#8 | A proven "exit strategy" from corporate life (and other lessons like how to respond to Jeff Bezos' famed "?"-email) with Tahir Hussain

I am sitting down today with Tahir Hussain who has 25+ years of global leadership experience in the consumer, retail and tech space. He lived and worked in Korea, China, the US and the UK. Having worked for BCG, Bertelsmann, and Amazon in senior roles, Tahir is now an independent advisor, and the founder of the non-profit education startup: 21 Future.

Tahir already addressed a question many of us face: what happens after the corporate career? What’s the “exit strategy” that is both personally rewarding and economically sustainable? 

In our conversation, we unpack what he calls the 2/2/1 model. It describes his allocation of time to commercial activities, philanthropic goals, and, well, unstructured flexi-time, which he can dedicate to family, hobbies or spontaneous interests. 

People often dream of such portfolio approaches, but few do it. Tahir is one of them. 

In the interview we also track through a series of leadership lessons, especially from his time as a leader at Amazon. We discuss: 

… The power of leadership principles to synchronize how large groups of colleagues deliver results together

… Why focusing on controllable inputs - such as assortment availability in retail - often connects directly with what matters to customers, but also why such inputs are at risk of being bypassed with a short-term focus on outputs, especially quarterly commercial metrics.

We explore why owning your defects publicly - that is to say the underperformance in your area of responsibility - can be a way of enhancing one’s reputation if you can come back and show that the underlying root causes of the defect have been removed as a result of flagging them.

We discuss the famous “?” email, customer complaints forwarded to responsible teams by Jeff Bezos, and what that level of customer focus at the top of the house produces across the company.

We unpack the “Press Release FAQ” approach as a way to put forward proposals for innovation. Based on this, we track through “working backwards” from a northstar goal, and ...

Why sometimes, it’s important to be comfortable with being misunderstood for long periods of time, while in pursuit of a genuinely new and bold idea.    

Fully on topic with doing well and feeling fine, here is Tahir Hussain and his biggest goals in work and life.