Jeff Bezos once warned that "decision making isn't one size fits all," arguing that big companies often drift into a "large company malady" by using the same heavy process for every choice, a habit he said can choke speed as organizations grow.

Bezos Split Decisions Into Two Types

Speaking at a November 2018 gala in New York for STEM nonprofit FIRST, Bezos said leaders should sort decisions by asking two questions: "What are the consequences of this decision?" and "Is this decision reversible?" His goal was to help Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) stay "high-velocity" even as it expanded.

Bezos said most corporate choices are low-stakes and reversible. Those decisions, he argued, should move quickly, often with data and junior teams, because "if you make the wrong decision," the cost is low. What slows large companies, he said, is running small, reversible calls through a "big consensus process."

Fast Calls Need Less Perfect Data

In Amazon's 2016 shareholder letter, Bezos made the same point more bluntly, writing, "most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70 percent of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90 percent, in most cases, you're probably being slow."

Big Bets Demand Slow Deliberation

For irreversible, high-consequence decisions, Bezos prescribed the opposite. Senior leaders, or very small teams, should make them deliberately and slowly. In his 2015 shareholder letter, he called those choices "one-way doors", stating, "If you walk through and don't like what you see on the other side, you can't get back to where you were before." Bezos later joked that on such calls he became Amazon's "chief slow down officer."

The framework has endured beyond Bezos. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy repeated the same "two-way door" and "one-way door" logic in his 2024 shareholder letter, saying reversible decisions can be made "quickly and locally," while harder-to-reverse calls require a more methodical process.

Economists have echoed the broader logic for decades. Research published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in 2022 says uncertainty makes flexibility more valuable and raises the cost of locking into hard-to-reverse decisions too early.

According to Benzinga’s Edge Stock Rankings, AMZN shows a negative price trend across the short, medium and long term, while its Quality score ranks in the 71st percentile.

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