When Doug Herrington first arrived at Amazon greater than twenty years in the past, he discovered not only a fast-moving e-commerce startup, however a tradition wrapped in what felt like a company creed.
“I felt like I had joined a cult,” Herrington stated on a latest episode of Study and Be Curious with Doug Herrington, Amazon’s inner podcast. He had joined Amazon in 2005 because the vice chairman of consumables, in accordance with his LinkedIn, working up the ranks to CEO of worldwide Amazon shops by 2022.
“I told my wife, ‘I don’t understand what’s going on,” he recalled. Herrington isn’t the one Amazon worker to explain the corporate that method, particularly in its early days. A 2001 Wired characteristic titled “Inside the Cult of Amazon” quoted a former worker who described staff as being “brainwashed” into adoring Bezos and embracing 20-hour workdays.
However Herrington in the end noticed his preliminary skepticism as a ceremony of passage—one which made him a greater chief. And he noticed it as a method for Bezos to “get this whole company to row in one direction.”
Nonetheless, the corporate’s now-famous 16 Management Rules aimed toward defining “how we want our leaders to make decisions, and behave, and work with each other, and solve problems when they’re at their best” at first felt like an excessive amount of, Herrington admitted.
Over time, Herrington noticed the ability in Bezos’ message and the way that cultural playbook in the end turned Amazon’s id.
“I learned the power of using culture to get everybody on the same page. It just reduces friction if you know where everybody’s coming from,” Herrington stated. “And we do it through these Leadership Principles.”
Herrington additionally clarified Bezos’ management ideas weren’t like the ten Commandments etched in stone. In actual fact, Herrington stated most of the ideas didn’t even get written down till 2002, about eight years after the corporate was based.
“So Jeff didn’t come down from the mountaintop with these leadership principles carved in stone,” Herrington stated. “We wrote them down primarily so that we could start teaching them to other people, and teaching them to all the new people at Amazon.”
Now Herrington sees the ideas—from buyer obsession and bias for motion to dive deep and have spine—as a unifying language that retains Amazon’s roughly 1.5 million staff aligned.
How Bezos’ ideas turned Amazon’s tradition
Bezos’s personal writings—particularly his letters to shareholders over the many years—emphasize most of the identical themes as his 16 Management Rules: relentless buyer focus, long-term pondering, an obsession with invention, and a readiness to “work backwards” from what clients really want.
Steve Anderson, creator of The Bezos Letters: 14 Rules to Develop Your Enterprise Like Amazon, stated Bezos’ management ideas constantly underpinned Amazon’s technique because it scaled from a garage-based startup to the world’s second-largest firm.
“As I studied the letters, I realized Bezos had ‘hidden in plain sight’ how he had grown Amazon by taking intentional and calculated risks,” Anderson stated. “I discovered there were recurring themes (principles) that any business could use to grow like Amazon.”
Past Herrington, present Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has prioritized educating and explaining Bezos’ ideas internally, even launching video explanations of every one to assist staff interpret them. He even admits even after almost three many years on the firm he’s nonetheless mastering them to this present day.
“I’m still working on it,” Jassy stated in Amazon’s Management Rules Defined video collection. “People change, competitive dynamics change, products change, technology changes. The Leadership Principles are something you have to constantly work at. When they’re applied well, they’re powerful.”
What critics say about Bezos’ ideas
Whereas Amazon’s high management clearly embraces Bezos’ management ideas, they haven’t been universally accepted or embraced. As Amazon has grown into a company behemoth, the ideas are more and more woven into promotions, efficiency evaluations, and office coverage, a shift that has drawn pushback.
However as a result of Jassy claims he hates paperwork a lot, he, in 2024, introduced a plan to extend the ratio of staff to managers. This was a call based mostly on Amazon’s disdain for inefficiency and having too many stakeholders concerned in decision-making.
“The reality is that the [senior leadership] team and I hate bureaucracy,” Jassy stated throughout a 2024 inner name, the identical assembly the place he addressed worker questions on Amazon’s strict return-to-work coverage, a spokesperson confirmed to Fortune. “One of the reasons I’m still at this company is because it’s not a political or bureaucratic place.”
Bezos’ legacy, and the way forward for tradition
For all the controversy, Bezos’ management ideas stay one of the distinctive artifacts of the founder’s legacy. They symbolize an effort to engineer tradition with the identical intentionality the corporate engineers its provide chain or cloud-computing companies. In an organization that has by no means shied away from daring experiments and disruption, the ideas are as a lot about how choices are made as what is set.
Herrington, as soon as bemused by how cult-like the ideas appeared, now views them as an indispensable information for tradition at Amazon—and one which’s stood the take a look at of time and can proceed to take action.
“As my colleague Russ [Grandinetti] says: ‘There 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,’” Herrington stated. “But 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.”
