Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon - Colin Bryar and Bill Carr
CoLab Book Club - March 2026
March's #CoLabBookClub read took us inside one of the world's most studied companies - and left us with more to chew on than we expected.
Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr is an insider's account of the principles and practices behind Amazon's growth. Written by two former senior executives, it's part memoir, part operational playbook. Some of us came in sceptical of anything Amazon-flavoured - but there's genuine value here if you're willing to take the ideas on their own merits.
Overview
Amazon's success wasn't down to one visionary leader - it was built on repeatable mechanisms that shaped how decisions get made, how teams are structured and how work gets done.
Those mechanisms include 14 Leadership Principles (actively used in hiring, performance and daily decisions) and five core practices: the Bar Raiser hiring process, Single-Threaded Leadership (one leader, one mission, no split focus), the six-page narrative memo (yes, they really banned PowerPoint), the PR/FAQ process for working backwards from the customer, and a relentless focus on input metrics over output metrics. It sometimes reads like an Amazon advert - but the authors are clearly still on the Kool-Aid a decade after leaving, which says something about the culture they were part of.
Our Key Takeaways
✔️ Good intentions don't work, systems do - the real question is what systems are you building to make success more likely?
✔️ Single-Threaded Leadership resonates - dependency hell is real.
✔️ Focus on controllable inputs, not output metrics - with the caveat that metrics can be weaponised, so choose and use them carefully.
✔️ Two-way doors beat sunk cost thinking - be as quick to stop something as you were to start it.
✔️ Narratives over PowerPoint - important decisions deserve deep, structured thinking, not a slick deck.
✔️ Be patient in hiring - resist the urgency bias.
✔️ Frugality as a discipline - doing more with what you have is a useful lens for prioritisation.
Who is it For?
Senior leaders, executives and product managers. Compulsory reading if you're coaching at C-suite level. For the rest of us, there’s more than enough to make it well worth our time.
Thank you!
Thanks to Colin Bryar and Bill Carr for the candid look inside the machine. The core discipline of building systems that make good outcomes more likely is a reminder worth having.
Thanks to this month's #CoLabBookClub crew - Alfred Enslin, Angela Zuba, Daniel Gauld, Elisabeth Stiller, Kat Debney (host!), Paul Salmon, Peter Bink and Toni Wilson. Great kōrero as always!
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