Digital Transformation & AI for Humans

Cultivating Impactful Leadership in the Age of Innovation & AI: Best Practices from Amazon and Beyond

• Max Sinclair • Season 1 • Episode 36

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In this episode, we explore what it takes to lead with impact in a rapidly evolving landscape shaped by AI and innovation and dive into the Best Practices from Amazon and Beyond. Max Sinclair - Angel Investor, founder & CEO of Ecomtent, ex Amazon senior executive from London, is our expert guest today. 

 Max shares invaluable insights and actionable strategies for today’s leaders.

💡 Key Topics Cover:

  • How Max adapted his leadership style at Amazon
  • The leadership qualities crucial for navigating AI-driven growth and how they differ from traditional approaches
  • Best practices from Amazon that Max has carried over to his current ventures
  • Building a culture of innovation and adaptability while embracing AI and emerging technologies
  • Strategies to overcome resistance to change within teams and from clients
  • Balancing emotional intelligence with the technological demands of AI-driven leadership
  • Actionable recommendations for leaders to harness AI and foster a forward-thinking mindset for the future

Whether you’re a leader, entrepreneur, or innovator, this episode offers powerful insights to transform not just your technologies but also your ways of thinking and leading.

🌟 Let’s dive into the conversation and take impactful leadership to the next level!

🔗 Connect with Max Sinclair on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/max-sinclair-ai/
🔗 Learn more about Ecomtent: www.ecomtent.ai


About the host, Emi Olausson Fourounjieva
With over 20 years in IT, digital transformation, business growth & leadership, Emi specializes in turning challenges into opportunities for business expansion and personal well-being.
Her contributions have shaped success stories across the corporations and individuals, from driving digital growth, managing resources and leading teams in big companies to empowering leaders to unlock their inner power and succeed in this era of transformation.

📚 Get your AI Leadership Compass: Unlocking Business Growth & Innovation 🧭 The Definitive Guide for Leaders & Business Owners to Adapt & Thrive in the Age of AI & Digital Transformation: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DNBJ92RP

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🌏 Learn more: https://digitaltransformation4humans.com/
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Speaker 1:

and welcome to Digital Transformation for Humans with your host, amy. In this podcast, we delve into how technology intersects with leadership, innovation and, most importantly, the human spirit. Each episode features visionary leaders who understand that at the heart of success is the human touch nurturing a winning mindset, fostering emotional intelligence and building resilient teams. Today's conversation is going to focus on cultivating impactful leadership in the age of innovation and AI and dive into the best practices from Amazon and beyond. Max Sinclair, angel investor founder and CEO of e-content, ex-amazon senior executive from London, is our expert guest today. Welcome, max.

Speaker 2:

Hi, how are you Good to be here.

Speaker 1:

Amazing. Let's start the conversation and transform not just our technologies but our ways of thinking and leading. If you are interested in connecting or collaborating, find more information in the description, subscribe and stay tuned for more episodes. Max, it's amazing to have this conversation today. I'm looking forward to it and, to start with, it would be great to learn more about you, your journey and your transition from the corporate world into the world of your own business. Could you share a few words about it?

Speaker 2:

Sure. So I worked in Amazon for six years and my co-founder, who showed me the first public release of StableFusion this is September 2022, a week after it was launched. This is September 2022, a week after it was launched. And this is before ChatGPT, before kind of most people I'd say most people outside of kind of the AI research community had actually seen any of this technology and, yeah, I was convinced that it was going to be absolutely transformational. So we launched e-content, which is to help sellers to generate visual and written product listing content optimized for AI-powered search. And, yeah, we've been running that business now for two years. We've worked with a number of retailers, hundreds of Amazon sellers, tens of Amazon agencies. So, yeah, that's kind of where we are.

Speaker 1:

Very impressive and inspiring During your time at Amazon. How did your leadership style adapt to the demands of AI and digital transformation, and what key lessons did you take from that experience into your current role as founder and CEO?

Speaker 2:

so I guess at Amazon, um, I are adopting to this kind of new form of AI. That being said, there's something called the Machine Learning University inside of Amazon, ai in its kind of previous, uh, let's say um kind of regression crunching and pattern matching version of ai that, uh, you know it has been around since the 1950s or however long it's been. Um, so I I kind of got a um, a background in education of the first generation of AI at Amazon and Amazon would run, which was amazing. They have a lot of resources for people to kind of just learn beyond their current role. So this machine learning university was one such example. But there's lots of different people, senior people in the company lending their time to run different aspects of upskilling people across the company. Totally different roles would never have come come across them otherwise and it was a great way to bring uh the entire company together. And you know, one of the big advantages working in a big company like that is you have extremely intelligent ai researchers who can actually go and help people who are history graduates like I am to get an understanding of this stuff. Um, so, yeah, that was the AI introduction that I had at my time at Amazon.

Speaker 2:

I think, now going forward, people will soon have to be managing humans and AIs and very soon maybe these kind of things will become, as we discussed on the last podcast, uh, more intertwined um, but I certainly I I certainly think that, like my experience of e-comptent is, managing nai is is noise. It requires something new because they, like the current set of gen ai tools are, especially when you start building them, um, they are very unreliable and prone to, uh, hallucinations and changing behaviors. They are almost like wild animals. I would I would describe it it's like trying to, you know, ride a zebra right, rather than riding a horse. If the deterministic kind of pattern, matching, big mathematical problem crunching AI of the past is kind of like riding a horse. These Gen AI models, which are a lot more creative and powerful, in many ways it's like riding a zebra. So it's that, you know, making sure that you're managing that as well as kind of people well, as people is an important factor.

Speaker 1:

Interesting. Great that you mention it and it's true it is a little bit wild for the moment and it requires a lot of attention to the details and that connection between technologies and the human part, the human factors. And what are the essential leadership qualities that you believe are necessary for successfully guiding a business through AI-driven growth? How do these qualities differ from those traditional leadership approaches that you mentioned?

Speaker 2:

So I think the number one thing is, with this new technology or any new technology it's very easy to be distracted by the power and the beauty or of the technology and forget about the customer. And I think, um, tomorrow I'm having this debate my own podcast with a friend of mine who's a web3 founder. Now, I don't know how much you know about web3 I don't know too much about it at all but it's all about nfts and blockchains and all this stuff, right, and I feel like for that wave, um, that kind of pandemic wave of technology, I have lots of friends actually who were very excited about it, thought this was amazing technology. I started businesses in it, but actually they completely lost focus on on the customer and like bringing value to the customer and ultimately, like it's very hard to point to any web3 um company like I'm not talking crypto, like there's a few crypto, like bitcoin, whatever, but like a web3 company that's using web3 technology to make lives easier for customers.

Speaker 2:

I honestly can't point to one. I don't know. Maybe you you know one, but it's um, and I think the the challenge in this ai world is there's so many new and cool and exciting things you can do, but are they actually useful and helpful to people in, uh, solving their everyday problems? That's a much harder challenge and that you know that staying focused on that remains to be true now, as it did kind of pre this technology. But I'm sure you know, with the rise of the internet and social media, like each, each kind of technology cycle brings something new and exciting and people will try, and you know people can be distracted by just trying to use the technology rather than solving a customer pain I agree.

Speaker 1:

Actually, I see the same trend and it's interesting to see it in different verticals all over the world, and I personally believe that it's also connected to the fact that those who are developing those powerful technologies, they have not so much experience of working with humans and their experience.

Speaker 1:

So, you know, it's more about developing technologies according to the vision, according to the goals they have in front of them, but they don't include that big part of customer experience and it becomes a little bit siloed from time to time. But I also believe that it gets more and more highlighted, which creates that connection between what is possible and what is really needed on the market, and it's going to be better and better covered with time. But it's great that you mentioned it because I hear it from my guests on this podcast and I hear it outside in private conversations with leaders as well, so it's interesting that this is requiring some extra attention right now. Can you share specific best practices you implemented at Amazon that you've carried over to your current company, particularly in the context of innovation, I mean in terms of leadership, in terms of business expansion?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so I guess Amazon had a really strong culture around their leadership principles. So these were not just at least for the first four or five years of my tenure there these were not just principles of um you know something written on the on the wall and ignored. These are principles that were in every. You know, when Jeff Bezos was was the um was still the CEO, you know each quarter he would do it, all hands focused around one of the principles and he would explain how the principle stuff like deliver results, hire and develop the best, learn and be curious. They had 14 or so principles that we would use in our work and he would show how he's using them in some big problem, let's say drone delivery, and how one of these principles insists on the highest standards is they're using it in the drone business and you talk about it and and and it and it would be how people are reviewed or pay on promotion. So there's a real culture around these principles and people really lived and breathed in and kind of discussed it on a daily basis and I have tried to.

Speaker 2:

You know, when I set out e-content, me and my co-founder sat down and we wrote a list of principles and we then, as the team grows. Every now and again we sit down with a team and I try and work out are these, are these actually the principles of people working with? To some extent, I can push and guide people towards certain things. In other aspects, I have to accept, um, that the people we've hired in the personalities don't do other things and therefore we don't want to pretend or like, have it written down somewhere that this is our principle, but actually it's not how it works. And and an important part of these principles is less so with the amazon ones, but more so with the ones we have is is only a principle if, if you could, a reasonable person could take the other view of it. So, learn and be curious.

Speaker 2:

Maybe it's a bad example because no one's going to say, oh, I don't want to learn and I don't want to be curious, uh. And another amazon principle is um, earns trust, right, so no one's going to say, oh, I don't want to earn trust. So, like the ones I mean we focused on are ones where people can. For some of them not all of them, I mean for some of them, people are going to say, yeah, everyone's gonna want that, but for some of them are ones where there's two sides to it and, um, you know, you as a company you have to sit on one side, uh, and if the company isn't sitting on that side, then I think you have to evolve and work around the way that people are actually working and the team that you do have, and be careful to shape it so people are included and feel like they feed back into it, because you can't top down authoritarianly, just tell people you have to work in this way now, and you know, I don't think that'd be a recipe for success.

Speaker 1:

But obviously, at the same time, we do want to stick to how we, you know, envision the company and push people, you know, and help people get to a certain way of culture and working push people you know and help people get to a certain way of culture and working Interesting, and it's good that you are taking something and reviewing it along the way as well, so that you know that some of those principles are not applicable in exactly your case and you adapt them your case and you adopt them. So, max, how do you cultivate the culture of innovation and adaptability within your team, in your company, especially when it comes to embracing AI and new technologies? What are the strategies you find the most effective in this case?

Speaker 2:

I think the number one, the most important thing, is the hiring. So you have to hire great people, um, uh, and we haven't had to do this yet. I guess we have in some regards. Like you have to hire great people, um, and one tactic we've used, for example, is we kind of take people on just graduated from school, from university or school as they call it in canada um, and they are kind of fresh grads, and you give them an eight month internship, full-time, and you tell them if you like this, if you, you know, if you're, if you suit the company and you're good and you like and you want to, there's a potential for a full-time role. So our first hire was like this we hired two people as interns, full-time interns, and I think intern is a bit of an unfair word because, like our, technically they were interns, they were full-time employees working in the company, highly skilled and talented people, and then one of those people we felt fit the culture and and and was good, uh, and, and we kept them on. And one of them, uh, we didn't and we are.

Speaker 2:

I quite like that approach of doing it and we're doing that again. We've got two new interns coming now in a month or two and and again, like maybe we'll keep them both, maybe we'll keep people with them, but like I think it's quite a good way of testing people out, because an interview is quite a hard way of seeing how people really work and their culture and you know, do they innovate, like you said? Like do they have this culture of innovation? You can ask someone in the interview but it's quite hard to really know without seeing them. So I think, doing that, yuri levine, who I spent four days with, like he's the founder of Waze, he did this workshop kind of in person for four days and his one of his big things I took away from that is firing.

Speaker 2:

So he, he says that if you're a founder, you should put a, put in a note in your calendar a month after you hire someone and basically after months, say, if I knew what I knew now, would I have hired this person. If the answer isn't, hell, yes, you should fire them. And he says, if the answer is yes, then you should go to them and you should say, hey, like you've been great so far this month and actually I want to increase your, you know the number of shares you have in the company. It doesn't have to be a big increase, but could say we gave you 0.25 options, I'm going to increase that 0.26 or 0.27, whatever it is, just because I think you've been great and I value you and blah blah blah. So that's his view. You should do that for every employee, you should have five of them immediately, or you should tell them that you really value them and increase their options in the company in the first month, and that way you build, you know, you build loyalty for life for these people. They, you know. Then no one's going to forget that Right. And on the converse side, you get rid of people who are disruptive quickly.

Speaker 2:

So we haven't actually fired anyone. We've kind of not hired people, as I mentioned. That's more been our modus. But, um, I understand, I understand that view and certainly I guess, as a as our company matures. You know, we just raised the funding round, so we're now in a position, I guess, where we can, we can move away from being as frackby as we we once were and like, yeah, like maybe we can start to do this where we hire people and then either fire them or give them more equity, um of them sounds interesting and I see you have this long-term vision as well in your approach.

Speaker 1:

so instead of taking on board and then replacing, you prefer to create those sustainable processes where you find those who really want to become a part of your journey, and then you create that magic together without too much drama involved. Yeah, which is really good. Resistance to change is often a challenge in the tech industry. How do you manage resistance within your team and from clients when integrating ai into business processes?

Speaker 2:

so I might be very biased, but the people that the customers I talk to are all very excited about ai and want to integrate it. Um, I guess the ones who aren't excited by AI and don't want to integrate it don't talk to me. So I don't really have any view on those people, to be honest. But I will talk to. You know 20, 30 people a week who have basically found us on Google or seen us on a podcast or whatever it is. We didn't do any paid ads, but they've seen us somewhere organically or they search for it and they want to try it and they want to see it and they want to try it.

Speaker 2:

So I mean, from my perspective I don't know if I have a good answer that because everyone is very excited by it and and kind of wants to implement ai in in their business, I think, when thinking back to kind of like working in Amazon and like a bigger corporation, like yeah, there's certainly people who don't want things to change, they like the status quo, they just want to keep things where they are. And certainly I can even say that I've been guilty of that in the past, you know, when I've kind of, let's say, I've set up a process, I've implemented it. I can then kind of, for example, I've got a promotion given that process to someone else. I don't really want to change that. I'm focused on other stuff now, but like I don't really want to change it unless there's a big reason, you know, a big reason to. So I think that's more of like a kind of corporate view, but yeah, not from my position. Currently, I think everyone's very excited.

Speaker 1:

Now you are free from that type of problems. Right, you moved beyond it. That's great. Emotional intelligence is often mentioned as crucial for leaders in tech. How do you balance the human element with the technological demands of AI, and why is this balance important?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I think burnout is a problem I've had, you know, members of my team tell me in the past that like they've, you know, they've had burnouto. I guess at least you're in control of the destiny in a way like if you're not the founder, then you're not the ceo. You don't really. You know you're, you're relying on someone. You're hoping they know what they're doing, because I've. So I think it can be very stressful. Demands are high. Uh, you know, customer demands are very high.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I think the kind of emotional intelligence pieces is an important one and I certainly, when I was a manager in amazon, what I realized is I was kind of a different manager to every one of my uh direct reports and for each of them, like I was, I would show them a different aspect of my personality, because they're all very different people and I realized like every single person is actually a very, very different person and whenever someone knew much of my team, I quickly realized the best way that I could get the best out of them would be that myself I kind of I adapt to them. So that's kind of how I thought about managing.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's a very wise approach, so that's kind of how I thought about managing that's a very wise approach and, of course, leadership is a two-way street. It's impossible to just make somebody follow your orders if they're not willing to see you as a part of their team as well and collaborate to co-create the results, so that's the most efficient way of approaching that. Max, as someone who has led teams at Amazon and now runs your own business and invests into other businesses as well, what are your top recommendations for other leaders looking to harness AI effectively and cultivate a forward-thinking mindset for the future?

Speaker 2:

So I think the landscape changes so rapidly. My co-founder and CTO is a phd in ai. He's a postdoc in ai as well. He spent eight years kind of contributing to research. I spend 10 percent of my time, maybe kind of like looking at competition, maybe less, maybe five percent of my time looking at competition, uh, in the e-commerce space, like similar companies to us. What are they doing? What are they talking about? Um, I spend my time doing that and I think he probably spends more time maybe 15 of his time just trying to stay on top of all the latest science papers that are happening.

Speaker 2:

What are people publishing, um, what's happening in the ai community? And I think that, like you really need that because the ground is just moving so rapidly. Like you need someone senior who is able to like synchronize this information and uh knows where to you know, knows where to look and which publications to read, just so that you you the company is always on the cutting edge and we, like we, when something important happens, we will certainly look at a new technology is launched, we'll be testing it internally. We'll see if something we can maybe can bring to one of the existing problems of solving for customers to solve it more efficiently. I think, yeah, that's a very important thing, just to have an eye out.

Speaker 1:

That's a great recommendation, because everything is moving forward so fast and it's really crucial to see what others are doing, how the competition looks like and what you can do to stay different, to create something unique, amazing and lead this change as well. Thank you so much for sharing your insights and experience with us today, max. It's been a great pleasure and honor to have you here and I'm looking forward to our future conversations. Today, we are covering the most part of those super important questions around leadership which today's and tomorrow's leaders should apply to their practice, both within the corporate world, and share with others, and they are also very relevant, very applicable to the business owners, to the founders, to everybody who is in the entrepreneurship and is creating something new, something amazing, and running and defining their own future. Thank you so much for sharing all these golden nuggets with us today.

Speaker 2:

It's been a pleasure.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for joining us on Digital Transformation for Humans. I'm Amy and it was enriching to share this time with you. Remember, the core of any transformation lies in our human nature how we think, feel and connect with others. It is about enhancing our emotional diligence, embracing the willing mindset and leading with empathy and insight. Subscribe and stay tuned for more episodes where we uncover the latest trends in digital business and explore the human side of technology and leadership. Until next time, keep nurturing your mind, fostering your connections and leading with heart.

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