The Village Truth-Teller Gets Clubbed
Bezos: If you go along to get along, you can survive. If you're the village truth-teller, you might get clubbed to death in the middle of the night. Important truths can be uncomfortable, awkward, exhausting, impolite. They can make people defensive even if that's not the intent.
But any high-performing organization — sports team, business, political organization — has to have mechanisms and a culture that supports truth-telling.
If you go along to get along, you survive. If you're the village truth-teller, you might get clubbed.
Speak Last
Bezos: In every meeting I attend, I always speak last. I know from experience that if I speak first, even very strong-willed, highly intelligent participants will wonder — well, if Jeff thinks that, maybe I'm not right.
If you're the most senior person in the room, go last. Let everybody else go first. Ideally, have the most junior person go first and go in order of seniority. So you can hear everyone's opinion in an unfiltered way.
In every meeting I attend, I always speak last. If I speak first, people change their opinions.
Junior Overrules Senior
Bezos: You want to set up your culture so that the most junior person can overrule the most senior person if they have data.
A lot of our most powerful truths turn out to be hunches. Intuition-based. Sometimes you don't have strong data but you know the person well enough to trust their judgment. Something about it feels right. Don't disregard it — say let's go collect some data on that.
Set up your culture so the most junior person can overrule the most senior — if they have data.
Fight the Optimism Bias
Bezos: There's an optimism bias. If there are two interpretations of new data and one is happy and one is unhappy, it's dangerous to jump to the happy conclusion. You may want to compensate and say — I'm going to go with 'it's bad' for now until we're sure.
If two interpretations — one happy, one unhappy — go with unhappy until you're sure.