In any business endeavor there is no leader or follower, there are a number of stakeholders with varying interests and proficiencies. Is “lead follow or get out of the way” something you would be embarrassed to tell a customer? An investor? Because customers and investors are stakeholders as well. The real world doesn’t look like an infantry boot camp.
Ref. https://www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-...
Once the decision is made and communicated, you're expected to follow/implement it.
Said differently: what's the practical alternative? If you don't like a decision, just continue to disagree with it, pocket veto/ignore it, pretend it doesn't apply to you/your team?
If you're dealing with obstructionist people, surely there are other ways to detect and address it than 'disagree and commit'.
For nearly any policy change, you can probably find 20% or more of people who would not have made that same exact choice. Many of them, if left to their own devices, will persist in disagreeing, slow-rolling, being mildly obstructionist, or similar.
If you don't have a clear (and enforced) principle that requires the implementation of made decisions and bars re-opening discussion absent material new information, you'll end up with an organization that lazily drifts towards the new decision instead of aggressively pivots towards it. That's clearly accepted in some companies; it doesn't seem to be accepted at Amazon.
That’s the whole point of disagree and commit. Most decisions are not clear cut obvious decisions, otherwise it’s unlikely there would be disagreements about them.
Disagree and commit allows everyone to contribute to their max capacity and move forward once deadlock has been reached.
There's only one place I can think of that might have benefited from that rule, and there were other solutions that would have worked as well if not better. Like a boss with a backbone.
Ultimately, if you need to exercise your management authority about stuff that your reports are doing that's a time-limited move, as too much of this will lead to reports just doing exactly what they're told, which is the kiss of death if you want to build good stuff quickly.
This has been an option throughout my career, and I think many people simply don't have that option, especially early in their career.
It's about making major strategic decisions that affect lots of people.
(I should have thought this would be obvious from context)
Every time the style guide says something that you didn't like, that you argued against, and you vigorously comply anyway, you've just disagreed and committed. Like you're supposed to as a professional in minor matters.
No there is, some people are just wrong.
Where's the deadlock? It sounds like there is consensus on the side of people making the decisions (management).
The CEO isn’t just any superior, they are the highest superior.
So literally everything coming from the CEO is “do X and follow orders”
But “STFU and do what I say” is a choice in management style, and not all CEOs choose that approach.
Just following orders is not about working arrangements in a corporation. And if you do find working arrangements morally heinous then you disagree and quit.
Except, moving cities isn't a small decision you accept without considering quitting.
Commuting to/from an office (releasing a lot of CO2 and pollution) when remote work is an option can easily be considered immoral these days.
It's also served as a hiring filter, and probably a very good one at that.
Amazon is Amazon because it gets things done. Certainly many at Amazon circa 2000s thought AWS was an incredible boondoggle and risk. "We sell books, why the hell would we sink capital into renting servers." Surely those same people disagreed and committed. Others have probably disagreed and committed to ideas that did prove to be terrible. But you increase your success rate by increasing your attempt rate... and nothing interesting happens at a stand still.
I don't doubt that Amazon is a great company. But if you are asserting that it got there because of the LPs I find it hard to believe. Are you suggesting that had those people "had backbone" and "were right, a lot", then AWS wouldn't have succeeded? That seems quite far-fetched.
The LPs look good on paper. But it's a stretch to call it a decision-making framework because the LPs are so vague and open to interpretation. Furthermore, they are often used by those in power to exploit those who are not, as illustrated by the story.
Then again, I don't work for Amazon so what do I know.
... that is, disagree-and-commit transactionally seems like it ought to be between peers. Disagree-and-commit when applied between superiors and reports could be rewritten as just "shut up and follow orders."