Commonplace Expertise Commoncog

Colin Bryar joined Amazon really early in its life and spent twelve years as part of Amazon's senior leadership team.
For two of those years he was 'Technical Assistant' to Jeff Bezos, as known as 'Jeff's shadow', during which he spent each day attending meetings, traveling with, and discussing business and life with Jeff. After Amazon, he and his family relocated to Singapore for two years where Colin served as Chief Operating Officer of e-commerce company RedMart, which was subsequently sold to Alibaba. Along with his ex-Amazonian colleague Bill Carr, Colin is co-author of Working Backwards, a book on an insider's look at how Amazon works. Bill and Colin are co-founders of Working Backwards LLC, where they coach executives at both large and early-stage companies on how to implement the management practices developed at Amazon.
This podcast is a really deep dive into the practice of the Amazon Weekly Business Review, which remains to this day one of Amazon's secret operating weapons, and a big part of what makes for a great operator.
Working Backwards, book: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/53138083Working Backwards https://www.workingbackwards.com/Commoncog summary of Working Backwards: https://commoncog.com/working-backwards/

(00:00) - Introduction
(01:24) - Colin's Background
(04:00) - Joining Amazon
(06:31) - The Data Situation in Early Amazon
(08:22) - Being Jeff Bezos's Shadow
(10:37) - Living in Singapore
(12:07) - Writing Working Backwards with Bill Carr
(15:17) - The History of the Weekly Business Review
(17:50) - How the Amazon WBR is different
(20:45) - Customer Experience Metrics vs Business Metrics
(22:33) - Controllable Input Metrics vs Output Metrics
(30:39) - What a Typical WBR Looks Like
(34:22) - Why Glancing at Metrics is Important
(35:43) - What kinds of discussions should you have in the WBR?
(37:30) - Understanding Variation
(41:28) - Stories About Figuring Out Controllable Input Metrics
(48:19) - Applying the WBR to internal business functions
(49:49) - Introducing the WBR to a New Company
(55:55) - Applying the WBR to New Products
(01:01:04) - Not Using Surveys as Primary Research on Customers
(01:04:17) - What Makes for a Good Operator?
(01:05:23) - Operating Cadence
(01:07:05) - What Colin Wishes All Operators Knew Tomorrow
(01:07:57) - What You'd Wish You'd Known
(01:09:50) - Would Many of These Lessons Apply to Early Stage Startups?

Eric Nehrlich is an executive coach, and was formerly the chief of staff on the Google Search Ads team. Before becoming chief of staff, Eric was part of the team that got Google's revenue forecasting down from an error rate of 10-20% to an error rate of around 0.5%. We open up with some wild stories of Google's early attempts at revenue forecasting, and then dig into how that forecasting success happened. Along the way, Eric explains how he, his boss, and his team developed a fingertip feel for variation in data.
We then switch gears to talk about Eric's coaching practice. We discuss the differences between mentorship and coaching, and talk about the tricky art of helping leaders grow their impact. Eric has a wealth of knowledge on coming up with small experiments in order to make personal growth easier. We talk about how he comes up with those experiments, and what some of those experiments look like in practice.
Finally, we close with a chat about Eric's upcoming book.
- Eric's Executive Coaching practice: https://www.toomanytrees.com/ - Eric's upcoming book is named You Have a Choice, and you may sign up for updates here: https://www.toomanytrees.com/book - Eric's LinkedIn (where he posts insights every week): https://www.linkedin.com/in/nehrlich - Eric's blog: https://www.nehrlich.com/blog/ - Eric's newsletter: https://www.nehrlich.com/blog/newsletter/ (which I highly recommend) - Full list of coaching and leadership development resources that Eric recommends: https://www.toomanytrees.com/resources - Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman!: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35167685-surely-you-re-joking-mr-feynman - Becoming Data Driven in Business Series: https://commoncog.com/becoming-data-driven-in-business/ - Be Good To Your Mentors: https://commoncog.com/be-good-to-your-mentors/ - Eric Nehrlich — Commitment, Competence, Structure: https://www.nehrlich.com/blog/2017/10/20/why-dont-we-change/ - James Clear — Atomic Habits (on Structure): https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/40121378 - Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey — Immunity to Change: https://www.gse.harvard.edu/hgse100/story/changing-better - Eric Nehrlich's post on Immunity to Change https://www.nehrlich.com/blog/2018/06/18/immunity-to-change-methodology/ - Claire Hughes Johnson — Scaling People: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/63063173-scaling-people - Eric's thoughts on Scaling People: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/nehrlich_google-stripe-leadership-activity-7044441138623127552-jhau - Dan Martell — Buy Back Your Time: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/60880804 - Terrence Real — Us Getting Past You and Me: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58502657-us - Eric's post on Us Getting Past You and Me: https://www.nehrlich.com/blog/2023/02/21/us-getting-past-you-and-me-to-build-a-more-loving-relationship-by-terrence-real/

(00:00) - Introduction
(01:21) - Eric's Background
(09:00) - Google Revenue Forecasting Stories
(13:16) - Driving the Forecasting Error Rate Down
(18:00) - Developing an Intuition for Variation
(29:45) - What a Forecasting Novice Would Get Wrong
(36:46) - What Does an Executive Coach Do?
(45:34) - The Difference Between Mentorship and Coaching
(53:42) - Changing Behaviour: Will, Skill, Structure
(01:02:14) - Changing When Your Identity Holds You Back
(01:05:50) - Coming Up With Small Experiments to Change
(01:08:48) - Getting Organisational Identities to Change
(01:11:55) - More Examples of Change Experiments
(01:15:25) - Books Eric Recommends for Experiments
(01:20:25) - Finding Eric Online
(01:21:10) - Eric's Book

Lesley Sim coached the Singaporean Ultimate Women's World Championship team in 2020. We open with an introduction to the sport of Ultimate (sometimes known as frisbee), her experience coaching the women's team in late 2019, and then move on to her remarkable approach to pedagogical development and skill acceleration in the game of Ultimate.
Along the way, we talk about desirable and undesirable problems in training, playing to play vs playing to win, and how she used a training method originally designed for dolphins and dogs and adapted it to humans — with great success!
Lesley's Twitter — https://twitter.com/lesley_pizzaLesley's Personal Site — https://lesley.pizza/Newsletter Glue — https://newsletterglue.com/Karen Pryor's Book Reading the Animal Mind: Clicker Training and What It Teaches Us About All Animals (on TAG Teach) — https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/2412884How to Get Rich by Felix Dennis — https://www.goodreads.com/el/book/show/1837402.How_to_Get_RichSticky.fm, Lesley's Podcast on Building Sticky Newsletters — https://sticky.fm/

(00:00) - Introduction
(03:25) - The Sport of Ultimate
(10:29) - Defining The Metagame for Ultimate
(15:14) - How Lesley Got Into Ultimate
(17:27) - Different Styles of Play in Ultimate
(20:42) - Coaching Singapore's Women's Worlds Team
(31:01) - Using TAG Teach as a Teaching Tool
(37:31) - Why Positive Reinforcement
(44:16) - Failing Forwards as a Training Philosophy
(56:27) - Desirable and Undersirable Problems
(01:08:37) - Drills and Simulations But Nothing In Between
(01:13:23) - What Makes for a Good Drill?
(01:16:23) - Playing to Play vs Playing to Win
(01:23:07) - On Newsletter Glue

Cedric Chin talks to David MacIver, who pushed the boundaries of property testing, and now helps programmers with soft skills, self improvement, and emotional debugging.

Cedric Chin talks to Lia DiBello, who discovered that all great businesspeople share a common mental model of business.

What to expect on Commonplace Expertise!