Bertrand Duperrin's Library tagged amazon → View Popular, Search in Google

May

2011

Give pods a chance

"Pods – also known as self-directed work teams – have been around for more than 20 years. Pods are 30% to 50% more effective than their traditional counterparts. A survey of senior line managers offers some of the benefits derived from implementing self-directed teams:

Improved quality, productivity and service.
Greater flexibility.
Reduced operating costs.
Faster response to technological change.
Fewer, simpler job classifications.
Better response to workers’ values.
Increased employee commitment to the organization.
Ability to attract and retain the best people."

www.dachisgroup.com/...give-pods-a-chance

- Preview

pod innovation podularity reward complexity interdependance modularity casestudies 3M amazon

Modular components are a critical element of a connected company. But to take advantage of pods you also need a business that is designed to support them.
Perhaps one of the reasons more companies haven’t organized around small, empowered teams is that their business architectures don’t allow it. It’s not easy to plug modules into a platform that isn’t designed for it.
10 more annotation(s)...
- Xerox, Procter and Gamble, AT& T and many other companies have credited self-directed teams with marked impact on their operations, including improvements in customer service, manufacturing, inventory management, and other productivity gain
- 3M has roughly 100 autonomous profit centers, each of which operates like a separate company. As operations grow, profit centers divide in order to keep each group small and agile
- In the 1990’s 3M implemented “self-directed work teams” in their manufacturing operations. The teams do their work as a team and manage themselves. Managers in this system were freed up to become coaches and teachers – essentially full-time trainers. Self-directed teams were not a top-down directive at 3M.
- Bezos does have an answer though: Break big problems down into small ones. Distribute authority, design, creativity and decision-making to the smallest possible units, and set them free to innovate. Small teams focus on small, measurable components that customers value
- Teams are limited in size to about 8-10 people. At Amazon they call them 2-pizza teams: If you can’t feed a team with two pizzas, it’s too large.
- Self-managed teams must not only have authority, they must be accountable for the results they deliver. The results the team is responsible for should be clear and measurable. There is some debate over whether self-directed teams should be compensated on a pay-for-performance basis.
- So I believe successful teams should be rewarded in other ways: by being recognized by their peers, or allocating more of the resources that make them successful, like better equipment, more people, support, and so on.
- This is where culture is critical. The culture of the company should be clear about expected behaviors like resolving disagreements, dealing with underperformers and so on
- Technical standards help to reduce friction, but they are secondary to culture. Focus on culture first, and teams will start to demand the technical infrastructure they need to perform.
- What you want is a part of the company that can be treated as a “black box.” If you can clarify the inputs and outputs you expect from a group or department, and what is inside the black box has limited interdependencies with other units, you have a sandbox where you can experiment with pods.

Aug

2009

Tips on Innovation & Entrepreneurship From Jeff Bezos

Listening to Jeff Bezos, founder and chief executive officer of Amazon, is like going to startup school where you learn that failure is part of entrepreneurial growth. Whenever I have talked to Bezos in the past, the things that have stuck in my head have been his willingness to be wrong and his unflinching abhorrence of the status quo. At the Wired Business Conference in New York City, Bezos reiterated some of those points in a conversation with writer Steven Levy.

gigaom.com/...terprenuership-from-jeff-bezos

- Preview

innovation amazon jeffbzos customers failure

“You need a culture that high-fives small and innovative ideas and senior executives [that] encourage ideas,” he said. In order for innovative ideas to bear fruit, companies need to be willing to “wait for 5-7 years, and most companies don’t take that time horizon.”
His tip on managing during tough times such as those faced by Amazon during the bust was to communicate more with its employees
2 more annotation(s)...
- Bezos listed a few prerequisites for innovation and inventing, but the biggest one is willingness to fail. You need to think for the long term and be misunderstood for a long period of time. “If you can’t do those things, then you need to limit yourself to sustainable innovation.” In other words, seek incremental change to grow your business.
- People overemphasize their failures when trying something new. Actually failure is not that expensive and it’s part of work

Jan

2009

Eli Lilly On What's Next In Cloud Computing - Plug Into The Cloud - InformationWeek

Eli Lilly uses Amazon Web Services and other cloud services to provide high-performance computing, as needed, to hundreds of its scientists. With AWS, Powers said, a new server can be up and running in three minutes (it used to take Eli Lilly seven and a half weeks to deploy a server internally) and a 64-node Linux cluster can be online in five minutes (compared with three months internally). "The deployment time is really what impressed us," Powers said. "It's just shy of instantaneous."

www.informationweek.com/...whats_next_in_t.html

- Preview

Elililly cloudcomputing amazon AWS IT