Deliver results

Amazon has a leadership principle called “deliver results.” But what’s inside it, isn’t really about delivering, but rather “how to deliver.”

The full principle reads:

“Leaders focus on the key inputs for their business and deliver them with the right quality and in a timely fashion. Despite setbacks, they rise to the occasion and never settle.”

That sounds straightforward, but putting it into practice isn’t in my experience.

I’ve ran my weekly newsletter “Three Data Point Thursday” for two years, before I decided to put out a daily shorter edition, too.

Do you know why? While I can’t control the output of this process, the success of my weekly newsletter, I can increase the number of ideas I have and, thereby, the number of good ideas I have I want to write about in my weekly newsletter.

I cannot simply “increase the quality” of my writing, but I can increase the frequency of my outputs to then find the best ideas to put into my weekly newsletter.

The hard part of delivering results isn’t delivering, it’s figuring out what the key inputs are, and figuring out how to deliver them in the right quality.