Jeff Bezos has a tip to help you get the most out of your professional life.
Amazon’s boss created the “two pizza” rule for his team during the early days of the company’s launch 30 years ago — a principle that can boost your career and financial success.
“We try to create teams that are no bigger than two pizzas can feed. We call it the two-pizza team rule,” Bezos said earlier.
The billionaire entrepreneur has argued that larger teams are difficult to manage and can become overwhelmed by increasing responsibilities, while the small team rule – of around 10 people – ensures teams of employees are the right size to be most efficient and productive.
“Ideally, this is a team of fewer than 10 people: smaller teams minimize lines of communication and reduce bureaucracy,” Daniel Slater, head of culture and innovation at Amazon Web Service, explained, according to the Daily Mail. “The two-pizza structure also promotes team accountability. Two-pizza teams don’t hand something they’ve launched off to another team to run.”
“That’s why two-pizza teams need to stay on top of every aspect of their service delivery, with a clear charter and a tightly defined mission,” Slater concluded.
At Amazon, any team that grows beyond the two-pizza limit must be split into two teams, with the original group’s responsibilities distributed to the new, restructured teams.
According to Bezos, this guide has helped the revolutionary retailer maximize efficiency and scalability — the twin pillars of Amazon’s success — and has now made it one of the largest companies in the world.
The two-pizza rule isn’t just good for business. According to financial experts at GoBankingRates, it encourages individual workers to view their time as money.
Purchases should be viewed in terms of how much time it would take to earn them. For example, a $20 pizza would take 30 minutes of work for someone making $40 an hour. Keeping this in mind can help earners avoid unnecessary spending and maintain perspective on their personal wealth.
Bezos’ rule also involves breaking down big goals into lots of small tasks. The same approach helps individual workers ensure they’re not biting off more than they can chew, and can move quickly from one task to another.
However, some business impresarios, such as Johnny Warstrom, CEO of Mentimeter, have criticized this hard-and-fast rule.
“I think Jeff Bezos’ two-pizza rule is outdated and in need of revision,” Warstrom wrote in Entrepreneur.
“Limiting the number of participants in a meeting doesn’t increase productivity,” the CEO explained. “It actually hinders it. Smaller teams limit the opportunity for a broad and diverse perspective.”