Podcast – Episode 17:
The Lessons of Amazon
Tech Leadership Tips from an Insider
It’s always interesting when you meet people who’ve made dramatic shifts from one field into another — in this episode, we speak with a scientist who made a spectacular, successful and exciting leap into the tech world. You may have heard of the company where guest David Glick ended up: a little startup they call Amazon! David Glick shares the inside scoop on how immersing himself in the “Amazonian” culture molded his tech leadership. Now CTO at FLEXE (a flexible on-demand warehousing and fulfillment company), David Glick has much hard-won leadership wisdom to share.
“… don’t know what you call it, a macho thing, kind of a firefighter theme, which is, “Oh, we’re so good at putting out fires.” After about 10 years of that, even about one year of that became not as much fun for me. I said, let’s do fire prevention!”
Key takeaways from the Podcast are:
- The layer cake of leadership (how to enhance and advance your tech career).
- Lessons from leading in Amazon.
- The truth about AI/ML.
TLDR: Straight to the point
(Quick Links)
We all live busy lives, and sometimes a long Podcast is too much of a time-footprint for our busy schedules. So, to help you get to the bit you’re more interested in, use our table of contents below. Quick links to help you get straight to the point.
2. Introducing David Glick
3. How being a Physicist has helped enhance Davids Role as a CTO
4. A long career in Logistics
5. Managing Risk
6. Physicist to Engineering world
7. Amazon Leadership Principles
8. Drilling the Values and principles into the culture
9. The values and FLEXE
10. Do people abuse trust?
11. Layer cake Leadership
12. Choosing the right people for your teams
14. Diversity of thinking
15. Diversity in work (Women in work)
16. Getting curious around sexism
17. Single-threaded leaders
18. The success of Amazon of having Single-threaded leaders
19. The temptation to load people up… how to avoid it
20. Mechanisms to support intentions, not just intentions on their own
21. Thoughts on Agile
22. AI
23. Key takeaways from David Glick
24. TC Gill's Podcast Reflections