Jeff Bezos Says Obsessing With This One Thing Is 'Silly', Here's Why The Amazon Founder Swears By 'Working Backwards' On Impossible Problems

Jeff Bezos once said anyone chasing a big goal should stop obsessing over the scoreboard and instead "work backwards" until they land on daily actions they can control.

What Happened: In a 2014 Business Insider interview, the billionaire advised managers to "focus on the controllable inputs to your business; in the long term, you get better results."

He added: "If someone came to me and said, ‘Jeff, I want your job to be to drive up the Amazon stock price,' I would reject that job … I have no idea how to manage that directly. But I can make picking algorithms more efficient, and that will reduce cost structure."

Bezos laid out a simple chain: higher stock prices flow from stronger free cash flow, which in turn flows from lower costs, which start with "reducing defects at the root." "You keep working backwards until you get to something that's controllable," he said.

Amazon's 2016 shareholder letter delivers the same idea. Bezos wrote that senior managers spend "surprisingly little time discussing actual financial results" and instead pour their energy into delivery speed and customer-satisfaction scores.

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Management experts say the approach tracks the classic operations doctrine of measuring what you can directly influence. Harvard Business Review refers to it as "choosing information for performance measurement and control" when outputs are noisy or delayed.

Why It Matters: Bezos's input-first mantra resurfaced last year when he told a Dallas audience that "loving what you do" is another controllable factor that compounds over decades.

Analysts say the philosophy is one reason Amazon's delivery partners complain the company drills down to driver-level metrics such as stops per route and seat-belt compliance. Two Oregon contractors who quit in 2021 said the system was "arbitrary," but also acknowledged that those inputs determine last-mile costs.

Photo Courtesy: Lev Radin on Shutterstock.com

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