Jeff Wilke (former CEO, Amazon's Worldwide Consumer Business) sheds light on a counter-intuitive driver behind unusual success: Focus on the inputs, not the outputs. Jeff shares the 3 drivers underlying the rise of Amazon, Prime, Alexa, and AWS, including: 1. "Mechanisms": Amazon's definition, two failure modes, and why they're harder to implement than it first appears 2. A Single-Page Culture: How Amazon's set of principles proved to be an inoculation against a drifting culture 3. Single-Threaded Invention In practice, operational excellence is the key driver to executing consistently for the long term. It is the secret for harnessing creativity that compounds value over time.
James Currier:
You're a member of this S-team at Amazon, can you tell us what the S-team was, and then maybe give us a sense of some of the main things that you learned being part of that, and some of the mental models that you were using to achieve this level of excellence?
Jeff Wilke:
Well, the S-team is just the senior team. It started out as the direct reports to Jeff. So the longest-serving members of the S-team when I departed in February were me and Jeff because I was basically hired as a direct report.
Jeff Wilke:
I worked for Joe for that year, and then the president layer was gone. And it was what you would imagine it to have been in the early days; it was the operating committee or team that ran the company. So head of tech, head of HR, head of legal, head of Ops, head of retail.
Jeff Wilke:
And when you go into the mid-2000s, and we start to invest heavily in AWS, and in the devices business, my team led by Bill Carr built Prime Video, and then I asked Jeff Blackburn to take it over because we got to a place where most of the work was identifying scripts that were going to be winners. And I just knew that wasn't going to be me.
Jeff Wilke:
And I thought Jeff would be a terrific author, and he was. He and the team built that business amazingly. But when we got to a more diversified set of businesses, the role of the S-team started to change. It was less about operating the individual businesses and more about deciding on the mechanisms, and we have, I'll get to in a second, we have a very specific definition of mechanisms.
Jeff Wilke:
But it was about what should we be doing together to make sure that this culture thrives, that we stay day one versus day two, meaning that it feels like a startup, even if it's big, and that we continue to attract and retain the very best people in the world.
Jeff Wilke:
And we did things together like build the leadership principles. I was really adamant that we should have a single set of principles that define what it means to be a leader at Amazon. And we're all leaders. We talked about should they be only for people that have direct reports, or should they be for every Amazonian? And we decided they really should be for every employee of the company.
Jeff Wilke:
And they start with customer obsession, and it ends with deliver results. They're public, so anybody can take a look at them. But the S-team was the steward of the leadership principles, maybe first and foremost. It ran a couple of mechanisms.
James Currier:
Who wrote them? Did you write them back in 99 or did you wait until 2002 when you were firmly in Scottsdale or when did those-
Jeff Wilke:
2002 we started, there was a team led by a woman named Robin Mensinger, who was in HR, and later Mike George, who was an HR leader too, worked with me and Rick Dalzell who was our CTO. Mostly because I think we were sort of the most passionate members of the S-team about this.
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Rick was a West Point grad and understood leadership in a way that few people do. And we saw eye to eye on a lot of things that were leadership-related.
James Currier:
Wait, so but he was from West Point, and you are from Tigers and so there was a lot-
Jeff Wilke: Right.
James Currier: ... just kidding.
Jeff Wilke:
Right. It was perfect. Right, and we both played 150s football. So we were on opposite sides of the line a few years apart. But we thought it was important to codify what made this place special, and Jeff, there's a lot of Jeff in the language.
Jeff Wilke:
The first draft, clearly it wasn't good enough, and I think Jeff was right to push back on a bunch of things. And through that iteration, we ended up with a set of principles that were pretty enduring. We made maybe two or three other changes in the 18-year life, including adding learn and be curious, a few years ago. But they really did stand the test of time, and they proved to be an inoculation against a drifting culture.
James Currier:
Yeah. So a lot of companies do this, right? And I know with all of our companies, we actually run them through a program to actually develop these things. Very few of them make the impact that yours did. Is there something about what you said, or about who you were, about how you said it that really allowed it to come to life?
Jeff Wilke:
Well, I think one of the things we did right was we use the words in the leadership principles everywhere. I mean, we use them when we communicate to each other; we use them when we write documents. And Amazon is a writing culture, that meetings start in silence as you read the document. We don't use PowerPoint. And I'm saying we all the time, by the way, that's going to be a hard habit to kick.
James Currier: Yeah, that's okay.
Jeff Wilke: Forgive me.
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This transcript was exported on Apr 05, 2021 - view latest version here. James Currier:
We understand.
Jeff Wilke:
But these words were pervasive. They inform how you give feedback to people; they inform how you set your goals and how you measure against those goals. They inform how we talk to the investment community and customers.
Jeff Wilke:
And one of the things that, the little tricks that I was lucky enough to keep persistently in our focus was not letting the words get diluted with more explanation. So what I mean by that is the leadership team will often craft a single page of principles and values. And if they've done their work well, you could argue that those words are the only words that a new person needs to understand the culture.
Jeff Wilke:
And if you need more words than that, in other words, if you end up having the urge to create Wiki pages to define and further elaborate on each of the principles, you may not have written them crisply enough to start with.
Jeff Wilke:
So I made it my mission over the years to seek out diluted, and I would argue much less effective explanations of very crisp principles and try to remove them from the corpus. So that when you're forced to teach somebody the leadership principles, you're forced to go to the primary document, have the person read it, and think deeply about it.
Jeff Wilke:
And then ask them what do these mean to you, and how do you think you'd employ them in your work? And it produces very different results than I would argue less well-written prose that's too pervasive and too copious.
James Currier:
Too many committee, too many hands on it, too many compromises.
Jeff Wilke: Yep.
James Currier:
And so I'm actually hearing that you would go around and move language around in documents. You would talk to people about their language.
Jeff Wilke: Yeah, for sure.
James Currier:
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And you were the enforcer, and other people on the senior team were enforcers of this, they agreed with you that we needed to enforce a way of speaking and a way of communicating because that ultimately produces a result.
Jeff Wilke:
Yeah. And human cultures and businesses create cultures, the oral tradition matters a lot. Spoken word is very powerful. And I think we sometimes fool ourselves into thinking that the artifacts that we create that are in PowerPoint or in prose or in binders sitting on a shelf really define the models people have of the company and the way people interact.
Jeff Wilke:
And my experience has been a little different. I think that there's the way you wish it was, and then there's the way it is. And if you can make those to be as close to each other as possible, you're going to succeed.
James Currier:
But it does take [crosstalk 00:15:58].
Jeff Wilke: Effort.
James Currier:
And effort, all the time, over years.
Jeff Wilke:
For sure, constantly.
James Currier: Constantly.
Jeff Wilke:
Constantly. Yeah, it was one of the most important jobs that I and others had, I think, was-
James Currier:
And I got to dig into this because as new people come into the company and they move up into position of leadership, they want to put their own stamp on things. And yet, you're saying no, don't move that over there; it's right here. We need to keep it right here, I can't let you do that. Was that disappointing to people?
Jeff Wilke:
Well, we have a little phrase that we would put in parentheses around things that were slow-changing like this. And it says, 'unless you know better.' So these are our leadership principles unless you know better ones. And from time to time, people would propose better ones.
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But it's not enough to just say, well, these are better because we're going to ask why. Why are they better? And how can you demonstrate that they're better for us in this environment? And we did revise those principles two or three times over 18 years.
Jeff Wilke:
And it was after some really careful thoughtful pushing by people that thought we were missing certain things. But I think one of the problems that firms have is that when you bring something in from the outside, you can bring the process and the understanding and the science and the data, and you can also bring a bunch of stuff that's a little less crisp. And I'd argue try to separate the two. Get to the real root of insight and leverage and process, and discard the stuff that's sort of window dressing.
James Currier:
Maybe the cultural stuff or the assumptions.
Jeff Wilke:
The cultural stuff's important, but cultural, the way humans describe culture is a very complicated mixture of precision and imprecision in my experience. And it's the imprecision that leads to a less effective culture, I think.
Jeff Wilke:
That doesn't mean to say that the leadership principles need to be prescriptive. I just mean that the words that you choose need to be carefully considered and very precise.
James Currier:
Right. I remember one of the words that stood out to me from the leadership principles says, this is one of the things that makes Amazon peculiar. That word peculiar is not a common word. Around NFX we say, if you're not weird, you're weird.
James Currier:
And it seems like you guys were leaning into this peculiarity, and you're not leaning into difference, you're leaning into peculiarity, and there might be synonyms in the source, but the choice of the word peculiar was peculiar.
Jeff Wilke:
Yeah, it really is celebrating diversity of thought. And one of my favorite clauses in the leadership principles says, leaders don't believe their body odor smells of perfume, and you can imagine some cruder ways to say this, but I like that clause because it's a reminder that we were sort of a young startup. Like, I don't see a stodgy day two company saying we don't believe our whatever doesn't stink.
James Currier:
That's right. And at the time, you're like 32-33 when you're joining, and Jeff Bezos is 34-35, somewhere in there, so you guys were doing it. Do you think that startup founders or great leaders have to be peculiar in some way?
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This transcript was exported on Apr 05, 2021 - view latest version here. Jeff Wilke:
I don't think they have to be, but, well, look, I think all humans are unique in some way. And so if that's what peculiar means, then I think everybody has it. And as we go back to my mentor, Andre Tramper, said to me, don't hide all of your peculiarities. You will make more authentic connections with people if you have the courage to reveal you.
James Currier:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). It's really good. Hey, you made a comment about mechanisms, and you said you'd come back to. What are the mechanisms you were thinking of?
Jeff Wilke:
Well, it's a more precise definition of people use mechanisms as substitutes for process all the time or as a synonym. And we tended to think a little bit more about it. At Amazon, a mechanism is a tool or a process where you achieve adoption, so you actually do the work to make sure that people understand the tool or process.
Jeff Wilke:
And then, most importantly, you periodically inspect to make sure that the tool or process is being used as intended or can't be improved. And then if you find that it can be improved, then you improve it, you get adoption for the new version, and so on.
Jeff Wilke:
And this, it seems simple. But what I find over the course of decades is that most tools or processes that companies implement eventually go off the rails with a couple of failure modes. Then the funny ones are, you go back to something 10 years later, and people are still doing it even though the reason to do it is long gone.
Jeff Wilke:
What may be worse, or maybe just a different failure mode, is you go back and there's a real need for the process, but it has mutated into something that adds no real value, but yet, again, people are doing it very diligently. And you can't blame the people whose job it is to do the process. You actually have to inspect the process and ask, is this optimal? Is it working? Is the data still as accurate as I thought it was?
Jeff Wilke:
One of the things we would always say is uninspected data is always wrong. And this obsession with inspecting process really led to some of the operational excellence that was vital for things like Prime.
James Currier:
Got it. So talk to me about Prime, and you guys kept inventing even though you were getting bigger and bigger. When you got there, how many people were there?
Jeff Wilke:
When I got to Amazon, there were roughly 1000.
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This transcript was exported on Apr 05, 2021 - view latest version here. James Currier:
And now how many are there?
Jeff Wilke: Over a million.
James Currier:
Yeah. So, while you're growing, while you're getting all this girth, which normally syncs all processes and all modes of thinking, frankly, you guys are inventing AWS, you're inventing Alexa, you're inventing Prime. And you were involved with all of those things. Unbelievable track record, man. Unbelievable. So how do you invent when you've also got all these people and all these systems and process in place?
Jeff Wilke:
I mean, there are a bunch of tricks, none of which are overly complicated, but the hard part is to stay focused on them over the course of years. It's one thing to implement something new, but I've met too many CEOs who they read a book, they listen to a podcast, they have an idea, it's great, they implement it, and then they're off to the new thing. And they don't really come back in a couple years and ask the question, is that insight we had a few years ago still adding value in the way that it was?
Jeff Wilke:
That's a hard thing to do when you get your energy from creativity, but it's essential for creativity to actually compound value over time; otherwise, you just end up with a pile of what was once creative that is now just weight.
Jeff Wilke:
And so the things that that allowed us, I think, to scale without that weight included careful organization. So the idea that as often as possible, when you put someone in charge, you make them single-threaded. So when Jeff wanted to start AWS, he made Andy Jassy single-threaded. Andy didn't work at anything else other than the business plan for AWS.
Jeff Wilke:
And when we started Devices, Steve Kessel, who was running the books business at the time, moved over and took over with no other responsibilities, this nascent business. Went from running the largest business to running, having an assistant, and nothing else.
Jeff Wilke:
And so that's first thing, is single-threaded leadership. Second, I would argue that, and this is easier now with cloud services, but at the time, being disciplined about software architecture was vital because you can slow down and end up with organization following a bad architecture if you're not careful, or worse, the architecture then following a bad organization.
Jeff Wilke:
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And we had a lot of work to do to create a service-oriented architecture out of a more traditional legacy architecture, that may have been actually the hardest management problem in those middle years. We measured everything, and we focused on the inputs, not the outputs.
Jeff Wilke:
So teams rarely worried about quarterly revenue. This is a classic example. When I took over the retail teams, I printed out the inventory over time, and I noticed that we had a trough every March 30th or 31st, June 30th, September 30th, and December 31st; that's when our inventory was lowest.
Jeff Wilke:
Well, why would it be at the end of every quarter? Why is that the optimal time for low inventory? And then I looked at sales, and it turned out, we were seeing small, but perceptible sales dips, in the first couple of weeks of every quarter, and actually the last week of every quarter.
Jeff Wilke:
And I'm like, well, clearly what's happening is humans are worried about a target for inventory returns, and they're slowing down buying so that they can hit the inventory. And then they ramp it back up once the quarter starts again. And if you see that kind of a metric, and it's got a period of a quarter in business, something's wrong.
James Currier:
Right. Because it should be based on what the consumers are doing, not based on what your internal team is doing.
Jeff Wilke:
The math should optimize how much inventory you have. So I said, we're not going to do this anymore. We're going to find out what the optimal is from the math, and then we're going to leave it there. I told the investment community we're going to do that; they thought it was nuts.
Jeff Wilke:
They were like, "Well, then you're not going to have discipline." I said, "No, no, we're going to have discipline, but we're going to have discipline 365 days a year, not four days a year." And it turned out, sales went up, inventory turns went up, but it took a year or so, and we had to have the courage to do that.
Jeff Wilke:
So I got onto that by talking about focusing on inputs, not outputs, but if you focus on inputs, you're less likely to worry about the inter-organizational output stuff that a lot of teams fight about. And there's a host of other things that I think Amazon did well.
Jeff Wilke:
I'll highlight one more, which is, I think when you choose to invest in so many different businesses, many consultants would tell you that's crazy, you should pick a core competence and stick to it. You have to make sure you protect the nascent businesses because the mothership is going to want to destroy them.
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And I think Jeff was brilliant at this. I think he carefully protected Andy and AWS, he carefully protected Steve and Dave Limp and devices, even though it may not have felt that way if you were Andy, Steve, or Dave. But he made sure the third party business that we built, where we invited other retailers to sell against our retail team in the same store-
James Currier: Crazy.
Jeff Wilke:
That's crazy nuts, and the only way that that sticks is if you keep the retail business from crushing the third-party business, which Jeff did masterfully. We made sure that third-party sellers were treated as customers from the beginning.
James Currier:
Right. And how did, so look, I'm hearing such great perspective that you kept pulling back and saying, is the language right? Pulling back and saying, is the process right? Pulling back and saying, is our architecture and our software right so that our company organization structure is right?
James Currier:
You kept pulling back, and that's amazing. And that's a mental trick, but then you've got to actually get the people who you're working with to accept that the changes you want to make to put things back in the right spot. So what you said was it took courage to do this.
Jeff Wilke: Yes.
James Currier:
So where do you create the courage for the people who are working with you?
Jeff Wilke:
This is a great point. I think you do this with, it's a subtle thing, but you do it in the way that you communicate casually with them, the way you build a relationship. The way that you let them know when they fail that you're going to separate the problem from the people. And if they're failing because they're going to be unsuccessful, that you'll help them to move on to something where they can succeed.
Jeff Wilke:
But if they're failing because of things that aren't within their control, that you're going to work with them to remove those barriers. So I think a lot of it is setting up a relationship with people that lets them know that you're going to hold them to high standards and simultaneously support them if they fail.
Jeff Wilke:
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And I'll say this about Larry Boss, I learned this from Larry. Larry was the best person that I've ever worked with at making you terrified of performing poorly for him, but also even if you had failed, and he was mad coming back for more. And I have this great example where I was running a business, it was the first business I was running. It was my first quarterly review with the CEO, with Larry.
Jeff Wilke:
And I was nervous about it. Business was doing okay, but not great. And my assistant comes to the office, and she's a little frantic. She says, "Jeff, Larry's on the phone. Pick up the phone." So I pick up the phone, it's Larry. He says, "Jeff, it's Larry." I said, "Hey, Larry, what can I do for you?"
Jeff Wilke:
He said, "Looks like we have a review coming up tomorrow. We're reviewing all of the chemical businesses. Big day for you; I went through the book, I've looked ahead. And I want you to know that I think the world of you, I think you're going to be a fantastic leader, you're going to have a great career, but tomorrow is going to be a rough day."
Jeff Wilke:
And he hangs up. Like, I didn't sleep; I was way over-prepared. I got through the day fine, but I wanted to come back for more. And he was just great at setting a high standard and letting you know that he cared about you.
James Currier:
Very interesting. So that's just a lot of time, a lot of personal relationships, a lot of being authentic with people and being there for them.
Jeff Wilke:
Yeah. And the hard part is, as I think there are these moments, and you hinted at this earlier, where cultures change and the task of leadership changes. And I would argue that if n equals the log base 10 of the number of people, that there are these distinct phases of leadership n equals 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and now Amazon at 6.
Jeff Wilke:
And the one that you just described works best from one to two, so when you have 100 people or less, you can know everybody, you can manage by walking around. You certainly know your 10 most important people really well if you do this right.
Jeff Wilke:
But when you get to n equals three and four, you're depending on others to create that same environment where people will take risk and learn from those failures. And it's a harder thing to do. It requires some different kinds of mechanisms, some different kinds of projection. At n equals six, at actually five and six, I found that I had to do a lot more video work, for example, to project and to try to be authentic on video.
Jeff Wilke:
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In fact, I had an early interview some number of years ago where I was playing around with different video techniques. And I essentially memorize the script. Okay? So I had an hour-long interview, as you often do in a fireside chat, you know the questions in advance, but I had written out all the answers, and I memorized them like an actor.
Jeff Wilke:
And I delivered the talk because it was essentially a soliloquy with the interruptions of the questions. And when I was done, I showed the tape to a couple of people because I was super proud. I nailed the dismount; it was great. I didn't miss a word; I was super proud of myself. And I showed it to a few people. And I said, "What do you think of this?"
Jeff Wilke:
And they said it's good. You knew your lines; you said all the right stuff. But they said, there's something missing that I've seen you do on stage or in video, that was just missing for me. And I was like, "What is it?" And they said it was authenticity, that it was so carefully crafted.
Jeff Wilke:
What they said is, even if the words come out a little bit imperfectly, even if you insert like I just did, parentheticals, which would make written prose hard to read, there's something about your authenticity in an extemporaneous environment that's missing from this video.
Jeff Wilke:
So the next one, about the same length, I knew the questions, I spent time prepping, I thought through them, I practiced with somebody. But then, when I got on stage, I just riffed. And I showed that video to the same person, they're like, "You should do this every time."
Jeff Wilke:
It turns out in the prose, the transcript, I was being a perfectionist because the English prose wasn't as perfect as I would like to write, but the impact on an audience that viewed it was overwhelmingly better.
James Currier:
Right. What's that they say? They say, they don't remember what you said, they remember how you made them feel.
Jeff Wilke:
Exactly. And that matters much more at four, five, and six than it does at one or two because at one or two, if you're recording everything, instead of just being with your team, you're probably missing out.
James Currier:
Right. The medium is the message there where that's kind of inauthentic, even if you're being authentic on video, but later on when they know you can't be with them to be authentic on the video is a good substitute.
Jeff Wilke:
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Exactly. Hey, James, I'm going to pause. I know this is being recorded so they can edit this out. I've got
to, we're after five, I've got a guy waiting for me, and I want to make sure that he's...
James Currier: Okay.
Jeff Wilke:
That we let him know. So just give me one second here.
James Currier:
Oh, sorry about that buddy.
Jeff Wilke:
No, that's right. Please let him know...
James Currier:
You can finish this at anytime, I just...
Jeff Wilke:
Okay, sorry about that.
James Currier: It's good.
Jeff Wilke:
We'd love to talk about the post-retirement stuff.
James Currier:
Okay. Can we go through one more thing?
Jeff Wilke: Yeah.
James Currier:
I wanted to talk about in line of what you were just saying, like pulling back and talking with people. Bezos and others have described you as an incredible teacher to everyone at Amazon. What do you think makes someone a great teacher?
Jeff Wilke:
Well, I think competence matters. It's hard to teach something that you don't thoroughly understand, right? And so, when I go back to what we talked about upfront where early career, I was collecting experiences so that I could maximize option value, in effect, I was achieving competence in a bunch of areas that made it easier for me to teach.
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You have to be a lifelong learner to teach. So teaching isn't just getting to a certain point and then using whatever you've learned without any new learning. I think it's an iterative process, so the best teachers are also often the best learners.
Jeff Wilke:
I think the communication style and ability to relate to people in an authentic way helps you be a better teacher. And then finding mechanisms to project teaching broadly as an organization grows is important. And that's something that, especially in this era of Zoom, I watch great teachers do.
Jeff Wilke:
Zoom and Coursera, and that world where you have some teachers able to project to much broader audiences more effectively than others. It's a certain kind of skill to be able to use your voice and your face to project that what you're saying, that you believe it and that it's coming from an authentic place.
Jeff Wilke:
If you don't really believe it, and you're trying to do this on video, it's going to be super hard for others to believe it too. And part of learning is believing the teacher. You can be skeptical, but you have to believe that the teacher has competence.
James Currier:
And so, in a way, what makes you a great teacher is that you care about people, and you're a great learner.
Jeff Wilke:
Well, I hope so. And then I hope I spent the time to treat teaching as a task of paramount importance as opposed to something that you do reluctantly.
James Currier:
That's right. Got it. Helping fix those processes, helping fix the language, helping fix the communication so that it all works for people and teaching folks around you that in a consistent way.
Jeff Wilke:
Yeah. I mean, here's an example. I led a weekly business review for the North American businesses for, call it 10 years straight. So 500 meetings with the top 80 to 100 people in the retail business. And we would go through a deck of 50 slides in an hour.
Jeff Wilke:
And I would not look at the slides before I walked in the meeting. And every single one of those 500 days, there was some nugget presented to me just by concentrating on the slides where I had a chance to expose a potential trade-off that people might make and that they might choose poorly, and help them build their mental model in how Amazon thinks about making that trade-off.
Jeff Wilke:
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And at just every single meeting, I found a few of those, and those we would call teaching moments.
And some of them over enough occasions adds up to real learning.
James Currier:
Right. And so it's a seminar format, even if it's not my mistake, I can see someone else make a mistake, you correct it, and I can then not make that mistake myself next time. And I don't-
Jeff Wilke:
Exactly. And it's tricky. You have to not embarrass the person who made the mistake; you have to enroll them in helping everybody else learn. But if you set that environment upright, boy, it's powerful.
James Currier:
Yeah, good for you, man. Good for you. So, Wilke, I got to congratulate you on this huge epic run at Amazon. And now I know you can't stop building and inventing; you're just built that way. So what are you building and inventing now?
Jeff Wilke:
Well, for the last six months or so, I've been working on a company that we launched in January called Re: Build Manufacturing. The CEO is a classmate of mine from grad school at MIT. I'm the chairman, the non-executive chairman. We have a great small collection of investors and a really good board.
Jeff Wilke:
And the mission is to build a multi-division industrial company that will build US factories, employ US workers. We're starting with a number of acquisitions of companies that either have physical technology, so material science, physics, mechanical engineering, and so on, or have established product-market fit and are generating significant revenue, but don't have the latest technology, and combining them into an operating company with a healthy dose of computer science and automation that we think can compete effectively against global competitors.
Jeff Wilke:
And in businesses that, for example, NFX is going to be in, where you'll have some of the companies wanting to produce physical products, but yet not having really any idea how to do it at scale, perhaps, or if they have an idea how to produce it at scale, don't have the multi-tier supply chain necessary to provide components that we would, that Re:Build would turn out to be a really good American partner for those kinds of firms.
Jeff Wilke:
So I can imagine over time in renewable energy, and EV of all kind, and vertical farming, and I mean, all these things that are new that have physical componentry to them are going to need manufacturing, a manufacturing supply chain, and we're here to help.
James Currier:
Amazing. So is this going to be geographically centered somewhere, or is it going to be all over and then connected through a hub of transport?
Jeff Wilke - Listening Cut (Completed 03/30/21) Page 17 of 18 Transcript by Rev.com
This transcript was exported on Apr 05, 2021 - view latest version here. Jeff Wilke:
Well, the first three acquisitions include plants in Denver and the Carolinas, and the headquarters is Boston. We'll have locations wherever the first companies that we buy are, and then after that, we'll start to build greenfield sites.
Jeff Wilke:
And we'll probably end up doing that across the country also for, and we'll do it to be near customers, we'll do it where there's talent that we can tap into and so on. The goal is not, this isn't a fund, it's not a loose collection of companies where they keep their individual focus and don't really integrate.
Jeff Wilke:
We want this to be a lasting, important industrial company. And we want to build a culture. In fact, one of the first things we did was write the leadership principles for Re:Build Manufacturing. They're called the Re:Build Way; we actually posted them on rebuildmanufacturing.com. And we're hoping that that has the same cultural effect in some small way that it did it at Amazon.
James Currier:
Well, it sounds like they're going to have to find a Jeff Wilke, who's 32 or 33, to get this sucker really moving.
Jeff Wilke:
Well, I'll tell you, the CEO, Miles, has the energy of Jeff Wilke at 32. He was that way at MIT, and he's still that way. So I'm very grateful.
James Currier:
That's amazing. So if there are startup people out there who are listening, and you want to join a great culture and learn about manufacturing and learn about maybe IoT and other things, and how this whole world of software and manufacturing is going to come together, then you know where to go, rebuildmanufacturing.com.
Jeff Wilke:
Well, thank you for that. We would hope to be one of many American firms that revitalize this important part of the economy. I think the pandemic and everything that the US struggled to produce that was sorely needed brought this problem into relief.
James Currier:
Awesome. Well, Jeff, it's been great to talk to you, pal, and I hope to do so soon again.