I'm super grateful for this journey 🙏🏾.
I don't have the most money, I don't have big records, I don't have a huge home, nice cars, none of the stuff I thought I'd have at this age.
But I do have a community that loves me. I am valued and appreciated at home. I'm richer than a lot of rich people I know. I have something money can't buy 🙏🏾.
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)
“Either you go to the moon [and return the investment] or you don’t and you go away.”
Stem’s CEO explains, in plain yet blunt terms, how most labels view artist signings.
Here’s the finalists for Best Album of the 21st Century heading into tomorrow’s finale of Last Song Standing:
To Pimp A Butterfly
Lemonade
Madvillainy
Blonde
Discovery
Twisted Fantasy
MMLP
A Seat At The Table
Which one should win it all?