Why Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos doesn't like meetings with tight agendas
REUTERS/Rick Wilking
To help Amazon chase big ideas, he makes sure that meetings he goes to aren't overly constrained. He doesn't like regimented discussion topics.
"I like to wander - I like going down blind alleys," he said on stage at Vox Media's Code Conference. "I make sure all of my meetings don't have tight agendas. I don't like tight agendas in my meetings, because tight agendas assume you know where you're going."
Although he concedes that certain types of meetings do warrant strict schedules - like weekly business reviews where a team runs through a slide deck of different metrics - most don't.
"Most meetings should be used for a kind of mild brainstorming," Bezos said. "Wandering is super important, because thinking you know exactly where you're going is a kind of lack of humility that doesn't let you invent."
When Amazon does come up with a new idea - like when it first decided to create a business out of its cloud infrastructure - Bezos says its also important to try different tactics to achieve a certain goal.
He says he wants Amazon to be "stubborn on the vision and flexible on the details."
Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through hispersonal investment company Bezos Expeditions.
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