We've had our hands on the CBInsights summary of the Jeff Bezos Shareholder Letter the past few days. The following takeaways caught our eye and we at @55BirchStreet are working on them intensively:
- With an owner's mindset you always act in the best interest of your clients and your team.
- Top-down teams are effective at optimizing existing processes and getting work done, however only decentralized, bottom-up teams can continuously generate new ideas.
Command-and-control management as it is still common in many companies does not work for us. In our fast-changing world, we need teams and employees who think and act independently. Making all decisions at the top is inefficient to us and we simply cannot and don’t want to do that. Why not?
- We believe that skills and diversity are more important for good decisions than hierarchical levels and company affiliation in years.
- Real affiliation and participation come from taking responsibility.
- Who says that superiors know better? "If your boss says no, ask the boss of your boss".
The fact that we are aware of this does not mean that we always implement it this way. Therefore, we constantly question how decisions are made and try to overwrite our old patterns. Therefore, we have given ourselves the following BirchRules, which apply to all Birchies:
- Be brave and make decisions!
- Better to make them and ask for forgiveness later than to do nothing.
- Learn to differentiate between essential and common decisions. For the former, take your time and decide carefully - there is no way back. All other decisions, however, make them thoughtfully and quickly; they are not irreversible.
- Make decisions at work as if you had to make them for yourself privately.
