的方式，实际上并不难。
I teach about this. And to invent systematically, first you do need to be somewhat of an expert in whatever area you wanna invent. So like, Lenny, if you and I say, let's get together and we're gonna invent cancer drugs. We have the problem that we're neither of us as far as I know is a biologist, a doctor. We don't have the right background. We don't know what we're doing. We would just be fumbling around, I guess with a bathtub full of chemicals hoping, it's probably not gonna work out that well.
我教授关于这方面的知识。要系统地发明，首先你需要在想要发明的领域有一定的专业知识。比如，如果你和我说，让我们一起发明治疗癌症的药物。我们的问题是，据我所知，我们都不是生物学家或医生。我们没有正确的背景。我们不知道自己在做什么。我们可能只是在希望着一个满是化学物质的浴缸中摸索，希望这样做可能并不会有很好的效果。
So you have to be something of a knowledgeable expert. But then the second thing people don't do is they don't spend dedicated time actually thinking. They feel like, oh, invention is just gonna come to me. When I wanna invent, I get away from all my devices, I go in a room with the problem I have and I force myself to actually concentrate on what do I know and how can I invent? And the most straightforward way to invent is not to somehow come up with something completely new, but instead to put together two things that exist.
因此，你必须是个有见识的专家。但是，人们通常不做的第二件事是他们不花时间真正思考。他们觉得，哦，灵感会自然而然地来到我身边。当我想发明时，我会远离所有设备，躲进一个房间，专注于我所面临的问题，并强迫自己集中精力去思考我知道什么，如何能够发明？发明的最直接方式不是想出完全新的东西，而是将已有的两种东西结合在一起。
And so my example of this, I have a patent I talk about a lot for a drone delivery for Amazon, but the drone doesn't fly from the warehouse. Instead, a truck with no top drives slowly around the neighborhood and the drones go back and forth from the truck. As opposed to the driver stopping at every house, you can have four or six drones hitting everything in the neighborhood. And the way I came up with this idea is one day I was thinking about drones and delivery, but I loved military history. And so I was thinking also about an aircraft carrier. And I was thinking like, is there a way to have an aircraft carrier for drones? And from that, it was very quick for the light bulb to go on and say, well, what about a truck?
因此，我的一个例子是我有一个专利，我经常谈论亚马逊的无人机投递，但无人机并不是从仓库飞出来的。相反，一辆没有车顶的卡车在社区缓慢驾驶，而无人机在卡车和目的地之间往返。与司机每到一个房子停下来不同，你可以有四到六架无人机覆盖整个社区。我想出这个主意的方式是有一天我在思考无人机和投递，但我热爱军事历史。我也在考虑航空母舰。我在想，是否有办法为无人机建造一艘航空母舰呢？从那里，想法很快就闪现，我突然想到，为什么不用一辆卡车呢？
And so I am this patent and we haven't seen this become reality yet. I'm waiting for my idea to become part of Amazon's drone delivery system, but I think ultimately it will. That is badass. I'm imagining returns come back to the truck using that rope thing that just captures them with that little hook. Yeah, well, there's no reason, you know, same thing. When you want to return something as opposed to taking it to the UPS store or whatever, you just put it on your porch and then on your phone on your app, you know, maybe you take a picture of it so that the drone can recognize the box or you put it in a designated spot and you push a button and the drone takes your return away. Like, yes, there's no reason. Don't wait for that. And it takes your dog back and it sometimes all part of it. I'm not too heavy, thank you. My dog's not. There's like an owl in our backyard that we sometimes, or he's gonna come grab our dog.
我就是这个专利的申请人，但我们还没有看到这个想法变成现实。我在等待我的想法成为亚马逊的无人机投递系统的一部分，但我相信最终会实现。这太酷了。我想象着退货会用那根绳子回到卡车上，用那个小勾子捕捉它们。是的，这样做没有问题。当你想要退货时，与其把它带到UPS店或其他地方，你只需把它放在门廊上，然后在你的手机应用上，也许你拍张照片让无人机能认出盒子，或者你把它放在指定的地点然后按下按钮，无人机就会带走你的退货。对，这没问题。不要等待，它还会把你的狗带回来，有时也是其中的一部分。我太重了，谢谢。我的狗不会。我们后院有只猫头鹰，有时它会飞来抓我们的狗。
On this idea of invention, this is really interesting. I didn't plan to talk about this, but for someone, like say, a PM on a team that wants to get better at invention, innovation, big thinking, is there a practice you find helpful here? Like, is it block off two hours, get a pen and paper and just think about it the specific two adjacent things working together? So that's part of the process is put in dedicated time. The interesting thing I would say is you don't mean that much time. Two hours is great, but you only need two hours once a month. People think invention takes all this time.
关于创新这一想法，确实很有趣。我本来不打算谈论这个，但对于想要在发明、创新、大胆思考方面取得进步的团队中的产品经理来说，您觉得有什么好的实践方法吗？比如，是要安排两个小时，拿起纸和笔，然后只思考两个相邻的事物如何一起协作？这样的过程就需要花费专门的时间。我想要说的有趣的一点是，并不需要花费太多时间。两小时很好，但您只需要每个月花两小时时间。有些人认为发明需要花费很长时间。
The thing is, once you have one good idea, it often takes years to express that. So you had the idea to have a newsletter. I know some of the history of your newsletter. You've been working on the expression of that idea for years now. Jeff and Amazon had ideas like, let's have prime shipping. Well, prime is still getting better and still being worked on. It's a 20-some-year-old idea. You know, the Kindle, a decades-old idea now, still getting better. So the point here is you don't need very many good ideas to be seen as tremendously inventive.
事实是，一旦你有一个好主意，通常要花费数年时间来表达这个想法。所以你有了出版简报的想法。我了解一些关于你的简报的历史。你已经花了多年时间来表达这个想法。杰夫和亚马逊也有过像“让我们提供prime运输”这样的想法。嗯，prime服务仍在不断改进和完善。这可是一个有二十多年历史的想法。你知道，Kindle这个想法已经有几十年的历史了，但仍在不断提升改进。所以这里的重点是，你并不需要很多好主意来被视为极具创新精神。
Like Elon Musk, Tesla, he can kind of like dust off his hands. I mean, like I am now, you know, an Edison-like inventor. So he keeps doing it, but you don't need that many inventions. This touches on something else Jeff Bezos shared on the podcast that most of his innovation and work is an optimizing phase. It's not the, here's the idea. It's the making it cheaper and better and faster. And that's where most of the good stuff comes from.
就像埃隆·马斯克，特斯拉一样，他仿佛可以轻轻拍拍手，我是说，现在我就是类似爱迪生那样的发明家。所以他一直在做这个，但其实并不需要那么多的发明。这涉及到杰夫·贝索斯在播客中分享的另一件事，即他的大多数创新和工作都是在优化阶段。并不是想出主意，而是使其更便宜、更好、更快。这就是大部分好东西来源的地方。
Like in this point of Tesla, Elon had this idea and now the hard work is actually making it scalable and cheap enough for people to use, not just like an electric car. With the idea of Jeff saying that invention is really a lot of the incremental optimization, I completely agree with that, that to invent well, you need a base idea, but then there's so much of the work is making that idea real. And again, Prime is a great example of this.
就像在特斯拉这一点上一样，埃隆有了这个想法，现在真正困难的是使它变得可扩展且足够便宜，以便人们使用，而不只是像一辆电动车那样。关于杰夫说的发明实际上是很多渐进优化，我完全同意这一点，要想发明出色，你需要一个基本想法，但接着很多工作是让那个想法变成现实。Prime再次是这个的一个很好的例子。
The Amazon Prime program was a great example of, okay, we want fast-free shipping. We want this program. That was a one-time idea that they did build, but now Prime has expanded. First, it was two day in the US, then one day in the US, now it's same day in the US, but also they added Prime Video, Prime Music, Prime Gaming. There's actually something like 25 things you get free with Prime. Most people have no idea because you get free photo storage. And this ongoing list and all of that is that incremental optimization to make it better, better, better, better.
亚马逊Prime计划是一个很好的例子，就是我们想要快速免费运输。我们想要这个计划。那是他们曾构建的一次性想法，但如今Prime已经扩展了。最初，在美国是两天，然后是一天，现在是同一天，而且他们还添加了Prime Video、Prime Music、Prime Gaming。实际上，使用Prime会获得大约25种免费服务。大多数人都不知道，因为你还可以获得免费的照片存储。整个列表不断更新，所有这些都是渐进性的优化，使得Prime变得更好、更好、更好。
And of course, Jeff's goal, which you probably heard him say, was to make Prime and no-brainer to where, you would be irresponsible, really, not to be a member. I know you have an awesome Jeff Bezos story that I want to get to, but before we do that, one more question along this line of career advice and progression. So I read somewhere that you've interviewed over 2,500 people over the course of your career. And so kind of going back to the beginning of a career, or at least getting a job, what have you found is most helpful in standing out as a candidate when you're interviewing and just essentially getting hired? What advice do you have for people that may be going through an interview process right now? There's a lot of evidence that suggests that the number one and two factors in any interview are appearance and enthusiasm. And it doesn't mean you have to be beautiful, but show up somewhere looking like you're interested in the job, not in your pajamas. And most importantly, be enthusiastic. People want to work with people that want to work with them. So if you seem very judgmental of the company and like you have to sell me on it, you're going to turn them off. I look at every interview of whether or not I really want this job, I might have decided I don't want the job. I still want the offer. And so I come to any interview I do, leaned in and talking about how excited I am to be a part of this opportunity and what I know about the company. Beyond those cosmetics, the biggest thing I see, particularly at higher levels, is people talk about what they have done, but not why it mattered. They don't talk about the impact. See, a leader is not hiring someone to just do work. They're hiring someone because they have a problem or a need. And so if you can show them, look, here's the things I've done that have made a difference. Here's the things I've done that have helped my past employers where I've had an impact. So I didn't just do work, that makes you a worker.
再说一次，杰夫的目标，你可能已经听他说过了，就是要让Prime成为一个不用多想的选择，你要是不成为会员的话，实际上是不负责任的。我知道你有一个关于杰夫·贝索斯的精彩故事，我想先谈谈这个，但在此之前，我再问一个关于职业建议和职业发展的问题。我看到你在职业生涯中面试了超过2500人。所以回到职业生涯的开始，或者至少是找到一份工作，你发现在面试和被录用时最有帮助的突出自己作为应聘者的方法是什么呢？对于可能正在经历面试过程的人们，你有什么建议？
有很多证据表明，在任何面试中，排名前两位的因素是外表和热情。这并不意味着你必须长得漂亮，但你要像对这份工作感兴趣一样出现在面试地点，而不是穿着睡衣。最重要的是要充满热情。人们希望和那些愿意和他们一起工作的人一起工作。所以如果你看起来对公司很挑剔，觉得他们必须说服你，那会让他们反感。我在每次面试中都会考虑是否真的想要这份工作，我可能已经决定不想要这份工作，但我仍然希望得到这个职位。所以我参加任何面试时，都会全神贯注地谈论我对这个机会的兴奋之情，以及我对公司的了解。
除了外形方面，我观察到，尤其是在更高的层次，人们谈论他们做过什么，但不谈为什么重要。他们不谈及影响。你看，一位领导者不是为了让别人做工作而雇人，而是因为他们有问题或需求。因此，如果你能向他们展示，看，这些是我做过的对结果有影响的事情，这就是我的过去雇主受益的事情。所以我并不只是工作，这使你成为一个真正有影响力的人。
Someone who has an impact is more of a leader. And leader doesn't need to mean people manager, just a higher level, right? That I have done something that solved the big problem and here's how it changed the company or customer outlook. That's what I'm looking for in an interview is are you bringing me an understanding of the business that shows you contributed to the business or are you just telling me how hard you worked? Awesome. On that first piece, now that most interviews I imagine are over Zoom in terms of enthusiasm and looking professional. Is there anything you've found that people may not be thinking about in those two buckets? Oh yeah, you know, show the person full-time dedication. So unless you really don't have any choice, don't take an interview from a car, don't have your camera off. You know, I contact this still a real thing. Body language is still a real thing. Gestures like I'm making now with my hands. They're part of your presentation. And so be fully present and try to project through the camera a little bit of I'm excited to be a part of this and I appreciate the opportunity. You know, I often tell people the best way to prep for an interview might be a good night's sleep and a pot of coffee. That being fully engaged and energetic is a huge lever. Awesome. And I think basically the feedback there is don't over-obsess with the content. There's a lot of value in just how you come across. Yeah, 100%.
那些对他人产生影响的人更像是领导者。而领导者并不一定意味着管理人员，只是一个更高的层次，对吧？我已经解决了一个大问题，看看它是如何改变公司或客户的前景的。这就是我在面试中寻找的东西，你是否能让我了解业务，证明你对业务有所贡献，还是只是告诉我你有多努力工作？太棒了。关于第一个观点，现在我想象大多数面试是通过Zoom进行的，对于热情和专业看待这两个方面，你有发现人们可能没考虑到的东西吗？哦对，你知道，展示全职奉献。除非你真的没有选择，不要在车里进行面试，不要关闭摄像头。你知道，眼神交流仍然很重要。肢体语言仍然很重要。就像我现在用手势一样。它们是你演讲的一部分。所以要完全专注，试着通过摄像头传递一点“我很激动成为其中一员，我感激这次机会”的感觉。你知道，我经常告诉人们最好为面试做准备的方式可能就是睡个好觉，然后泡一壶咖啡。保持全神贯注和精力充沛是一个巨大的优势。太棒了。我认为基本的反馈是不要过分专注于内容，你的表现方式也很重要。是的，百分之百正确。
Let me tell you about a product called Arcade. Arcade is an interactive demo platform that enables teams to create polished, on-brand demos in minutes. Telling the story of your product is hard and customers want you to show them your product, not just talk about it or gait it. That's why product for teams such as Atlassian, Carta and Retool use Arcade to tell better stories within their home pages, product change logs, emails and documentation. But don't just take my word for it
让我来告诉你一个叫做Arcade的产品。Arcade是一个互动演示平台，可以让团队在几分钟内创建精致、符合品牌的演示。讲述产品的故事很困难，客户想要看到您展示产品，而不仅是谈论或描述它。这就是为什么像Atlassian、Carta和Retool这样的团队使用Arcade来在他们的主页、产品更新日志、电子邮件和文档中讲述更好的故事。但不要只相信我的话。
Quantum metric, the leading digital analytics platform created an interactive product tour library to drive more prospects. With Arcade, they achieved a 2X higher conversion rate for demos and saw five times more engagement than videos. On top of that, they built a demo 10 times faster than before. Creating a product demo has never been easier. With browser-based recording, Arcade is the no-code solution for building personalized demos at scale. Arcade offers product customization options, designer-approved editing tools and rich insights about how your viewers engage. Every step of the way. Ready to tell more engaging product stories that drive results? Head to arcade.software. And get 50% off your first three months. That's arcade.software.
量子指标，领先的数字分析平台，创建了一个交互式产品导览库，以吸引更多潜在客户。通过Arcade，他们实现了演示的转化率提高了2倍，比起视频，参与度提高了5倍。另外，他们比以前快了10倍地创建了演示。创建产品演示从未如此简单。通过基于浏览器的录制，Arcade是构建大规模个性化演示的无代码解决方案。Arcade提供产品定制选项、经设计师批准的编辑工具以及关于观众如何参与的丰富见解。每一个步骤都在你掌握之中。准备好讲述更引人入胜的产品故事，从而取得成效了吗？前往arcade.software。购买首三个月还可享受50%的折扣。这就是arcade.software。
Now let's take a little trip to failure corner. This is something that I do more and more on this podcast. Talk about people's failures in their career and their learnings. And you have a great story of failing the great Jeff Bezos and surviving to tell the tale. Could you share that story? I do. You know, it's both like a highlight and a low light. So I had been at Amazon about six years. I had become a director and I was responsible for launching Amazon App Store. And so we were building an Android-based App Store to go on Google phones and eventually on the Kindle tablets. And we got to launch day. And at that time, Jeff used to write a letter introducing new products. He would write a letter that said, Dear Customers, Today Amazon's proud to launch Blah Blah. And it's got these great features. And I hope you really enjoy it. Thanks, Jeff. And we would take down all the sales stuff on www.amazon.com. And that letter would fill the whole screen.
现在让我们来到失败的角落小旅行一下。在这个播客中，我越来越常谈论人们在职业生涯中的失败和经验教训。你有一个关于失败的伟大故事，还幸存下来能够讲述吗？我有。那既是一个亮点也是一个低点。我在亚马逊待了大约六年。我成为了一个主管，负责推出亚马逊应用商店。我们正在构建一个基于安卓系统的应用商店，可以在谷歌手机上使用，最终也可以在Kindle平板上使用。到了发布日，那时候，杰夫经常写一封信来介绍新产品。他会写一封信，说亲爱的客户，今天亚马逊很自豪地推出了某某产品，它有这些很棒的功能。希望你们能真正喜欢。谢谢，杰夫。我们会在 www.amazon.com 上移除所有的销售内容，而那封信会填满整个屏幕。
So he had written a Jeff letter. And this Jeff letter emphasized a particular feature of our product that he really liked. So that something that made it a little different. And that specific thing was we had a button called Test Drive that you could click on and it would open the app in a simulator in your web browser. So you could check out the app and interact with it before putting it on your phone. So he thought this was really cool. And he was all about it. Well, my team had built all this technology. We had Test Drive working. It was kind of a hard piece of technology to think about simulating any of thousands of arbitrary apps. And we worked all night to launch it. And it wasn't quite working. At 6 AM, we were still debugging. Now, you know engineers very well. And I'm sure most of your listeners know about engineers, even if that's not their discipline.
所以他写了一封给杰夫的信。这封杰夫的信强调了产品中一个他非常喜欢的特点。这因为让产品与众不同的一个点。那个特别的东西是我们有一个按钮叫做“试驾”，你可以点击它，它会在你的网页浏览器中打开一个模拟器来展示这个应用程序。这样你可以在把它安装到手机上之前先查看这个应用并与之互动。他觉得这很酷，他对此很感兴趣。我的团队开发了所有这些技术。我们让“试驾”功能正常工作了。模拟成千上万个任意应用程序是一项比较困难的技术难题。我们整夜都在努力解决问题以使其推出。但它还没有完全运行正常。到了清晨6点，我们仍在调试中。现在，您非常了解工程师。而且我相信大多数听众对工程师都有所了解，尽管这不是他们的专业领域。
We always think we're this close to finding the last bug. So about 6.15 AM, I get a message from Jeff that says, hey, I woke up, where's the letter? Because it was supposed to go live at 6 AM, right after the markets in New York would have opened at 9 AM Eastern. And he says, where's the letter? And I write him back and I say, well, we're working on a few problems. But what I'm thinking in my head is getting a shower, getting a shower. I just need 20 minutes, getting a shower. For Jeff to get in the shower. Yeah. And like 30 seconds later, I have an email back that says, what problems? And at this point, I have to start explaining. And, you know, I end up explaining that we're having a problem with a database. And we're debugging this database problem. And he's like, wait, there's a database in your design? We're trying to eliminate all Oracle databases and move to AWS. Why do you even have this? And, you know, he's just getting more and more frustrated and angry. And he starts copying in my boss and my boss's boss, who's with Jeff Wilkie, the CEO of Retail. And they start asking me questions. And it's just this snowballing, you know, but like 7.30 in the morning, Jeff is clearly angry. And there's this list of other people waking up and feeling like, well, Jeff is angry. So my job is to be even more angry. And it's just raining in on me. Oh, man.
我们总是以为我们离找到最后一个错误只有一步之遥。所以大约在早上6点15分，我收到了Jeff的消息，他问我，嘿，我醒了，信呢？因为信应该在早上6点发布，就在纽约市场在东部时间9点开盘后。他问，信呢？我回复他说，我们遇到了一些问题。但我心里想的是，赶紧洗个澡，赶紧洗个澡。我只需要20分钟，赶紧洗个澡。Jeff去洗个澡。是的。大约30秒后，我收到了一封电子邮件，问，什么问题？这时我不得不开始解释。我最后解释说，我们遇到了一个数据库问题。我们正在调试这个数据库问题。他说，等一下，你的设计里有一个数据库？我们正在尝试消除所有Oracle数据库，并迁移到AWS。你怎么会有这个？他越来越沮丧和生气。他开始把我的老板和老板的老板抄送进去，老板的老板和Jeff Wilkie一起是零售部门的首席执行官。他们开始问我问题。这只是一个不断滚动的过程，但到了早上7点半，Jeff显然是生气的。其他人也开始苏醒，并感觉像，嗯，Jeff生气了，所以我的工作就是更加生气。这一切只是不断压在我身上。哦，天啊。
So what did I do? The interesting is what do you do when, you know, when the future richest man in the world is mad at you? He wasn't quite the richest man in the world yet, but he was headed there. So the first thing I did was I owned it. I said, yes, it's not working. It's my fault. I will deal with it. I took ownership. And the second thing I did was start updating him very proactively and saying, here's where we are. Like 8 AM, this is exactly where we are. This is what we're going to do in the next hour. And this is when you'll get your next update. Like I will update you again at 9 AM. So here's our plan. And even though Jeff had sort of lost trust with me, like it's down and it's not right and I'm mad, given that he agreed with the plan, he was willing to give me 60 minutes. And then I would update him again and say, okay, this is what we've done and this is what we're going to do. And we'll update you again at 10 AM. So I was buying life one hour at a time.
那我该怎么办呢？有趣的是，当你知道世界未来最富有的人对你生气时，你会做什么？他当时还不是世界上最富有的人，但他正在朝着那个方向发展。所以我做的第一件事是承认错误。我说，是的，这个问题出在我这里。我会处理好的。我接受责任。第二件事是主动更新他，告诉他我们的进展。比如在早上8点，我会准确告诉他我们目前的情况，接下来一个小时我们会做什么，下一个更新将在何时。比如我会在早上9点再次更新他。所以这是我们的计划。尽管杰夫对我有些失去了信任，而且他生气了，但因为他同意了这个计划，他愿意给我60分钟的时间。然后我会再次更新他，告诉他我们已经做了什么，接下来会怎么做，下一个更新将在早上10点。所以我一次只能买来一个小时的时间。
Now, the other thing I did, and this is a good thing about Amazon, as more and more leaders got copied into this angry thread, they started reaching out in the back channel and saying, we've all been under Jeff's eye of Sauron. We know it's miserable. What can we do to help? And essentially, Andy Jassy's organization, which was AWS at that time, and his CTO, a guy named Werner Vogels, said, you're having a database problem. Let's get you some principal engineers from the AWS database team. And these principal engineers showed up at 9 AM roughly. And they looked at our design. We had made some fundamental mistakes in our database usage. And they said, you know, it's too complicated to fix this. We're just going to give you like 500 AWS machines so that your crappy design will run anyway. Like that's the immediate fix. And I'm like, okay, well, I guess if you have 500 databases lying around because you're AWS, this is a great solution and that's what they did. So the next step is we fix the problem. A bunch of us work together very hard to get the problem all fixed. Now it took all day and Jeff was still frustrated because the opportunity to sort of control the messaging and the media by having his letter up had passed. People had noticed our launch and the articles had been written. And so Jeff was still very mad. So we fixed the problem, but Jeff now had no trust in us. The weekend went by, he was using the system like looking for bugs because he's like, oh, this team's not reliable now. Ethan's not reliable. I better check it myself. So you have the CEO checking on him. And he found a problem and emailed me like Saturday night at nine o'clock. Like I was doing this and it broke. And luckily I was able to tell him exactly what happened by like 930.
现在，我做的另一件事，这是关于亚马逊的另一个好事，随着越来越多的领导人被抄送到这个愤怒的主题中，他们开始在背后联系，说，我们都曾处在杰夫的索伦之眼之下，我们知道这很痛苦。我们能做些什么来帮助？基本上，安迪·贾西的组织，当时是AWS，还有他的首席技术官，一个叫Werner Vogels的家伙，说，你们遇到了数据库问题。让我们从AWS数据库团队中找一些主要工程师来帮助你们。这些主要工程师大约在早上9点左右到达了。他们审视了我们的设计。我们在数据库使用上犯了一些基本错误。他们说，你知道，要修复这个太复杂了。我们只会给你们大约500台AWS机器，这样你们糟糕的设计也会运行。这就是即时解决方案。我说，好吧，如果你们有500台数据库因为你们是AWS，这是一个很好的解决方案，他们就是这么做的。接下来我们修复了问题。我们一群人一起努力工作来解决问题。这花了一整天的时间，杰夫仍然感到沮丧，因为通过他的信件来控制信息和媒体的机会已经过去了。人们已经注意到我们的发行，文章已经被写出来了。所以杰夫仍然非常生气。所以我们解决了问题，但是杰夫现在对我们没有信任了。周末过去了，他在使用系统时在寻找问题，因为他说，哦，这个团队现在不可靠。伊森也不可靠。我最好自己检查一下。所以你有CEO在审查它。他发现了一个问题，周六晚上九点给我发了封邮件。我幸运地在9:30之前告诉他发生了什么。
Anyway, the next part of the story is that following week, I had a meeting with him on another topic. So I was part of this small group that was trying to figure out how to build a competing browser. You may not remember, but Amazon had a browser called Silk for a while. And I was invited to this meeting, but I wasn't a critical participant. So you may know this idea from Scrum where they say some people are pigs and some are chickens and the chickens are sort of observers. I was a chicken in this meeting.
不过，故事的下一部分是在接下来的一周，我和他进行了另一个话题的会议。所以我是这个小组的一部分，他们正在试图找出如何构建一款竞争性的浏览器。你可能不记得了，但亚马逊曾经有一款名为Silk的浏览器。我被邀请参加这次会议，但我并不是关键的参与者。你可能听说过 Scrum 中提到过的一种理念，他们说有些人是猪，有些人是鸡，而鸡是一种观察者。在这次会议中，我就是一只鸡。
And that turns out to be a great analogy because I was thinking, should I chicken out and not go? Like I could skip this meeting with the CEO who's angry at me. But when I had that thought, I realized, you know, if I can't face the CEO, I'd better pack my desk. Like that's the end. So I went to this meeting early and Jeff always sat in the same chair. So I knew where he would sit when he came in. So I sat down right next to his chair and I thought, I don't know, let's find out. And so the meeting goes by.
这个比喻非常贴切，因为我在想，我是不是应该胆怯而不去？比如我可以不参加这个对我生气的CEO的会议。但当我想到这一点时，我意识到，你知道的，如果我不能面对CEO，那我最好收拾好我的桌子。就像是结束了一样。所以我提前去参加了这个会议，杰夫总是坐在同一个椅子上。所以我知道他进来后会坐在哪里。于是我坐在他的椅子旁边，心想，我不知道，就让我们看看吧。于是会议进行了下去。
And of course, in my mind, Jeff is totally ignoring me, like not even looking at me. But I think that's just me projecting because remember I wasn't central to the meeting. So at the end of the meeting, everybody gets up to leave, he turns and looks at me and says, so how are you doing? I bet it's been a hard week. And I thought, oh, okay, we're gonna talk. And I said, yeah, you know, I just sort of answered him with, of course it's been hard, but here's what we're doing and here's what we're gonna do in the future. And we had a very human conversation and I didn't believe Jeff would have forgotten that I let him down, but it was clear he had forgiven it. So I was still gonna have to, as it turns out, re-ear his trust, but the thing I did that's key for people to learn from is it's really easy to flame.
当然，我心里觉得杰夫完全不理我，甚至都没看着我。但我想这只是我在担心，毕竟我在会议中并不是中心人物。所以会议结束的时候，大家都起身离开，他转过身来看着我，问道：“你好吗？这一周肯定很辛苦吧。”我当时想，哦，好的，我们要聊一聊了。于是我说：“是的，你知道，当然很艰难，但我们正在做些什么，以及未来将要做些什么。”我们进行了一次非常人性化的对话，我并不认为杰夫会忘记我让他失望的事，但显然他已经原谅了。所以我还是要继续努力恢复他的信任，但我认为人们应该学会的一点是，面对困难时，很容易发火。
He had been flaming me, right? Writing angry emails, angry emails are easy. Sitting three feet from someone and being angry with them face to face is hard. And when faced with, I can either start ranting at this person who reports to me, or I can say something nice, he chose to say something nice and that rebuilt our relationship. So the end of the story is two years later, I was promoted to vice president. So even though I had failed the CEO on this very public launch, where he was very definitely mad at me, I re-earned the trust, I showed I had learned the lessons of how to launch more reliably without outages and I was promoted. And so I share that story because I think it, what I want people to understand is if I can get away with publicly failing one of the richest, the most famous inventors on earth and then get promoted and finish my career at Amazon very successfully, you can dig out of any hope.
他一直在对我火上加油，对吧？写愤怒的电子邮件，愤怒的电子邮件很容易。在离某人三英尺远的地方面对面生气是困难的。当面对选择时，我可以开始向这个向我报告的人发牢骚，或者我可以说些好话，他选择说些好话，这重新建立了我们的关系。所以故事的结局是两年后，我晋升为副总裁。所以即使我在这个非常公开的发布中失败了CEO，他肯定对我很生气，我重新赢得了信任，表明我已经学会了如何更可靠地进行发布而无中断，并获得了晋升。所以我分享这个故事是因为我想让人们明白，如果我能公开失败地脱身于地球上最富有的最著名的发明家之一，然后被晋升，并且在亚马逊结束我的职业非常成功，你也可以走出任何绝望。
You just have to manage it, right? That is an amazing story. Okay, so there's a lot of lessons that I wanna pull on here. One is just if you get caught in a situation like this or something completely fails, what I took down as you were talking, one is admit, yes, this is a huge problem, own it. This is not like don't try to deflect. Two is the way I describe what you did here is something I call prioritizing and communicating where you prioritize here's what we need to do and then communicate, here's our priorities. And I love that you have this like every hour, here's the latest, here's the latest. So make it, make people understand you are on it and you will continue to keep them updated because I imagine one of the worst fears is I have no idea what's happening here, I'm gonna go in and start micromanaging. You're exactly right.
你只需要去处理它，对吧？那真是一个令人惊讶的故事。好的，我想要在这里汲取很多教训。首先是，如果你陷入这样的情况或者是出现完全失败的情况，我从你说话中得到的启发是，首先承认，是的，这是一个巨大的问题，拥有它。不要试图推诿责任。其次，我描述你在这里所做的是我称之为优先处理和沟通的方式，即明确优先处理的问题然后沟通我们的优先事项。我喜欢你每个小时提供最新消息的做法，让人们明白你在处理这件事并且会持续更新他们，因为我想最糟糕的恐惧之一就是我不知道发生了什么，我必须去干预管理事情。你说得完全正确。
I'm trying to hold off micromanagement. I'm trying to give them like, okay, I believe with this and I can wait an hour and then I can wait another hour because that team seems to be honest. So I'm trying to rebuild trust one hour at a time and avoid having three or four levels of management all come in and start helping. And then I love this other piece of advice of kind of meet them in person, try to take it off offline essentially, which I know you did later, but that's such a good point that it's hard to be as mad and angry and like flamey in person, right? People are just gonna be like, okay, I get it, let's try to figure this out. Amazing, is there anything else?
我正在尽量避免过度管理。我试图给他们一些信任，我相信他们，我可以等一个小时，然后再等一个小时，因为那个团队似乎很诚实。所以我正试图一小时一小时地重建信任，避免让三四个管理层都来插手。还有一个建议我很喜欢，就是亲自见面，试图将问题离线处理，我知道你后来已经这样做了，但这是个很好的建议，亲自见面时很难像在网上那样生气和激动，对吧？人们只会说，“好，我明白了，让我们试着解决一下问题。”太棒了，还有什么需要注意的吗？
Those are the three that I took away just like if you're caught in that situation in the moment, is there anything else that you found to be really helpful? I mean, work hard and fast, right? You do have to fix the problem. My team had been up all night. I had to start sending people home to sleep and shifts. We had to pull in all this help. And so it was a very hard weekend. When you have a mistake, it's on you to pull out the stops even if it's uncomfortable to recover from it. And again, this is not the time to be like, well, it's the weekend now and my team will hit it Monday. Like that would have been like, I'd have been out the door so fast. I would have had like the comic, Wily Coyote Skidmarks as I bumped down the street.
这些是我带走的三点经验，就好像当你陷入那种紧急情况时，还有其他什么东西你觉得很有帮助吗？我的意思是，要努力而快速地工作，对吧？你必须解决这个问题。我的团队整夜都在忙碌。我不得不开始让人们回家睡觉轮班。我们不得不寻求所有的帮助。所以那是一个非常艰难的周末。当你犯了错误，就得全力以赴，即使恢复可能会有些不舒服。再次强调，现在不是像“现在是周末了，我的团队周一会解决”的时候。否则，我很快就会被赶出去。我会像简单公差一样沿街溜达。
So I would say that's important. It's just, it's part of showing ownership. The other part of this is something I went through for a while when I was starting to become a more senior leader is I had a lot of imposter syndrome. And this fear that if I messed up, everything would crumble. People would see that I don't actually know what I'm doing and I'm not really ready for this level of seniority. And so there's a sphere of like one big mistake. It's over. Clearly, this was an example of a huge mistake and it was not over for you. Is there any lessons there that you take away of just like you can mess up and still do well, even if it's this level of mistake?
所以我会说这很重要。这是展示拥有权利的一部分。另一个部分是我在成为更高级领导者时经历过的一段时间，那就是我有很多冒名顶替的感觉。害怕如果我犯错，一切都会崩溃。人们会看到我实际上并不知道自己在做什么，我并不真的准备好晋升到这个高级别。所以有一种恐惧，就是一次大错就会毁了一切。显然，这是一个巨大错误的例子，但对你来说并没有结束。你从中得到了什么教训，比如即使犯了这种级别的错误，你依然可以做得很好呢？
I think a lot of people in my position would have quit. They would have let the shame. I was just a little bit bullheaded where I'm like, yeah, I messed up, but like I'm still, I know I'm still a good person and a good worker. Yes, I made a mistake, but I'm gonna move on. You know, part of the story I haven't told that you might enjoy is I mentioned that Jeff Wilkie was Jeff's number two at that point, Jeff Bezos number two person. And he was my skip level. Well, he during this process, he came physically into our offices and he wanted to talk to me. And my manager who was vice president said, hey, Jeff, this is my team. I own it. If you have any criticisms, say it to me. You know, you don't need to talk to my team. And Jeff Wilkie said to my boss, whose name was Paul, Paul, that's excellent leadership. I really appreciate what you're doing. Please step out of the way. I wanna talk to Ethan. You're doing a great job, Paul. Now step aside and then he kind of read me the riot acts.
我认为很多人在我这个位置上可能会选择放弃。他们可能会让羞耻战胜自己。我只是有点固执，我觉得，是的，我犯了错，但我知道我还是一个好人，一个好的员工。是的，我犯了错，但我会继续前行。故事中一部分我还没讲给你听，你可能会喜欢。我提到过，Jeff Wilkie那时是Jeff Bezos的二把手，他是我的直属上司。在这个过程中，他亲自来到我们办公室想和我谈话。我的副总裁经理对他说，嘿，Jeff，这是我的团队，我负责。如果你有任何批评，请告诉我，你不需要和我的团队说。然后Jeff Wilkie对我的老板保罗说，保罗，你的领导才是出色的，我真的很感激你在做什么。请让一下，我想和Ethan谈谈。你做得很好，Paul，现在请让步，然后他给了我一些警告。
And the rest of that funny story is I was so happy with how well my meeting with Jeff Bezos went. I patted myself on the back and like, I'm gonna go face Jeff Wilkie now. I'm gonna schedule a meeting with him and do the same thing. You know, I've got this down. So I go to meet with Jeff Wilkie, figuring like I'm gonna run the same playbook. I'm gonna look him in the eye and all will be forgiven. Jeff Wilkie looks at me and says, Ethan, when you launched this, did you know you were gambling with the result? Did you know it might not work? And I said, yes, we had a media commitment to launch on that day and I thought shooting for the date was more important than perfect certainty. And he said, well, two things. First, you were wrong. You were wrong to prioritize date over our reputation. You let Amazon down in public and that was a mistake. He said, second though, at least you knew you were gambling. If you hadn't known you were gambling, we'd be discussing your departure. And I'm like, okay, here I thought I was rolling in this meeting, like I'm gonna run my relationship playbook and he's evaluating whether or not to keep me.
故事的剩下部分是我对和杰夫·贝佐斯的会议进展得如此顺利感到非常高兴。我自己感到得意，说我现在要去面对杰夫·威尔基。我打算安排一个会议，做同样的事情。你知道，我已经掌握了这个技巧。于是我去见杰夫·威尔基，认为我会运用同样的策略。我打算直视他，一切都会被原谅。然而杰夫·威尔基看着我说，伊桑，当你发起这个项目时，你是否知道你在赌博结果？你知道可能会失败吗？我说，是的，我们有媒体承诺要在那天启动，我认为争取那个日期比完美的确定性更重要。他说，首先，你错了。你错误地把日期放在我们声誉之上。你让亚马逊在公众面前失望了，这是一个错误。他接着说，第二，至少你知道自己在赌博。如果你不知道自己在赌博，我们将讨论你的离职。我当时觉得，我以为我在这个会议中表现得很好，认为我会实行我的人际关系策略，但他却在评估是否要留用我。
The bullheadedness is even after he had told me he had been considering firing me. I'm like, well, he isn't. So I'm just gonna go forward. And a lot of that stubbornness of sure I made a mistake, but like I'm not gonna live in shame about it. I think is what people can take away. I think a lot of people feel they're more dead in the water than they are. Because everybody makes mistakes, right? Jeff's, I mean, Jeff and Firephone, which, you know, it's like his, that'll be an albatross around his neck. You know, Jeff and Firephone will be a phrase of anybody who knows Amazon for the rest of his life. Yeah, we talked about on the Working Backwards podcast and why did working backwards work for the Firephone?
尽管他告诉过我他考虑过解雇我的事，但他仍然固执地坚持。我只能向前看。我犯了错误，但我不会因此感到羞愧。我想人们可以从中得到的教训是，很多人觉得他们的处境比实际上更糟糕。因为每个人都会犯错，对吧？杰夫的火手机，你知道，这将是他一生的羞耻之事。杰夫和火手机将永远是那些了解亚马逊的人们口中的话题。是的，我们在《逆向思考》播客中讨论过，为什么逆向思考对火手机有效呢？
We talked about it. I love that these quotes and lines are so seared in your brain you can remember it like word for word exactly what they were. I've relived that moment many times. And then just along the lines of working right out of the hole is the, is essentially what you did just succeed for two years and do great. And that's, that was the key there. No, I think I did have to learn. I've always been sort of an operational cowboy, meaning I like to go fast and loose. I prioritize speed. And I really had to step back and say, okay, Amazon, Amazon at this level and scale doesn't like that. So I've taught myself a new phrase which was fear the New York Times headline. Like be aware that if Amazon is down, it goes up on every news website immediately. And so if Amazon has some kind of mistake, it's on Wall Street Journal and CNN. And so as a leader, I had to think is what I'm doing going to generate a New York Times headline.
我们谈论了这个。我喜欢这些引用和台词在你脑海中留下了深刻的印记，你可以记得得如此准确，就像逐字逐句地知道它们是什么。我已经多次重温那个时刻。然后在从最初的阶段就开始工作这方面，基本上你做的就是成功两年并做得很好。那就是关键所在。不，我想我必须学会。我一直都是一个实战型的牛仔，意思是我喜欢快速和潇洒。我将速度放在优先考虑的位置。但我真的不得不退一步想一想，好吧，亚马逊，亚马逊在这个水平和规模上不喜欢那样。所以我教会了自己一个新词组，那就是害怕《纽约时报》头条新闻。就是意识到，如果亚马逊出了问题，这会立刻出现在每个新闻网站上。所以如果亚马逊犯了某种错误，它将出现在《华尔街日报》和CNN上。作为一个领导者，我必须思考我所做的事情是否会产生《纽约时报》的头条新闻。
Cause if it is, I'd better be really careful. And that's, that's what I taught myself is like, you can't be paralyzed, but you do, I taught my whole team like we don't want to be in the New York Times for the wrong thing. And that was the lesson. Along the lines of lessons, last question here, just what's something that you took away from the way you approached it, that you shouldn't, should have changed or should have done differently, that you just, you've done differently since, you know, obviously like don't, like you mentioned this idea of don't promise a date that you're not that certain you're going to hit, I guess, is there anything along those lines? I have two things here. First, Amazon loved in the past, they love surprise launches. They love the idea of we're going to be quiet, quiet, quiet, because basically it was a reaction, I think, to Microsoft where they felt Microsoft always talked about what was coming and then pushed the dates back. And so there was this whole thing about vaporware.
因为如果是的话，我最好要非常小心。这就是我教给自己的，就像你不能被麻痹，但是，我教导了我的整个团队，我们不想因为错误的事情出现在《纽约时报》上。这就是教训。在这些教训之中，最后一个问题是，您从您所采取的方式中得到了什么收获，您应该改变或做得不同的事情，您自那时以来就做得不同了吗，您明白了，显然，不要像您提到的那样承诺您不确定能够实现的日期，我想，有没有类似的事情？我这里有两个事情。首先，亚马逊过去喜欢惊喜推出。他们喜欢静悄悄，因为这基本上是对微软的一种反应，他们觉得微软总是谈论即将到来的事情，然后把日期往后推。因此，关于虚拟软件的整个事情就出现了。
And Amazon wanted to be the other way, which is we won't say anything and then it will just be there. The problem I came to say is the biggest thing I learned with surprise launches is that you're surprised by what doesn't work. And so I shifted the approach to let's do a lot of beta testing. We always, even if others don't agree, fight and say, you're right, we're not going to have a surprise launch. Some of our beta testers, even if they sign NDAs, are going to leak and that's a better outcome than launching something that doesn't work. That's one lesson. The other lesson is this thing that broke in front of Jeff Bezos, ultimately it was a new college graduate engineer who wrote that code. And he had been left alone to write part of our user interface, but he had written it in such a way that it didn't scale.
亚马逊想要采取的方式正好相反，即我们不会透露任何消息，产品会突然出现在你面前。我发现问题是，我在进行惊喜发布时学到的最重要的一点是，你会被那些不起作用的东西惊讶到。因此，我改变了策略，开始进行大量的测试。即使别人不同意，我们总是会争论并说，你是对的，我们不打算进行惊喜发布。有些 beta 测试人员，即使他们签署了保密协议，也可能会泄露消息，但这比发布一个不起作用的产品要好。这是一个教训。另一个教训是，在杰夫·贝索斯面前出问题的那部分，最终是一名刚毕业的工程师写的代码。他被让独自负责编写我们的用户界面的一部分，但他的编写方式导致了不可扩展性。
Now, we didn't give him any help or oversight. We left him on his own because we were busy focusing on other pieces of the problem. And shortly after the disaster, she left the company. And the mistake I made was not reaching out to him and really reassuring him of like, yes, you wrote the bug, but that's not on you. Like the system failed you and we don't see you, bugs happen. So the thing I regret in this whole thing is not realizing that even though no one in the team ever yelled at him or whatever, he knew it was his bug and he obviously saw me and others sort of taking a beating. And so he left and I wish he hadn't done that. And I wish more than that I had stepped in. I didn't realize what he was feeling.
现在，我们没有给予他任何帮助或监督。我们把他留给自己，因为我们忙于专注于问题的其他部分。灾难发生后不久，她离开了公司。我的错误是没有去联系他，真正让他放心，告诉他，是的，你写了bug，但这不是你的错。系统出了问题，bug是常有的事情。整件事情让我后悔的是，我没有意识到即使团队中没有人对他大喊大叫之类的，他知道这是他的bug，他显然看到了我和其他人承受的压力。所以他离开了，我希望他没有这样做。我更希望的是我当时能够插手。我没有意识到他的感受。
It's interesting the lesson there isn't catch that person sooner and notice these links in the chain that may break, but it's more just be there for that human that have this challenge that people may not be focusing on. Because we lost a good person and he probably felt very bad about it and we all feel bad when we make mistakes that can be prevented, but he felt undue responsibility. I think and that I really regret. This is actually a really good example of ownership. You mentioned this term ownership and that connects to Amazon has these leadership principles. I think there's 14 of them. One of them is around ownership and apparently you helped craft the actual language for that principle, which I think is a huge deal within Amazon.
有趣的是，这节课并不在于尽早抓住那个人并注意到可能会断裂的链条，而更多的是为那个遇到挑战的人提供支持，这是人们可能没有关注到的。因为我们失去了一个好人，他可能对此感到非常难过，当我们犯下可以避免的错误时，我们都会感到难过，但他感到了不应该的责任。我认为我真的很遗憾。这实际上是一个很好的责任担当的例子。你提到了这个术语责任担当，这与亚马逊的领导原则有关。我想有14个原则，其中一个是关于责任担当的，显然你曾帮助制定过这个原则的实际语言，我认为这对于亚马逊来说是一件很了不起的事情。
I imagine very few people have a say over how to define and describe and say these principles. Could you just talk about this principle that you contributed to, how it came to be that you helped actually write it? Amazon is now kind of on its fourth version in my mind. Maybe there's more, but it's fourth major revision of its leadership principles over its 25 plus year history. And when it was going from version one to version two, Jeff and his leadership team sat down together and actually in version one, there were three different lists. They were like leadership principles in core values and something else I don't remember. And they were like, three lists is stupid. Let's make one list. Well, ownership, the term had been a part of one of those lists, but when they merged everything, they took it out.
我想很少有人对如何定义、描述和表达这些原则有发言权。你能否谈谈你参与贡献的那个原则，以及你是如何帮助实际起草它的？在我看来，亚马逊现在已经是第四个版本了。也许还有更多，但是在其25年历史中，已经进行了四次主要修订领导原则。当它从第一版升级到第二版时，杰夫和他的领导团队坐在一起讨论。实际上，在第一版中有三个不同的列表，就像领导原则、核心价值观和我不记得的其他东西。他们觉得有三个列表很蠢，决定合并成一个列表。所有权这个词是其中一个列表的一部分，但当他们合并一切时，将其剔除了。
And this guy, Jeff Wilkie, I mentioned, the number two and the leader of retail, he brought a bunch of us, a bunch of his directors. He brought the proposed list to us in a meeting and said, hey, this is the proposed new version. Do you have any comment? And we all sat around and talked to this, I said, where's ownership? Ownership is missing. So we told him, we said, look, ownership is missing. We think it should be there. And he said, well, why don't you propose a draft? And so about a half dozen of us sat around and rost out a draft of how we felt ownership should be written.
而这位我提到的杰夫·威尔基，排名第二并且是零售业领导者，他带着一群人，他的几位主管们，来到我们开会。他提出了新版本的建议清单说，嘿，这是提议的新版本。你们有什么评论吗？我们大家一起坐下来讨论，我说，所有权在哪里？所有权不见了。所以我们告诉他，我们说，看，缺少了所有权。我们认为应该加上。他说，那你们为什么不提出一个草案呢？于是，我们大概有六个人围坐一起，起草了我们认为所有权应该如何写入的草案。
And I propose these six words, which are, an owner never says, that's not my job. Maybe that's seven words. Um, so I propose this specific language as a part of it. And we sent off this draft. And months go by, we hear nothing. And then one day the leadership principles are announced. And ownership is back in. It's been modified, but that an owner never says, that's not my job, is a part of the leadership principle. And it's remained to this debt.
我提出这六个词，就是，一个负责人永远不会说，这不是我的工作。也许应该是七个词。所以我建议将这种特定的语言作为其中的一部分。然后我们发送了这份草案。几个月过去了，我们没有收到任何消息。然后有一天，领导力原则被宣布。负责精神又回来了。虽然有所修改，但一个负责人永远不会说，这不是我的工作，是领导力原则的一部分。至今保持不变。
And what I love about that is it's probably the most, because Amazon has, you know, one and a half million employees who live by these leadership principles, it's probably the most impactful thing I've ever written. Wow. So those seven words are the most impactful thing you've ever written. I love that. And I totally get that. I'm really looking at the principles right now. And it comes right at the end of that principle, willing to the 14 leadership principles. Is there another principle that you really love or one or two?
我喜欢的是，亚马逊拥有150万员工遵循这些领导原则，这可能是我写过的最具影响力的事情。哇。所以这七个词是你写过的最具影响力的东西。我喜欢那个。我完全理解。我正在仔细研究这些原则。这个原则正好出现在14个领导原则的最后。还有其他你非常喜欢的原则吗？
I don't know. It's probably hard to pick your favorites. I'm a huge proponent of bias for action. Bias for action says speed matters in business. And, you know, many decisions are reversible. And so it's important to go faster. And I think people don't understand that in a competitive environment, being right is good, but being quick is necessary, because if there are 10 startups working on an idea, some of them will gamble and they'll make bad gambles and they'll go out of business. But some of them will gamble and make an early bet and be right. And if you're not moving quickly, you'll be beaten by the people who maybe got lucky. And so you've got to have a process that values speed.
我不知道。挑选自己喜欢的事情可能很困难。我非常支持行动偏好。行动偏好说速度在商业中很重要。而且，你知道，许多决定是可逆的。因此，加快速度很重要。我认为人们不理解在竞争环境中，做正确是好的，但做快是必要的，因为如果有10家创业公司在做同一个想法，其中一些会赌博，他们会赌错，并且会倒闭。但是其中一些会赌博，做出早期的赌注，并且是正确的。如果你行动不够迅速，你会被那些也许运气好的人击败。因此，你必须拥有一个重视速度的流程。
Values, what can we do today? What can we commit to today? So I really like bias for action. Now that is what got me in trouble with Jeff, right? I was willing to gamble. So it has to be in balance, but that's my other favorite. I was, again, that Jeff Bezos' interview with Lex Freeman, he was talking about how with his, with Blue Origin, his, with the way Amazon, he thought about Amazon as customer obsession. That was like the core goal and differentiator of Amazon with Blue Origin, he wanted to be decisiveness.
价值观，今天我们可以做些什么？我们今天可以承诺些什么？所以我真的很喜欢做出行动上的偏见。然而就是这让我和杰夫闹矛盾，对吧？我愿意冒险。但是它必须保持平衡，但这是我另一个最喜欢的。再次提到，杰夫·贝索斯在与莱克斯·弗里曼的采访中，他谈到了他对于亚马逊和蓝色起源的想法，他认为亚马逊是以客户为中心的受欢迎目标，而蓝色起源则希望做出果断的决策。
It's basically leaning into this bias for action, like fully, which is really interesting. I saw that part of the interview and I thought, wow, you know, that's exactly right. Because again, rockets blow up and they have people on them. Like you've got to get it right. But you also have to keep moving because there's always one more thing you can safety test. So how do you balance it? Yeah, it's interesting. With rockets, if like that's the one that you pick, it's a pretty bold to be all move forward kind of thing.
这基本上是倾向于行动的偏见，非常有趣。我看到了采访的那一部分，我觉得，哇，你知道，那确实是对的。因为再次，火箭会爆炸，上面载有人。你必须做到完全正确。但你也必须继续前进，因为总会有更多可以进行安全测试的东西。那么你如何平衡呢？是的，这很有趣。关于火箭，如果你选择了火箭，这是一种相当大胆的措施，要一直向前进。
I'm reading, so this principle again, going back to ownership. So you basically suggested this phrase, you didn't hear anything and all of a sudden it becomes part of the whole thing. Did that feel weird that they never told you or I don't know if they give you credit for that or it's like, no, it's great. Yeah, you know, I wouldn't even claim credit for it except I kept a copy of the email that says Ethan thinks it should say blah. Like I have the written proof because it's not about the credit. I'm very happy and proud that those words were kept.
我正在阅读，所以再次谈及这个原则，回到所有权的问题。所以你基本上建议了这个短语，你什么也没听到，突然之间它就变成了整个事情的一部分。他们从来没有告诉过你这件事感觉奇怪吗，或者我不知道他们是否给了你功劳，或者说不，这很棒。是的，你知道，我甚至不会为此要求功劳，除非我有一封邮件的副本，上面写着伊桑认为应该这样说。像这样的书面证据，因为这不是因为要求功劳。那些字被保留着，我感到非常开心和自豪。
But, you know, in Amazon, I doubt if Jeff knows I wrote those words, you know, it's not like I've ever told him like, hey, do you know you kept my words? Like that's not appropriate. It's just a fun anecdote. And it does show, I guess, something people can learn them that though, you can influence way up in a company if your ideas are good.
但是，你知道，在亚马逊，我怀疑杰夫是否知道我写了那些话，你知道，不像我向他说过：“嘿，你知道你保留了我的话吗？”这样的话不太合适。这只是一个有趣的轶事。我想它确实表明了一个人们可以从中学到东西，那就是，如果你的想法很好，你可以在一个公司里影响很大。
You know, and also when we challenged, Jeff Wilkie was a strong opinionated leader who didn't necessarily always love being challenged. And so when we first told him like, well, we think you're missing ownership, he was like, you know, like, you're staying at the whole S team can't get its leadership principles right? I mean, it wasn't exactly that way, but he was very much like, well, is this really necessary? Why do you think it's necessary?
你知道，而且当我们挑战他的时候，杰夫·威尔克是一个充满强烈意见的领导者，他并不总是喜欢被挑战。所以当我们第一次告诉他，我们认为你缺乏所有权感的时候，他就像说，你知道，是不是整个S团队都无法掌握领导原则？我是说，情况并没有那么严重，但他非常像是说，这真的有必要吗？你为什么认为这是必要的呢？
And his challenge to us to write it was kind of framed as like, well, if you're so sure it's good, show us, right? And so, you know, but again, I'm stubborn and I'm like, all right, let's write it. And we did. That's funny. That's not a great example of leadership where he's like, hey guys, I have, I need your feedback on this thing, but like, no, don't actually, don't actually tell me anything's wrong.
他对我们提出写作挑战时，基本上是这样说的，如果你们如此确信它很好，那就证明给我们看，对吧？所以，你知道，但我又很固执，我就说，好的，那就写吧。我们就写了。这有点搞笑。这并不是一个很好的领导示范，他说，嘿伙计们，我需要你们对这件事给我反馈，但实际上，不，不要告诉我出了什么问题。
Well, yeah, yeah, I mean, for a bunch of directors to kind of critique the work of people two levels higher, he wanted it, but you know, then he's sort of naturally resistant to it of we're kind of, you know, poking at his baby. It's unlikely that there's something huge missing and it turns out they were.
嗯，是的，我是说，一群导演评价比自己高两个层次的人的工作，他想要这样做，但你知道，然后他对此有一种本能的抵抗，当我们在戳他的"心头肉"时。很不可能会漏掉很重要的事情，结果是他们确实有。
Yeah. And I guess just on these principles, people may not know this, but this is where disagreeing commit comes from. It's actually have backbone disagreeing commit. We talked about this on the podcast about working backwards. I also love leaders are right a lot. That comes up a lot.
是的。我想人们可能不知道，但这就是不同意承诺的原则所在。实际上，坚持不同意见才有骨气。我们在播客中谈到了倒退工作的原则。我也喜欢领导者大多数时候都是对的。这也经常被提及。
And I love that just like to be successful, you need to be right. You can just, you know, project confidence. You can't just be in a bunch of meetings and ship things. You need to be right to be. And that one's been rewritten to carefully say, you know, it's always interesting. What is the history of the edits? Which you wish you could see the edit history on these.
我喜欢成功就像需要做对一样。你不能只是表现出信心。你不能只是参加一堆会议和发货物品。你需要做对。这一点已经被重新表述为，你知道，这总是很有趣。编辑的历史是什么？你希望能看到这些编辑的历史。
That one got modified to say leaders, something about leaders work to dis, actively work to dis confirm their beliefs. And the key there is it was trying to get at the idea that you've got to be very open and always be questioning, yes, I think I'm right. But what's the new evidence? What am I learning? What's changing? And in fact, that active, it also says they seek diverse perspectives.
这段话被修改过，说的是领导者，关于领导者努力打破坚信的信念。重点是要表达的观点是，你必须非常开放并且持续质疑自己，是的，我觉得我是对的。但是有什么新的证据？我学到了什么？有什么改变？实际上，这种主动行为也表示他们寻求多样化的观点。
And that was a way of getting at what's called, you know, DEI, diversity, equity and inclusion. That's a subtle nod towards, if everyone in the room is a 50 year old white man, you may not really be making the right overall decision for Amazon's customer base. You may be making the one for like, 50 year old white suburban Seattleites. Right. And so it's just some of these, every word in those has been studied as an invisible word inside the company. Amazing.
这种方式其实是在谈论所谓的DEI，即多样性、公平和包容性。这是对如果房间里的每个人都是50岁的白人男性的微妙讽刺，你可能并没有为亚马逊的顾客群体做出正确的决定。你可能只是为50岁的白人男性郊区西雅图人做决定。所以这些词汇全部被研究为公司内的隐形词汇。很棒。
Okay. Let's move on to the final area. I wanted to spend a little time on, and this is called contrarian corner. I'm curious if you have any contrarian opinions about, things that basically that other people believe that you don't believe, something you see that many people don't see. Is there anything that comes to mind?
好的。让我们继续讨论最后一个领域。我想花点时间谈谈这个，这个被称为“反向思考角”。我想知道你是否持有任何与众不同的观点，也就是说其他人相信的你却不相信的东西，或者是你看到而其他人却没有看到的事情。有没有什么想法冒出来？
Yeah. I think a place where I'm currently very contrarian is the return to office movement. You know, many leaders at my level appear or publicly favor the need to get back into the office potentially full time. And I'm contrarian on this because of innovation. Specifically, I looked it up, you can check my facts on Wikipedia.
是的。我认为我目前非常持异议的地方是回到办公室的运动。你知道，我这个级别的许多领导人似乎或公开支持有必要可能全职回到办公室。而我对此持异议是因为创新。具体来说，我查了一下，你可以在维基百科上查看我的事实。
The first purpose built office, the first building ever built to be an office was built in 1726 in London. And so we're about 300 years into learning how to use offices well. And what that means is, offices aren't gonna get much better. Like, what's the last major thing you can think of that got better in offices? You might say, well, open offices, but a lot of people say that's not even a good idea.
第一座专门建造的办公楼，也就是第一座专为办公而建的建筑于1726年在伦敦建成。所以我们已经进入了学习如何有效利用办公室的大约300年的历程。这意味着，办公室不会有太大的改善。就像，你能想到最后一个在办公室领域有所改进的重大事情是什么？也许你会说，开放式办公室，但很多人说这甚至不是一个好主意。
These big rows of desks and loud pits. With working from home, we've only been doing that for a few years since the pandemic began, and at all since the internet started 20 years ago, which one is likely to have more opportunity for improvement? There's so many things we haven't explored with remote work.
这些长长的办公桌和喧闹的工作台。随着在家办公，我们自从大流行开始仅仅做了几年，而在互联网开始20年前之前根本没有这样做过。哪种方式更有可能有更多的改进机会呢？远程工作有许多我们尚未探索的事情。
And I think the people who say, oh, back to the office, it's because we know it works? Well, we know what it is, but I have so much more faith in the opportunity to improve the remote experience. And so I think long-term, it's going to triumph. The one other place where I'm a huge contrarian is doing business on a handshake. I understand companies need lawyers and I have an attorney for certain things, but I coach people, most of the people I coach, there's no NDA in place, there's no contract in place, they pay me through PayPal and I do good coaching for them.
我认为那些说“回到办公室去”的人是因为他们知道这种方式行得通？是的，我们知道这是一种方式，但我更相信改善远程体验的机会。因此，我认为从长远来看，远程工作会取得成功。另一个我持不同意见的地方是靠握手做生意。我明白公司需要律师，我也有律师处理某些事情，但我指导的大多数人没有签订保密协议，也没有签订合同，他们通过PayPal支付我，我为他们提供良好的指导。
Like, I think too much of the world is contract-driven. And we've lost the idea of your word being your bond and like you can actually trust me to follow through on my commitments. And I'm a contrarian there. I realize I will occasionally get burnt. Someone will behave in a way. So they'll let me down. But I think when we're always suspicious of people, that's a high cost. And the other place I'm contrarian is just doing business on faith. There reminds me, Sam Altman has a similar philosophy of just like trust people and assume it'll all be okay. Sometimes you'll get burned, but on balance, it'll end up being much better for you and everyone around you. I didn't know that Sam had said that, but I strongly agree with it. Yeah. Although he has some challenges recently, I don't know if it's working. But it ended up great for him. So anyway, okay, we've actually reached our very exciting lightning round. Before we get there, is there anything else you wanted to touch on or share or leave listeners with? No, I've really enjoyed this conversation. I can talk about careers forever. And I love doing that. But I think we've covered a ton today that will really help people. So I'm good. Let's hit the lightning round.
我认为世界上太多的事情都是合同驱动的。我们已经失去了言而有信的概念，你可以真正相信我会履行我的承诺。在这方面，我是与众不同的。我意识到我偶尔会受到伤害。有人会以某种方式行事，所以他们会让我失望。但我认为当我们总是对人们持怀疑态度时，这是一种高成本。另一个方面我与众不同的是凭信任做生意。这让我想起，萨姆·奥特曼有类似的哲学观念，就是相信人们，并假设一切都会好起来。有时你会受伤，但总体来说，这对你和周围的每个人都会更好。我不知道萨姆最近是否仍然这样做。但最终对他来说都很好。所以，好吧，我们终于进入了非常激动人心的闪电回合。在我们开始之前，您还有什么想要触及、分享或留给听众的吗？不，我真的很享受这次对话。我可以永远谈论职业。我喜欢这样做。但我认为我们今天覆盖了很多内容，这将真正帮助人们。所以我觉得很好。让我们进行闪电回合吧。
All right, with that, we reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready? I'm ready. Ethan, what are two or three books that you recommended most to other people? Two or three books. My number one recommendation is a book called Decisive. It's by Chip and Dan Heath, and it's about the science of making better decisions. The reason I recommend it so much is it will make your career better because leaders are decision makers, but also your personal life. So I apply it at least as much in my personal life as I do in my professional life. My second book, my second most recommended book, is Leadership and Self-Deception, much less known than Decisive, a little bit harder to approach. It's by a group, a research group called the Arbenger Institute, and it's about how to, the self-deception is we cause a lot of our interpersonal problems while blaming them on others. And it walks through how are you part of the problem you're having with somebody else and what can you do about it?
好的，接下来我们将进入非常刺激的闪电回合。你准备好了吗？我准备好了。以撒，你向别人推荐过哪两三本书？
我推荐得最多的一本书是《果断决策》。这本书是由奇普与丹·希斯合著，讲述了如何做出更明智的决策的科学。我推荐这本书的原因是它能让你的职业生涯更上一层楼，因为领导者就是决策者，同时也会影响到你的个人生活。所以我在私人生活中的应用至少和在职业生活中一样多。我推荐次数第二多的书是《领导力与自欺》，相比《果断决策》知名度要低得多，难度也略高一些。这本书是由一个名为阿本格研究所的团队撰写的，讲述了我们如何因自欺而导致许多人际关系问题，同时又将责任归咎于他人。它解释了你如何是问题的一部分，如何与他人之间的问题有关，以及你能够采取什么行动。
The third and final book was recently brought to me by someone I work with that you know, Jason Yoom. That book is the almanac of Novel Robicon. And Novel Robicon is an angel investor responsible for Angel's List, but what I love about that book is he has a recipe, he really boils down how to be successful while loving what you do, and he says no one can be a better version of you. Don't try to copy me and be, oh I'm going to be like Ethan or I'm going to be like Lenny. Instead, figure out what you uniquely do best that you love because no one can copy you being you. And that's your defensible sort of career value. And I really like that. Minslma.
最近，我与你认识的Jason Yoom一起工作的某人给我带来了第三本也是最后一本书。那本书是《Novel Robicon年鉴》。而Novel Robicon是一个天使投资人，负责“天使名单”，但我喜欢那本书的原因是他提供了一种成功的秘诀，他真的很简洁地说明了如何在热爱自己所做的事情的同时取得成功，并且他说没有人可以成为比你更好的自己。不要试图模仿我，比如说“我要像伊桑一样”或者“我要像莱尼一样”。相反，要找出你独特的、最擅长且热爱的事情，因为没有人可以模仿你做你自己。这就是你的事业的防御性价值。我真的很喜欢这一点。Minslma。
Yeah, Novel has so many insightful messages. And you can read all these on his Twitter, well like this Twitter, and someone just made a book out of his tweets basically. That's such an interesting thing. Yes, that's right. Awesome. What is a favorite recent movie or TV show you really enjoyed? So I grew up on a farm and so all the Taylor Sheridan, you know, 1923 and Yellowstone, and I, all of those series of, we've watched everything he's put out. You know, we do kind of laugh like wow, are you familiar with Yellowstone at all? Absolutely. A lot of death. Yeah, we, at one point my wife and I were watching it, we would start betting like, so the episode is starting. How many people will die in this episode? You know, like this ranch in Montana, but yet somehow, you know, they're always killing people. How does this work? That's, that's what your life was like is what I'm hearing.
是的，小说里有很多深刻的信息。你可以在他的推特上阅读到这些，就像这个推特，有人基本上把他的推文做成了一本书。这真是件有趣的事情。没错，太棒了。你最近最喜欢的电影或电视剧是什么？我在农场长大，所以所有泰勒·谢里丹的作品，比如《1923》和《黄石》，我都看过了。你们对黄石这部剧了解吗？当然了。有很多死亡情节。是的，有一次我和妻子在看的时候，我们开始打赌，比如说这集开始了，这一集会有多少人死亡？这个剧讲的是在蒙大拿的一个牧场，但不知何故，他们总是在杀人。这是怎么回事呢？你的生活看起来就是这样的，这是我听到的。
Favorite interview question that you like to ask candidates? I think my favorite interview question is tell me about a time where you needed to disagree with your management, where you needed to stand up or, you know, fight for a position against higher leadership or people in power, because I think that's really hard to do. I'm normally interviewing leaders and I think, you know, having a bunch of people who just say yes isn't helpful. You need people, you know, as you said, have backbone, disagree and commit. So that's what I'm normally looking for. Awesome. Is your favorite product you recently discovered that you really live? It's, it's silly, but my favorite product that I discovered recently is the Chucket, which you used to whip a ball for your dog like a quarter mile. It basically extends your arm and it's just fine to send a ball soaring like way further than you could ever throw it. And you feel like, wow, look at me. Like I'm a major league pitcher. It's because I have this three foot lever arm and I understand physics. You know, if we look at tech products, there's so many I love. It's too easy to say chat GPT and stuff. So I won't go there.
你最喜欢问应聘者的问题是什么？我认为我最喜欢问的面试问题是告诉我一个你需要和管理层意见不一致的情况，你需要站出来，或者与更高层领导或有权力的人争取立场的经历，因为我认为这很难做到。我通常面试的是领导者，我认为，你知道，有一群人只会说“好”是不够的。你需要那些有骨气的人，敢于持不同意见但又能付诸行动。这是我通常要找的。真是太好了。你最近发现的最喜欢的产品是什么？这有点儿傻，但我最近发现的最喜欢的产品是Chucket，你可以用它为你的狗扔球，像扔近四分之一英里远。它基本上是延长了你的手臂，很容易让球飞得比你能扔得更远。你会感觉自己像，“哇，看我像大联盟的投手一样。”这是因为我有这三英尺长的杠杆臂，并且懂得物理。如果我们看科技产品，我喜欢的太多了。说chat GPT之类的太容易了，所以我不去谈那里。
Awesome. My dog does not love chasing balls. I haven't had a reason to buy that, but I've never thought about just the joy of flinging a ball really far. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to you, share with folks, find useful in work or in life? I happen to be a Christian and the motto that I think about the most is to whom much has been given from him much will be required. And so I think a lot about what is my social responsibility? What, you know, I've been very lucky. I grew up on a farm in Ohio. Now I wasn't a farm boy. My father was a chemist, but I grew up, you know, in like upper middle class settings and I've ended up being extremely successful, able to retire from my job at 50 to kind of coach and teach. What do I owe to pay forward? So those words are, you know, obviously ancient spiritual texts, but they're the ones I take away and think the most about what's my responsibility. As an example of someone that to whom much has been given, but because he's worked so hard, Jeff Bezos is starting a space business as you know, if you had the chance to go to space, would you, would you go? Well, I of course saw his interview where he talked about the safety and the conversation he had to have with his mother. I would like to go to space. I'm not willing to pay what I think the current tickets are, but yeah, I would take the risk. So, you know, what's the risk of that ride? One in 100, one in 50, even more that you won't come back. I would probably take the gamble. So you'd be in the early adopter. Like where along that curve would you be? Early adopter laggard?
太棒了。我的狗不喜欢追球。我没有理由买那个，但我从来没有想过投掷球真的很远会让人开心。你有一个经常回头来的生活座右铭吗？你和别人分享，工作或生活中发现有用的？我碰巧是个基督徒，我最考虑的座右铭是“给予者将有所要求”。所以我很多时候会思考我的社会责任是什么？我知道，我很幸运。我在俄亥俄州的一个农场长大。虽然我不是农场男孩，我父亲是一名化学家，但我成长在一个中上层阶级的环境中，最终我取得了极大成功，能够在50岁就退休去指导和教学。我该怎么回报？这些话显然是古老的灵修文字，但它们是我所关注的，我最多关注的是我的责任是什么。举一个给予很多的人的例子，但因为他工作得如此努力，杰夫·贝索斯正在开始一项航天事业，你知道的，如果你有机会去太空，你会去吗？当然，我看过他的采访，谈到安全性和他必须与母亲交谈的内容。我想去太空。但我不愿意支付我认为现在机票的价格，但是，是的，我愿意冒险。那次旅行的风险是什么？百分之一，百分之五十，甚至更多，你可能不会返回。我可能会冒险。那么，你会是早期采用者吗？在这一曲线上，你在哪里？是早期采用者，还是滞后者？
Well, I'm old enough that I remember when the challenge or space shuttle exploded. And I said, you know, I would get on the next one. And I said, they're never going to be more careful than the next one. So I'll get on the next one. So, you know, I think I would get on any one I was offered because of the chance. Unlike Jeff who claims he wasn't scared, I would probably be really terrified, at least it liftoff, right? So, I mean, while you're up there, it's great. Everything either goes wrong going up or coming down. It's not the middle.
嗯，我已经够老了，还记得挑战号航天飞机爆炸的事情。我说过，我会坐下一班航班。我说，他们永远不会比下一班更小心。所以我会坐下一班。所以，你知道，我觉得我会搭乘任何给我的机会，因为这是个机会。不像杰夫声称他不害怕，我可能会真的很害怕，至少在升空的时候，对吧？所以，我是说，当你在空中的时候，一切都很棒。一切要么在起飞时出问题，要么在降落时出问题，不会出现在中间阶段。
Ethan, I think we're going to help a lot of people with their career. I think we're going to help them work through failure, become better owners. Thank you so much for being here. Two final questions. Work in folks find you online if they want to reach out. Also, just share what you do now in case people could use that help. And then how can listeners be useful to you? So the best place to find me online, I do all my writing on LinkedIn. It's where the professional community is. So Ethan, Amazon LinkedIn, my actual handler is eating Evan's VP from my history as a vice president. That's the best place to find me. I do have a sub stack newsletter. I do teach through the Maven platform, but all of those are linked off LinkedIn. And really how readers help me, they comment on what I write because I miss things. I am one person's perspective. So I actually have a process where I take in all the comments people write, all the different perspectives, all the different exceptions or special cases or examples of the different exceptions or special cases or examples. And that's how I improve my own thinking is I read every comment and think, okay, what did I miss? What could I have said better? How can I incorporate this if I ever talk about this again? Just to give you another opportunity to plug the stuff you do now. What do you help people with in case people could value, could use the stuff that you offer. You said you coach, you have a course, what sort of stuff. I focus on two topics, career development. So how do you grow in your career, the whole magic loop and how do you attain promotion or attain a new role or raise if that's your goal. And then leadership specifically, I teach a course that's been very popular called Stuck at Senior Manager, Breaking Through to Executive, which is how to get out of that sort of stuck. I'm working really hard. I'm pretty good. I'm managing 25 or 50 people. But how do I get to the big chair? How do I get to the division level leadership? And what do I need to change? It's that whole what got you here won't get you there. And I love to see people succeed at that. You know, people write me back and say, I did get a job. I did get promoted. I did get a raise. And that's, that's my fulfillment.
伊桑，我认为我们将帮助许多人发展事业。我认为我们将帮助他们克服失败，成为更好的主人。非常感谢你在这里。最后有两个问题。如果有人想联系你，他们可以在哪里找到你在线？另外，只要分享一下你现在在做什么，以便他们可能需要帮助。然后听众如何对你有帮助？最好的找到我的在线地方，我把所有的写作都放在LinkedIn上。那是专业社区所在的地方。所以伊桑，去LinkedIn找我，我的真实用户是“伊桑·埃文斯VP”，这是我以前作为副总裁的历史。那是找到我的最佳地方。我有一个子堆栈邮件列表。我会通过Maven平台进行教学，但所有这些都是从LinkedIn链接过去的。实际上读者如何帮助我，他们评论我的写作，因为我会漏掉一些东西。我只是一个人的观点。所以我有一个流程，汇集所有人们写的评论，所有不同的观点，所有不同的例外情况或特例或例子。这就是我改善自己思维的方式，我会阅读每一条评论，并思考，我漏掉了什么？我该怎么说得更好？如果我再谈论这个话题，我怎么把这个纳入进去？再给你一个机会来宣传一下你现在在做的事情。你帮助别人做什么，以便那些可能需要你提供的帮助，会感到有价值。你说过你是教练，有一个课程，是什么样的事情？我专注于两个主题，事业发展。如何在事业中成长，整个魔法循环以及如何获得晋升或获得新的角色或升职，如果这是你的目标的话。然后领导力，具体来说，我教授一门非常受欢迎的课程，名为“身处高级经理的困境，突破至高管”，这是如何走出那种困境的。我非常努力工作。我做得相当不错。我管理着25或50个人。但我如何坐上高层的大椅子？我如何获得部门级别的领导地位？我需要改变什么？整个“你今天所拥有的东西不会带你走到那里”的情况。我喜欢看到人们在这方面取得成功。你知道，人们写信给我说，“我确实找到了工作。我确实获得了晋升。我确实获得了加薪。”那就是我的成就感。
Amazing. Ethan, thank you so much for being here. Thank you, Lenny. And I got to say, you are very good at this. You're so smooth and you just do a great job interviewing. It's been really been a pleasure. I really appreciate that. And so are you. Thank you. Bye everyone.
太棒了。Ethan，非常感谢你能在这里。谢谢你，Lenny。我得说，你真的很擅长这个。你非常流畅，采访得很棒。真的很愉快。我真的很感激。你也是。谢谢。再见大家。
Bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or a leaving review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lenny'spodcast.com. See you in the next episode.
大家再见了。非常感谢你们的收听。如果你觉得有价值，可以在Apple Podcasts、Spotify或者你喜欢的播客应用上订阅节目。另外，请考虑给我们评分或留下评论，这将帮助其他听众找到这个播客节目。你可以在lenny'spodcast.com找到所有往期的节目或了解更多关于节目的信息。下一集节目再见。