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An exploration zone is important for visitors. This is how we protect insiders while giving outsiders a chance to participate, to learn more about our community, and to decide whether it’s right for them. We can encourage explorers by sharing some specified activities and areas, but not all. These are outer ring activities. Areas reserved for insiders (whether formal or informal) are inner ring. The vast majority of activities can be outer ring. The larger the outer ring, the more outsiders can evaluate a community before seeking membership. It’s important to have an inner ring, too, as this gives shared-values explorers something to aspire to and provides that important safe space for your members.
The Art of Community
Charles Vogl
You might think that religious organizations and other social groups that are more relaxed, with fewer rules and strictures, would attract a larger group of followers. Not so. “Stricter churches” achieve a larger following and are generally more successful than freewheeling ones because they ferret out free riders and offer more robust club goods.
Dopamine Nation
Anna Lembke
But Jeff felt that if we tried to manage digital media as a part of the physical media business, it would never be a priority. The bigger business carried the company after all, and it would always get the most attention. Steve told me that getting digital right was highly important to Jeff, and he wanted Steve to focus on nothing else. Steve wanted me to join him and help him create the new business. This change would be one of the first major examples of the single-threaded leader org structure concept at Amazon. Before Steve moved over to head Digital, the most senior leader of the digital media business was a product manager, four levels below Steve. There was no way that someone at that level could lead and develop the kinds of new products and initiatives that we would launch in the coming years. For this to become one of Amazon’s biggest and most important businesses, Jeff needed Steve, an experienced and proven vice president (now promoted to senior vice president), reporting to Jeff, single-threaded on digital. Steve would in turn need to build a team of senior leaders under him, each of whom would be single-threaded on one aspect of the business, such as device hardware, e-books, music, or video. Eventually, I appreciated the importance of organizing this way. If we had tried to figure out how to deliver digital media while also managing our online physical-media business, we could not have moved quickly enough. We would not have thought big enough about how to reinvent the customer experience as we did when we built our own e-reader device and service. The customer experience would undoubtedly have been a subpar mishmash of the physical and digital business approaches. We had to start from scratch. And this sudden job change, the one I’d been so disappointed by, would prove to be not only the right thing for the company but also one of the best things to ever happen for my career.
Working Backwards
Colin Bryar and Bill Carr
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