Lenny Rachitsky: observation

Transcript context

…And they'll be looking. I always remind people, as a leader, I want the best people under me I can have. It's not that I don't wish to promote you. If you think about my job, this helps people, right? I have selfish motivation to promote you. A lot of people think, "The bosses there holding me down." Well, maybe some bosses are, but why wouldn't I want stronger, more capable direct reports? Why wouldn't I want people under me who can do more of my job? Frankly, that's the only way I can do less of my job. Plus this pressure you're always getting from your reports. So like, "Hey, I'm ready to get promoted, because this time"... You mentioned this word inventiveness, and I was just listening to Jeff Bezos on Lex Fridman, and I don't know if you heard this, but Jeff Bezos described himself most as an inventor more than anything else that he does. Is that something that you think about? Is that influenced by Jeff Bezos any way, that idea of being an inventor as a leader? I'll say a couple things about that. First, I know you talked to my old boss, Bill Carr, who wrote Working Backwards. What I don't know is if he shared with you that after he published it, he actually realized there was a better title. He wishes that he had called the book The Invention Machine, because what Jeff was trying to do with Amazon was create the most inventive company, the company that would systematically out-invent others. And so while Working Backwards is a great title, Bill and Jeff think they should have called it the Invention Machine. When I joined Amazon, I did not think of myself as an inventor, but I saw that we had these leadership principles think big and invent and simplify that pushed on that. And I said, "I'm in trouble. I don't know how to do this." And I sat down and thought about that. What am I going to do? It seems like that's required. And I figured out how to become systematically inventive. So I now hold over 70 patents as one benchmark of inventiveness, and they were all created during my 15 years at Amazon. And the way I did that, inventiveness actually isn't that hard. I teach about this. And to invent systematically, first you do need to be somewhat of an expert in whatever area you want to invent. So Lenny, if you and I say let's get together and we're going to invent cancer drugs, we have the problem that neither of us, as far as I know is a biologist, a doctor. We don't have the right background, we don't know what we're doing. So we would just be fumbling around I guess with a bathtub full of chemicals hoping. It's probably not going to work out that well. So you have to be something of a knowledgeable expert. But then the second thing people don't do is they don't spend dedicated time actually thinking. They feel like, "Invention is just going to come to me." When I want to invent, I get away from all my devices. I go in a room with the problem I have, and I force myself to actually concentrate on what do I know and how can I invent? And the most straightforward way to invent is not to somehow come up with something completely new, but instead to put together two things that exist. And so my example of this, I have a patent I talk about a lot for a drone delivery for Amazon, but the drone doesn't fly from the warehouse. Instead, a truck with no top drives slowly around the neighborhood, and the drones go back and forth from the truck. As opposed to the driver stopping at every house, you can have four or six drones hitting everything in the neighborhood. And the way I came up with this idea is one day I was thinking about drones and delivery, but I loved military history. And so I was thinking also about an aircraft carrier and I was thinking, is there a way to have an aircraft carrier for drones? And from that, it was very quick for the light bulb to go on and say, well, what about a truck? And so I have this patent, and we haven't seen this become reality yet.…

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