What it means to “disagree and commit” and how I do it (2016)

The good: it's taken relatively seriously, it's not just some empty PR line. It allows you to prove to managers and colleagues that you know what you are doing instead of following the heard. It encourages people to prove their ideas with prototypes instead of talk and more talk. It discourage "design by committee" and blame shifting. It's refreshing to be able to disagree openly and challenge popular views.

The bad: It takes a lot of self confidence. Some people might feel insecure due to impostor syndrome, upbringing or belonging to minorities and this creates a disadvantage. Also, it's really exhausting in the long term.

Neutral: if you disagree, commit and fail it becomes a very public failure. On the bright side it teaches people not to disagree too lightheartedly.

Jeff Bezos makes the strong point that risk is important: "most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow."

Bezos also emphasizes that disagree-and-commit is a hard requirement: "Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting."

I also found that if you need to follow the principle too many times it's a good indicator the team/company goals/vision/ and yours don't align and - if circumstance permits doing so - leaving is better than keep up the fighting forever (which is extremely exhausting, from personal experience).

Unfortunately the proposal can be a fait accompli. I used to have demoralizing arguments with my boss, a company VP, about his product directives that were blatantly unsupported by logic or data. In every case his response would be to shrug his shoulders and say "but it's a done deal". (Meaning his CEO wanted to do it.) I can look back & say with confidence that each change was a financial dud.

Go ahead & say that it's your option to leave the company in these situations. It's true - and not always a viable option.

I personally like the principles although I’m missing a statement about developing employees. Also, the combination of two values can have dire effects, e.g. “Insist on the Highest Standards” and “Deliver Results” was probably the reason why some amazon warehouse workers have peed in bottles, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16849520.

The issue though is when you do bring it up and none of the leadership care and they plow ahead anyways. Headlong into another poor decision.

On to addressing points raised in the essay:

"If you have been following Amazon at all, you have probably heard what sounds like code language when we talk about how we get our work done. As I have mentioned before, our work like a kind of short-hand for the types of qualities that make people effective here. And they aren’t just for leaders of organizations, they are for everyone at Amazon. We are all leaders."

No, everyone at Amazon.com is not a "leader". Leaders get to set the terms by which they and others will do some job. Reports of worker exploitation (see https://stallman.org/amazon.html#exploiting for links to relevant stories to back up the claim) make it clear that not everyone has the freedom to determine how their own job should be structured. Even if those changes would result in allowing workers to live in reasonable conditions, earn a living wage, work under conditions that don't make them ill, work without "spout[ing] the ideology of devotion to the company" (as Stallman rightly put it on his personal website linked above), and work a full-length career not a short-stint part-time or "contractor" job that will leave the worker to have to find another way to make ends meet all while delivering goods and services in a reasonable time-frame. I'll give you a hint as to how this could play out for boxing goods at Amazon.com: it's fine if Amazon.com's customers waited an extra day or two in order to let the "pickers" take bathroom breaks, longer working breaks, and avoid on-the-job hazards like constantly hustling and fainting during the working day.

"You may have heard that Jeff Bezos dislikes social cohesion. It’s a detriment to business success because it causes people to stifle ideas and objections for the sake of keeping the peace. I’m the kind of person who can have a concern or objection sidetrack my attention and I need to get it out; at least have it heard."

I doubt many who work under someone else believes this. This is what the manager class tell each other and tries to believe themselves while the worker class (people with the least say in the relationship) knows that stifling one's ideas and objections is conducive to helping them keep their job. This applies at every level in the hierarchy -- mid-level managers suffer from this when talking to their bosses and exploit this when talking to their subordinates. But the largest set of people always exist in the least-empowered class.

Managerial glib puffery PR like this usually downplay or ignore why people work these jobs at all: they live in societies that don't pay enough to give the worker the flexibility of choosing where to work. Capitalism pushes people to trade their skills for sustenance and tries to make it seem like that's a right and proper tradeoff, while capitalism also ridiculously over-rewards a few at the top (most notably in the case of Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos). Bezos, who might be the wealthiest person, clearly makes enough money to where he could never work again and be fine (as so could many generations of his children). But Bezos is not alone in this over-reward scheme; the gap between rich and poor is the largest it has ever been and it is accelerating.

It's ironic that any discussion of this kind would be raised in a single-point-of-censorship discussion forum such as this; it's so easy for anonymous users to score someone's post low (which affects whether other readers see the post with difficulty or at all) instead of responding. All scoring systems that affect how others see the posts are censorship, without exception. They work that way because that's precisely what they were designed to do. They are a mechanised way of implementing the reality of talking to the boss and run directly counter to the self-deluding lie of "disagree and commit".