The Secret of Two Pizza Teams

Pizza is delicious, and also the key to faster decision making

How much pizza can you eat? On a normal outing, I eat two slices. If I am feeling hungry, I might go for three. When I was on the wrestling team in high school, I could polish off an entire large pie myself after making weight. I do not recommend that.

Pizza has been on my mind lately, probably because I just came back from Italy. But mostly it is because pizza is a wholly separate food group for me. There are the standard food groups like meat, dairy, grain, and fruits & vegetables, and then there is the pizza group. In fact, pizza is more than a food. It is an entire religion.

I am always finding new ways to explore my gluttonous desire for this culinary delight. For example, one thing I recently learned is that the best pizza in the US is in New Haven, Connecticut. This is not an uniformed opinion, but a fundamental law of nature like gravity or thermodynamics. I tested this myself recently on a trip to the pizza capital, a sacrifice I made for the sake of food science.

Why yes, I absolutely did eat both of these delicious New Haven pizzas.

The topic of pizza came up again in the more mundane world of social media. With Jeff Bezos passing the mantle of CEO of Amazon to Andy Jassy, there has been much reflection on his over two decades of leadership wisdom that has guided Amazon from scrappy bookseller to an eCommerce and technology giant.

What people on the outside often remark on is Amazon’s incredible agility and speed of execution. Even as a global company with now over one million employees, Amazon manages to grow, explore new markets, and release ever more product at faster cycles.

That speed that observers talk about comes from the ability to make fast decisions. Jeff Bezos has talked about decision making on multiple occasions:

“Speed matters in business — plus a high-velocity decision-making environment…