The 25th Edition - On Elon Musk, Amazon bar raisers & shame

Did you know that in 2021, Netflix still made a humble $182 million in revenue from their US DVD-by-mail service? (It has declined -24% YoY though). Who would have thought?

Hello,

1 article

CXBR: The Other Amazon Bar Raiser - by @ibscribe

There is another bar raiser program at Amazon that is rarely talked about, which comes into play once you’re an employee: the Customer Experience Bar Raiser (CXBR).

runthebusiness.substack.com

Ibrahim is a VP Product Management at Amplitude, but in his writing, he focuses on all the wild things he’d been through at Amazon.

A great short story that digs into this 1 practice at Amazon that would be impossible at many other tech companies.

1 video

[Exclusive] Elon Musk: A future worth getting excited about | TED | Tesla Gigafactory interview

The most recent hour-long Elon Musk interview from TED where he talks about the specific challenges with the self-driving AI (~ 12 mins), driving people to be ambitious (~ 18 mins) and much more.

I used to think those videos were empty ego-stroking vanity projects, but sometimes these can be insightful, no matter what you think of the person. This is such a video.

2 quotes

• “By bringing shame to a person, how could one expect to make him a better man?” - Yamamoto Tsunetomo

• “If all you offer is money, all you get are mercenaries.” - Frederik Gieschen

3 thoughts

• TOC & Bottlenecks: What is your biggest bottleneck in life right now? How can you apply the Theory Of Constraints in it? You can use the 5 focusing steps (Identify, Optimise, Subordinate, Elevate the constraint > Do it again). To Identify, your first step is to make work-in-progress visible.

• 80/20 Principle: If you have a list of 10 tasks to complete in the day, two of those tasks will be worth more than the other eight. The corollary idea is that whatever you’re doing right now, odds are high that it’s not the MOST IMPORTANT thing (ok, apart from reading this newsletter).

• Meaningful Weekends: Follow the peak-end rule for weekends and make sure that you’re got something fun or meaningful scheduled for a Sunday night (Saturday nights usually take care of themselves).

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