Lessons from Leaders at Amazon and Facebook Companies like Amazon and Facebook, which began as startups and have profited from an agile culture, provide lessons about empowering teams to do their best work. Leaders at these organizations are doing more than removing obstacles in the way of teams trying to do great work. They are leading by example. To maintain Amazon’s startup culture, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos 18 promotes ‘high quality and high velocity decisions.’ This includes recognizing and correcting poor choices quickly, and adopting a strategy he calls ‘disagree and commit’: supporting a team’s decision if the members believe in the choice even if he doesn’t. For example, Bezos approved an Amazon Studios production even though he had doubts about it. “Consider how much slower this decision cycle would have been if the team had actually had to convince me rather than simply get my commitment,” he writes. These decisions go in more than one direction. Amazon Studios is not afraid to fail fast by canceling new shows. It canceled ‘The Last Tycoon’ two weeks after 19 releasing a season’s worth of episodes. This approach embodies agile thinking. To avoid complacency, Bezos remains obsessed with keeping his company thinking that it’s always ‘Day 1’ of business. Facebook’s flat organizational structure and acceptance of failure to improve is another example of the lean-agile mindset. “You have to embrace organizational failure,” COO Sheryl Sandberg says. This goes hand in hand with making sure top executives are not driving every decision; everyone feels their input is welcomed 20 and encouraged. 18 Amazon, 2016 Letter to Shareholders, April 12, 2017, accessed March 13, 2018, https://www.amazon.com/p/ feature/z6o9g6sysxur57t 19 Variety, The Last Tycoon Canceled at Amazon, September 9, 2017, accessed March 13, 2018, http://variety. com/2017/tv/news/the-last-tycoon-canceled-amazon-1202552964/ 20 Entrepreneur, Sheryl Sandberg Shares 7 Ways to Build Resilience into your Company Culture as you Scale, June 1, 2017, accessed March 13, 2018, https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/294948