03/06/2026
At a conference, Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, spoke about how work is managed within an organization:
“Put me in front of a whiteboard and I can come up with a hundred ideas in half an hour.”
In the early days of Amazon, Jeff Wilke — who had only known me for about a year at the time — came to see me and said:
“Jeff, you have enough ideas to destroy Amazon.”
That remark deeply surprised me.
As a founder, I had the privilege of being able to recruit very experienced and brilliant leaders, such as Diego Piacentini and Jeff Wilke. I listened to them a lot; they taught me a great deal.
Jeff insisted: “You generate enough ideas per minute, per day, per week… to destroy the company.”
I asked him what he meant.
He explained: “You must release work at a rate the organization can absorb.”
For him, every new idea I launched created a queue — work in progress, a backlog.
As long as those ideas piled up without being processed, they created no value; on the contrary, they caused distraction.
His advice was simple: introduce new ideas only when the organization is ready to handle them.
Today this seems obvious, but at the time it was a revelation for me.
I then began to:
✔️ prioritize my ideas more effectively
✔️ write them down
✔️ keep them to myself until the right moment
✔️ think about how to make the organization capable of absorbing more of them
This involved:
✔️ a strong leadership team
✔️ appropriate leadership
✔️ executive bandwidth (available time and attention)
We gradually built a company capable of inventing while pursuing several initiatives in parallel.
But the idea of releasing work at the right pace’ was decisive. It made the organization far more operationally effective while remaining innovative.”
🫵 And you — how is work released within your organization?
