Think Like Amazon
Learn how to apply Amazon’s core principles and innovation frameworks to elevate your business and career. Join Jorge Luis Pando, an 8-year Amazon veteran who’s helped over 70,000 Amazonians boost productivity, as he dives into real-world insights from leaders who’ve transformed their work using Amazon-inspired methods like customer obsession and systems thinking. With global experience in product, tech, and marketing, Jorge brings a fresh perspective to every conversation.
Whether you lead a startup, growing business, or team outside of tech, each episode delivers practical tools to innovate, scale, and lead with confidence. Follow us on LinkedIn for updates: https://www.linkedin.com/company/think-like-amazon-podcast/
Think Like Amazon
Have Backbone; Disagree & Commit with John Olsen
John Olsen spent 7 years at Amazon as VP of Kindle Human Resources and VP of HR for Worldwide Operations. During these years of rapid global expansion for Amazon, John had to rely on proven principles and models to help ensure teams were making strong decisions, avoiding bias, and committed behind key goals. Since leaving Amazon in 2019, John has helped companies and boards learn to have backbone, disagree and commit in his roles as an advisor and investor.
During our conversation, John shares how the Have Backbone, Disagree and Commit principle integrates with the other Amazon leadership principles, mental models for how to determine when a decision needs to be debated further, how to foster healthy disagreement with remote teams, and much more.
Follow John:
On LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-olsen-808650/
More from the episode:
3:40 – Why you can’t just disagree and commit without having backbone
6:25 – How to recognize when it’s time to move a team forward with a decision
7:49 – 6-page memos as a tool to facilitate having backbone
9:40 – How to create a culture where it’s safe to respectfully disagree with other leaders
14:00 – Decision or document bar raisers
23:00 – How to encourage disagreement and speaking up with remote teams
26:30 – When to commit and when to continue to disagree
31:00 – Applying the leadership principle in advisor and governance work