Jeff Bezos explains the “releasing the work” framework he used to build Amazon
In the early days of Amazon, Jeff Bezos had too many ideas.
Then Jeff Wilke, a new Amazon executive at the time, told his boss, “Jeff, you have enough ideas to destroy Amazon.”
“This was just a shocking idea for me,” Bezos recalls. “As a founder, I had the great luxury of always being able to hire my tutors. I would hire these experienced, senior executives . . . And I would listen to them and they would teach me.”
When Bezos asked Wilke what he meant by this, Wilke responded, “You have to release the work at the right rate so that the organization can accept it.”
Bezos reflects on this point:
“Every time I released an idea, I was creating a backlog of work in process. And because it was just stacking up, it was adding no value. In fact, it was creating distraction . . . This sounds so obvious, but it was not obvious to me at the time. And this was a profound insight for me. So I started prioritizing the ideas better, keeping lists of them, and keeping ideas to myself until the organization was ready for the ideas.”
He continues:
“I also started figuring out how to build an organization that can be ready for more ideas. That’s about having the right senior team and leadership and giving those people the executive bandwidth so they could do more ideas per unit of time. And that is what we built. We built a company that’s very good at inventing and doing more than one thing at a time. And as the company gets bigger, you do want to be able to do more than one thing at a time. But that idea of ‘releasing the work’ was very profound for me. It made us operationally more effective while still being inventive.”
Video source: @Reuters (2025)
You should always keep a list of questions that you obsess about that can’t be answered easily.
This fuels lifelong curiosity and makes life so much more interesting as you keep forming a web of connections around such questions.
My wife just compared all this tech-adjacent extreme longevity focus in men to anorexia in women. A physical manifestation of anxiety and lack of control. And now I can't get the thought out of my head. Spot on.
It’s humbling to realise that there are just a handful of exceptional people breaking new ground, and the rest of us are simply catching up with derivative work—myself included.