Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Hosted by Maureen Metcalf

Conversations with global thought leaders on leadership, culture, and innovation—designed for executives navigating complexity and building resilient organizations.

Amazon’s Innovation Secret from their VP: Look to Failure for Your Success

Episode Description

What if the fastest path to breakthrough innovation runs directly through your organization’s willingness to fail? Across nineteen years at Amazon, Beryl Tomay rose from software engineer to VP by treating errors as raw material for growth, including the day she broke Amazon’s purchase page and turned it into a lesson in root cause thinking. Her conversation with Maureen Metcalf offers executives a candid look at how supportive teams, honest reflection, and cultures that reward bold experimentation produce the resilience and the Alexas that define market leaders.

Key Takeaways

Mistakes are inevitable at every career level, so leaders should direct energy toward understanding root causes and prevention rather than self blame.
Resilience is built over time through supportive teams and the perspective that perfection is neither possible nor the goal.
Stepping into unfamiliar leadership roles accelerates growth when leaders lean on questioning and collaborative learning from colleagues.
Amazon’s “Think Big Days” show how judgment free brainstorming creates space for the experimentation that fuels genuine innovation.
Breakthroughs such as Alexa demonstrate that tolerating failure is a prerequisite for producing category defining products.

Why This Episode Matters

It shows executives that innovation and talent development depend less on avoiding failure and more on building cultures that learn from it.

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Featuring

Beryl Tomay, Vice President of Last Mile Delivery and Technology at Amazon

Episode Topics

Culture Change • Leadership Capability & Maturity • Scaling Innovation

Podcast Air Date

December 5, 2023

Episode Duration

39min

Watch the episode

Season 9

Episode Number 51

Episode Content:

Maureen Metcalf, CEO of the Innovative Leadership Institute, shared this article as a companion to her podcast with Beryl Tomay, Vice President of Last Mile Delivery and Technology at Amazon, To Err Is to Innovate.

What can leaders learn from mistakes made along their career journey? Beryl Tomay, Vice President, Last Mile Delivery and Technology at Amazon, shares unique insights from over 18 years at the company.

Everybody makes mistakes and everybody will always make mistakes, Beryl reflects. Early in her career as a software developer, Beryl struggled with errors and failures. However, Amazon’s culture of learning and resilience helped her cope.

Within Beryl’s first six months, she made a coding change that broke Amazon’s “Thank You” purchase page. “I had a pretty tough time with that,” she admits. However, her team provided support to understand the root cause and prevent recurrence. “It kind of makes me better,” says Beryl.

When beating herself up over mistakes, Beryl has kept perspective by remembering two things. First, errors are inevitable at all career levels. Second, the priority is to learn from mistakes rather than dwelling on perfection. This mindset has served to build Beryl’s resilience over 18+ years.

Later, Beryl took the risk to lead business divisions she lacked deep expertise in. The intimidating meetings and decisions challenged her, underscoring the need for investment in rapid learning. However, by asking questions and gathering knowledge from those around her, Beryl succeeded in adding value.

She also continues to take risks via Amazon’s innovation efforts. “Think Big Days” encourage teams to brainstorm creative ideas without judgement. Though not every moonshot works out, big wins like their Alexa technology make failure worthwhile.

What did Beryl learn about mistakes, resilience, and innovation over nearly two decades?

1. Errors happen; focus on learning and prevention.

2. Build resilience through support systems and perspective.

3. Take risks and learn from failures to drive innovation.

4. Foster a culture accepting of mistakes to unlock creativity.

Resources:

Our host, Maureen Metcalf, posts a newsletter every week on LinkedIn. You can subscribe here.

Maureen’s latest book is Innovative Leadership & Followership in the Age of AI. You’ll find details about it at https://bit.ly/LeaderInAI. Her other 10 books are available on Amazon here.

Books we’re reading for fun or personal development right now include:

Women and Leadership: Journey Toward Equity by Sherylle J. Tan & Lisa DeFrank-Cole
Becoming Superman: My Journey from Poverty to Hollywood by J. Michael Straczynski
Own the AI Revolution by Neil Sahota
Time and Chance by Kim Campbell

NOTE: As an Amazon partner, we may make a small commission from books you buy through these links.

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Guest(s):

Beryl Tomay, Vice President of Last Mile Delivery and Technology at Amazon

Guest(s) Bio:

Beryl Tomay has been at Amazon for nearly 19 years having joined in 2005 as a Software Development Engineer. She was part of the small team that launched the original Kindle device and remained in the Devices organization for the subsequent 8 years. She joined the nascent Last Mile organization (the logistics business that gets packages through the final steps on their way to customers’ doorsteps) in early 2014 as one of its first employees, and today is responsible for all of Amazon’s Last Mile delivery businesses, including the Delivery Service Partner, Amazon Flex and Hub Delivery programs. In addition, she oversees the Last Mile product and technology teams covering areas such as mapping, routing, capacity planning, pickup points, delivery station and driver experience technologies. Prior to Amazon, Beryl received her undergraduate degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Waterloo in Canada.

Transcript