“Jeff, you have enough ideas to destroy Amazon”
Jeff Bezos shared this formative moment of feedback from Jeff Wilke during a conversation at the Italian Tech Week 2025.
Too many ideas? And their weight posing an existential risk to a business like Amazon?
There is a lot wisdom in this observation and the this segment of Jeff’s conversation (roughly from 23:20 to about 27:00 in the video linked below). The core idea, as he explains, is that new ideas create work. And when the capacity of an organization is already full, those new ideas simply stack up like “work in progress” and do not add value. Worse, they create distraction and make the organization less productive.
He went on to say, “you have to release the work at the right rate that the organization can accept it”. That has meant holding ideas close, refining them, and being much more deliberate about the time and place they are released. And as a leader, it raised the question, “How do you build an organization that can be ready for more ideas? How do you do more ideas per unit time?”
The concept resonated with me. In a flurry of energy and inspiration ideas come in droves. But rarely do they yield a lot of progress. Often times teams seem bewildered and confused about what to do, and I suspect it is a consequence of the effect Jeff is describing: More backlog, more distraction, less progress.
So how do you capture ideas, nurture them, and carefully release them? What do these patterns look like in practice? I would love to hear ideas and examples.