Author

Chris Dunlop

Click here to view the book on Amazon

You should buy this book.

I don't actually say that often.

But hear me out.

I've read 50 books this year. There have been some amazing books, like 7 Powers and The Trillion Dollar Coach. But this book is the best book I've read all year. It's called Working Backwards and it's by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr.

Review of the book

If you have followed the ThinkTank, you will have seen an obsession over the last month with Amazon. For the last four weeks, I have been focusing solely on them – reading the books, articles, creating resources, and writing about their frameworks.

All of the Amazon posts are, in fact, the most popular thing on the ThinkTank.

This book is written by two ex-Amazon executives. They were there for 12 years and were present during the time when Amazon was growing from a small company to the behemoth it is today.

It covers all of the frameworks that Amazon uses.

Key things covered

As you will see, all of the concepts below are articles that we have previously published on the ThinkTank. This book is a goldmine of information and consolidates all of that thinking into one place.

• The 14 Leadership Principles
• No PowerPoint rule
• Amazon Day One
• The way Jeff Bezos Reads
• The Press Release Technique
• Single Threaded Leadership
• Two Door Thinking
• Failures
• The Bar Raiser Process

Stories that it covers

I love this book's format, as once it has finished with the frameworks and thinking patterns, it then shows them in action. It covers the story of the Kindle and AWS, and many others within Amazon.

The key things that stood out

• the constant obsession with the customer and focusing on that as the first thing in all conversations.
• the way that they don't enter markets or offerings unless they clearly understand the value chain and how they are going to win.
• their bar raiser hiring process. I enjoyed that so much that I wrote a 10-page resource on it with step-by-step guides.

Should you buy it?

No question

5 stars

*****

Huge thanks to Anna Scott, the CEO of Smartshares, for gifting this book to me!

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