Team of One

"Good intentions don't work. Mechanisms do." — an old adage at Amazon, cited throughout Working Backwards

Amazon's answer to every recurring failure was never "try harder." When something went wrong, Bezos's question was: "Do we have a mechanism in place so it doesn't happen again?" The assumption was that people already had good intentions when the problem happened, so intentions were not the variable worth changing.

A solopreneur has more good intentions than anyone and no mechanisms at all. That is the gap this skill closes.

You cannot out-discipline a team. You can out-mechanism one.

Companions: amazon-writing for document formats · four-answers for answer discipline.

Where solo hours actually go

Every mechanism here targets a specific, measurable waste. If a mechanism is not removing one of these, it should not be running.