Former Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos recently was a guest on the Lex Fridman podcast. Bezos obviously needs no introduction as fundamentally changing retail and e-commerce with Amazon. In case you’re not familiar with Fridman though, he is currently a research scientist at the MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems. Bezos discussed numerous topics on the podcast with Fridman, including Blue Origin, rockets and space exploration, and the future of human civilization. Buried within the 3-hour long-form interview was the topic of “disagree and commit”, one of Amazon’s core leadership principles Bezos enacted in his tenure as CEO.
What “Disagree and Commit” means according to Jeff Bezos
“Disagree and commit is a really important principle that saves a lot of arguing. There will be disagreements in any endeavor in life where you have teammates. In society, and inside companies, we have a bunch of mechanisms we use to resolve disputes. And a lot of them are really bad. An example of a really bad way of coming to an agreement is compromise.”
Bezos continues, “The advantage of compromise as a resolution mechanism is that it’s low energy, but it doesn’t lead to truth. You shouldn’t allow compromise to be used when you can know the truth.”
“The War of Attrition” between coworkers doesn’t lead to the truth
Bezos also made another valuable point on what he refers to as “the war of attrition” between executives who are in a disagreement.
“Another bad resolution mechanism is the more stubborn person winning. You have two executives who disagree and they just have a war of attrition. And whichever one gets exhausted first, capitulates to the other one. Again you haven’t arrived at truth and it’s very demoralizing.”
According to Bezos, coworkers should never get to the point where they feel they are in a war of attrition loop. Instead, escalate the issue.
“Escalate that. I’ll help you make the decision,” Bezos said. “Exhausting the other person is not truth-seeking. And compromise is not truth-seeking.”
When Truth is Unknown: Disagree and Commit
Sometimes, the path forward and the truth at hand are ambiguous, or unknown. There are countless cases in business or negotiations where no one knows the real truth.
That’s where “disagree and commit” comes in.
“Escalation is better than a war of attrition. Escalate to your boss and say ‘We can’t agree on this. We like each other and respect each other, but we strongly disagree with each other and need you to make a decision so we can move forward.’ Decisiveness and moving forward on decisions as quickly as you responsibly can is how you increase velocity. Most of what slows things down is taking too long to make decisions.”
All too common in business or military organizations, decisions are continually rolled uphill for an executive to make a decision. But at Amazon under Bezos’ tenure, that wasn’t always the case—he would often be the one to disagree and commit.
“I would often say, ‘You know what, I don’t think you’re right. But I’m going to gamble with you and you’re closer to the ground truth than I am. I’ve known you for 20 years—you have great judgment. I don’t know that I’m right either—all of these decisions are complicated. Let’s do it your way.’ But at least then you’ve made a decision, and I’m agreeing to commit to that decision. I’m not going to be second-guessing it. I’m not going to be sniping at it. I’m not going to be saying ‘I told you so.’ I’m going to actively try to make sure it works. That’s a really important teammate behavior.”
The full interview with Bezos on the Lex Fridman Podcast is available anywhere you can stream popular podcasts such as YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.
We’ve linked to the specific segment in the podcast above where Fridman discusses principles and his tenure at Amazon.
If you like what you see, be sure to check out other Fridman podcast interviews. His podcast has had notable guests including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andreessen, and Sam Altman, among many others.
