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When Doug Herrington first arrived at Amazon more than two decades ago, he found not just a fast-moving e-commerce startup, but a culture wrapped in what felt like a corporate creed.<\/p>\n
\u201cI felt like I had joined a cult,\u201d Herrington said on a recent episode of Learn and Be Curious with Doug Herrington<\/em>, Amazon\u2019s internal podcast. He had joined Amazon in 2005 as the vice president of consumables, according to his LinkedIn, working up the ranks to CEO of worldwide Amazon stores by 2022.<\/p>\n \u201cI told my wife, \u2018I don\u2019t understand what\u2019s going on,\u201d he recalled. Herrington isn\u2019t the only Amazon employee to describe the company that way, especially in its early days. A 2001 Wired<\/em> feature titled \u201cInside the Cult of Amazon\u201d quoted a former employee who described workers as being \u201cbrainwashed\u201d into adoring Bezos and embracing 20-hour workdays.<\/p>\n But Herrington ultimately saw his initial skepticism as a rite of passage\u2014one that made him a better leader. And he saw it as a way for Bezos to \u201cget this whole company to row in one direction.\u201d<\/p>\n Still, the company\u2019s now-famous 16 Leadership Principles aimed at defining \u201chow we want our leaders to make decisions, and behave, and work with each other, and solve problems when they\u2019re at their best\u201d at first felt like too much, Herrington admitted.\u00a0<\/p>\n Over time, Herrington saw the power in Bezos\u2019 message and how that cultural playbook ultimately became Amazon\u2019s identity.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI learned the power of using culture to get everybody on the same page. It just reduces friction if you know where everybody\u2019s coming from,\u201d Herrington said. \u201cAnd we do it through these Leadership Principles.\u201d<\/p>\n Herrington also clarified Bezos\u2019 leadership principles weren\u2019t like the 10 Commandments etched in stone. In fact, Herrington said many of the principles didn\u2019t even get written down until 2002, about eight years after the company was founded.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cSo Jeff didn\u2019t come down from the mountaintop with these leadership principles carved in stone,\u201d Herrington said. \u201cWe wrote them down primarily so that we could start teaching them to other people, and teaching them to all the new people at Amazon.\u201d<\/p>\n Now Herrington sees the principles\u2014from customer obsession and bias for action to dive deep and have backbone\u2014as a unifying language that keeps Amazon\u2019s roughly 1.5 million employees aligned.<\/p>\n Bezos\u2019s own writings\u2014especially his letters to shareholders over the decades\u2014emphasize many of the same themes as his 16 Leadership Principles: relentless customer focus, long-term thinking, an obsession with invention, and a readiness to \u201cwork backwards\u201d from what customers actually need.\u00a0<\/p>\n Steve Anderson, author of The Bezos Letters: 14 Principles to Grow Your Business Like Amazon, <\/em>said Bezos\u2019 leadership principles consistently underpinned Amazon\u2019s strategy as it scaled from a garage-based startup to the world\u2019s second-largest company.<\/p>\n \u201cAs I studied the letters, I realized Bezos had \u2018hidden in plain sight\u2019 how he had grown Amazon by taking intentional and calculated risks,\u201d Anderson said. \u201cI discovered there were recurring themes (principles) that any business could use to grow like Amazon.\u201d<\/p>\n Beyond Herrington, current Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has prioritized teaching and explaining Bezos\u2019 principles internally, even launching video explanations of each one to help employees interpret them. He even admits even after nearly three decades at the company he is still mastering them to this day.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m still working on it,\u201d Jassy said in Amazon\u2019s Leadership Principles Explained video series. \u201cPeople change, competitive dynamics change, products change, technology changes. The Leadership Principles are something you have to constantly work at. When they\u2019re applied well, they\u2019re powerful.\u201d<\/p>\n While Amazon\u2019s top leadership clearly embraces Bezos\u2019 leadership principles, they haven\u2019t been universally accepted or embraced. As Amazon has grown into a corporate behemoth, the principles are increasingly woven into promotions, performance reviews, and workplace policy, a shift that has drawn pushback.\u00a0<\/p>\n But because Jassy claims he hates bureaucracy so much, he, in 2024, announced a plan to increase the ratio of employees to managers. This was a decision based on Amazon\u2019s disdain for inefficiency and having too many stakeholders involved in decision-making.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe reality is that the [senior leadership] team and I hate bureaucracy,\u201d Jassy said during a 2024 internal call, the same meeting where he addressed employee questions about Amazon\u2019s strict return-to-work policy, a spokesperson confirmed to Fortune.<\/em> \u201cOne of the reasons I\u2019m still at this company is because it\u2019s not a political or bureaucratic place.\u201d<\/p>\n For all the debate, Bezos\u2019 leadership principles remain one of the most distinctive artifacts of the founder\u2019s legacy. They represent an effort to engineer culture with the same intentionality the company engineers its supply chain or cloud-computing services. In a company that has never shied away from bold experiments and disruption, the principles are as much about how decisions are made as what is decided.<\/p>\n Herrington, once bemused by how cult-like the principles seemed, now views them as an indispensable guide for culture at Amazon\u2014and one that\u2019s stood the test of time and will continue to do so.<\/p>\n \u201cAs my colleague Russ [Grandinetti] says: \u2018There was never a Camelot where we were perfect. Our leadership principles were always the behaviors that we aspired to live by when we were at our best,\u2019\u201d Herrington said. \u201cBut the way that we do that is we keep on communicating them and talking them and teaching them. And I try to do that every day.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n #Amazon #exec #important #lesson #Jeff #Bezos #power #leadership #principles<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When Doug Herrington first arr… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22992,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[374,2142,446,2922,2141,2137,1055,3989,7486,1124,2892,1609],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22991"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22991"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22991\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/22992"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}How Bezos\u2019 principles became Amazon\u2019s culture<\/h2>\n
What critics say about Bezos\u2019 principles<\/h2>\n
Bezos\u2019 legacy, and the future of culture<\/h2>\n