Book Club Aha’s — Vol. 8

The FRAKXION Book Club gets together to dig into a book, build on each other’s interpretations, and pull out the aha’s that actually change how we work.

For this round, we spent our time with Colin Bryar and Bill Carr’s Working Backwards — and by the end, our discussion board was covered in sticky notes.

Working Backwards by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr is a practical guidebook and corporate narrative, filled with the authors’ in-the-room recollections of what “Being Amazonian” is like and how it shaped their personal and professional lives. They show that success on Amazon’s scale isn’t achieved by the genius of any single leader, but through commitment to and execution of a set of well-defined, rigorously-executed principles and practices.

– Use technology to analyze behaviour and create a unique, personalized experience for each customer.
– Keep raising the bar — the minimum standard for new hires should rise over time, not stay static.
– Make decisions once you have 70% of the information you’d like to have; a quick correction beats a slow one.
– Be stubborn on the vision, but flexible on the details.
– Empower the right people.
– Work backwards from the perspective of the customer.

We’re exploring a book on validated learning and building under uncertainty.

The Lean Startup by Eric Ries

Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched. Eric Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty — as true for one person in a garage as for a group of seasoned professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom.

Want to read along with us? Join the FRAKXION Book Club anytime — just email hello@frakxion.com and we’ll get you the current pick and details on our next discussion, plus access to our Miro board for reflection along the way.

Harness collective intelligence