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One way to reduce the influence of the ideological extremes is to change the way we elect our members of Congress. In 2006, only about 45 of 435 House races were seriously contested. Since members in so-called safe districts do not have to worry about challenges from the opposite party, their biggest vulnerability is getting outflanked in their own party. This is especially true in the era of bloggers, who make national targets out of politicians they deem ideologically impure. The result is that members of Congress from both parties tend to drift toward the extremes as insurance against primary challengers. Our government would be more productive—and our politics more civilized—if congressional districts were drawn by panels of nonpartisan elders instead of partisan state legislatures. This would make for more competitive general elections and a less polarized Congress. Making the change would require politicians to give up some of their power, never an easy task. But for future presidents looking to tackle a big problem, this would be a worthy one to take on.
Decision Points
George W. Bush
Most people tend to think of interruptions as originating from another person or from our devices, such as through a notification. But in our studies of people in their natural work environments, we observed a strange and regular phenomenon which typically looked like this: a person would be working on a task on their computer. Then, for no apparent reason to the observer, this person suddenly stopped what they were doing and checked their email or picked up their phone. There was no discernible stimulus that caused the person to interrupt themselves—there was rather some internal trigger, perhaps a thought, a memory, or habit. These interruptions originate from within ourselves. One of the most surprising results in our research is that we find that people are nearly as likely to self-interrupt due to something internal in them as to be interrupted by something external to them.10 We may not even be aware of how often we self-interrupt.
Attention Span
Gloria Mark
But it was clear that more and more companies would develop or acquire these capabilities, and they eventually would become an undifferentiated commodity. That is exactly what happened. Today, building the capability to store and retrieve millions of photos could well be a homework assignment for a college student taking a computer science class. In several of the Working Backwards documents for the early AWS products, the PR/FAQ stated that we wanted the student in a dorm room to have access to the same world-class computing infrastructure as any Amazon software engineer. That powerful metaphor in the PR/FAQ document really helped crystallize the thoughts and ideas of the AWS product development teams. There were a number of factors that influenced Amazon’s decision to start the foray into web services that would ultimately become AWS. We had several proofs of concept in the Amazon Product API and the Amazon Seller API demonstrating that the area was worthy of attention. It was simply a better way to build software than the traditional methods used at that time. There was a relatively clear roadmap on what was needed since the software building blocks were known, but hadn’t yet been offered as web services. We also knew our unique capabilities would not be unique for very long, which provided a sense of urgency. (The first company to offer a robust set of general-purpose web services wouldn’t be guaranteed to win in the long run, but the head start sure would help.) That sense of urgency is codified in Amazon’s Bias for Action leadership principle. It states, “Speed matters in business. Many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study. We value calculated risk-taking.”
Working Backwards
Colin Bryar and Bill Carr
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