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Under the leadership of founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, Amazon's culture is guided by many principles.
Some of these corporate creeds are quite well known: Amazon's obsession with customers or its frugality, for example.
But Thursday, Bezos was questioned about one of the oldest principles of the company. the one he called his favorite: that leaders "are often right". Bezos was speaking on stage at the Amazon re: MARS conference in Las Vegas, a gathering devoted to AI, robotics and space technologies. He was interviewed by his employee, Jenny Freshwater, director of forecasts for Amazon.
"Yes, I like a lot the people who are right." Bezos burst out laughing when Freshwater asked him.
But he then admitted that simply proclaiming that good leaders are right "is not very useful, it is an obvious desire." To be always correct, you need other important qualities. And Bezos said that he had detected common trends among this group of people.
"People who are right have a lot to listen to, listen to a lot, and change a lot," he said.
Have the discipline to "deconfirm" your prejudices
Bezos acknowledged that changing a lot of opinions was not always perceived as a quality. In politics, for example, a person who changes a lot of mind is called a "flip-flop", which is considered a negative trait.
But the CEO of Amazon believes that it is useful to change minds.
And while technology companies like Amazon are renowned for their ability to make quantitative decisions with the help of data, Mr Bezos pointed out that it was not just data. In fact, people who are often right often do so without any new information, he said. They simply sleep on what they have heard and sometimes make a new decision.
There are also some simple calculations involved. "The world is so dynamic that if you do not change a lot of ideas, you're very wrong, by definition," Bezos said.
Does this mean that people who are right often feel that they are not worried about anything? To succeed more by chance than by intelligence?
Not the kind of people Bezos is talking about.
He speaks of people who deliberately and voluntarily question their own assumptions. "They work very hard to discipline themselves, they want to overrule their fundamental biases, and this is very abnormal for human beings, and we are very selective in collecting our evidence."
We prefer to look for evidence to confirm the bias. "It's a very human thing to do," he says. But people who are often right can see the beliefs that they "hold firm" and "are actively trying to look for evidence that refutes this idea."
He said: "If you can do that, you will be right more often. "
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