Play Chess, Not Checkers is a sharp, story-driven chapter that challenges leaders to stop thinking one move at a time—and start shaping the entire board. Drawing on iconic examples from Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Amazon, and Microsoft’s reinvention under Satya Nadella, this chapter shows how the most successful Big Bets come from imagining multiple moves ahead, leveraging other people’s outcomes, and designing flywheel strategies that reshape ecosystems. Practical, provocative, and deeply relevant, this free chapter reveals how systems thinking, benchmarking, and disciplined learning can de-risk bold decisions and turn ambition into lasting advantage.
The Amazon Way: Amazon’s 14 Leadership Principles is a durable best-seller and has sold upwards of 300,000 copies and translated to eight languages. Here’s the poster.
The Amazon Way is a durable best seller — but it’s not about Amazon! It’s about you and what you can learn from a company like Amazon to innovate, improve customer centricity, creating a data driven and accountable high-performance team. The third edition had a new appendix — how to build your leadership principle. Don’t forget to “etch the in Jell-O”!