2. Don't give up information unless absolutely necessary.
Amazon didn’t tell Melville House how many of its books were sold on the site. Amazon also stays mum on Kindle sales and won’t say how many employees it has in Seattle. Moreover, the floor where the Kindle team works at the Seattle headquarters is called Area 51, since you can't set foot there unless you're directly involved with the product. Bezos, it seems, likes to deliver information — and create Amazon's narrative — in his own way, such as his carefully crafted shareholder letters.
3. Keep teams small enough that members can be fed with two pizzas.
Bezos is famous among management nerds for his Two Pizza Rule: No team should be larger than can be fed with two large pizzas. That means that task forces are limited to just five to seven people, allowing teams to test their ideas without too many onlookers, which guards against groupthink — one of Bezos’s pet peeves. Those tiny teams have led to big innovations, like the Gold Box deals, a popular promotion that gave customers limited-time deals.
4. Stop talking so much.
At an off-site retreat in the early 2000s, word was going around that groups needed to communicate more. Bezos got up and said, "No, communication is terrible!"
How could talking too much be a problem? Cross-team communication limits team independence and leads to people agreeing too much, he estimated, which stands in opposition to the creative conflict that defines Amazon's culture.
5. Get adversarial.
“The people who do well at Amazon are often those who thrive in an adversarial atmosphere with almost constant friction,” writes Brad Stone, author of "The Everything Store," which chronicles Amazon’s rapid growth. Why? Bezos can’t stand “social cohesion,” the cloying tendency of people who like to agree with each other and find consensus comfortable.
Research suggests that the