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The baby whale was swimming right beside me, so full of energy, speeding ahead, circling back, and bounding through the water with great exuberance. He turned and swam right under me, so close I could almost reach out and touch him. He seemed happy. He seemed to be playing and full of energy, but how long could that last? When had he last eaten? How long would his body fat sustain him? How often did he need to drink so he didn’t get dehydrated? What would we do if we couldn’t find his mother? I didn’t have any answers. But as long as we tried, as long as we kept looking, there was a chance we could find her. Sometimes it’s the process of doing that makes things clear. If we don’t start, we never know what could have been. Sometimes the answers we find while searching are better or more creative than anything we could ever have imagined before.
Every rehearsal began with a “noise jam,” which became a sort of improvisational exercise in dynamics, ultimately honing our collective instinct and making it so that song structure didn’t necessarily need to be verbally arranged; it would just happen, almost the way a flock of blackbirds gracefully ebbs and flows in a hypnotic wave over a country field in the winter. This method was instrumental in the quiet/loud dynamic that we became known for, though we hardly invented it. That credit was due to our heroes the Pixies, who were hugely influential to us. We had adopted their simple trademark in more than a few of our new songs: tight, simple verses that explode into giant, screaming choruses. A sonic juxtaposition with ferocious results, most notably “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”
The Storyteller
Dave Grohl
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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