Degenerate Leadership Principles
Degenerate Leadership Principles
I recently wrote about how the Amazon Leadership Principles (LPs) are often Weaponized.
In this follow-up, I write about a parallel problem, where a degenerate or overly simplistic form of the LPs is applied.
I consider the use of an LP to be Degenerate when it is applied without discernment in the easiest possible way, often due to a lack of effort or laziness by the user.
Here are examples I have seen and what to do about them.
First, I love the Amazon LPs.
They help give the company a single consistent internal language.
They also fit one description of a sustainable culture from the book Good to Great, which states that a culture need not be perfect, it needs to be clear and consistent.
People who fit the culture will stay and those who do not will leave.
The end result is a coherent team.
The book’s example was the RJR Nabisco cigarette company, which at the time had a clear culture of smoking. The smokers stuck together, giving the company an “us versus the world” culture. I would consider this a negative culture…the point is, it worked to give the company coherency towards its goals (selling cigarettes).
I consider the Amazon LPs, while imperfectly used, to be better.
Second, I have pride in the Amazon LP — “Ownership.”
I had the opportunity early in my career to help advocate for and draft the Ownership LP.
The words, “They never say ‘that’s not my job.’” are mine.
I share that story here.
At Amazon, one of the most frequently degenerate LPs has its own unofficial name — “Frupidity.”
This name comes when the Frugality LP is applied without an eye toward value and is implemented as “do not spend money.”
It is easy (if lazy) to try to look frugal by saying no to most or all expenses.
The most extreme example of Frupidity I saw before Amazon was at Lycos.
This Internet boom company had a controller who “saved” money by having three piles on his desk:
A purchase request, when received, went into pile one, where it sat.
If you came back, asking, yelling, or begging for what you needed, he moved it to pile two.
If time went by and you repeated this process, it moved to pile three.
Finally, if you came back a third time, predicting the end of the world without the resources, he would reluctantly take it from pile three and order it.
To be clear on the odd chance that this controller from the late 90s is still alive (I honestly have no idea of his name), I rarely needed to buy things in my role and only heard this from others who did. So maybe it is just his fearsome image.
But it makes a good story of a process gone wrong, an attempt not to actually evaluate the merit of a request but merely to use friction as a filter.
At Amazon, I saw this in person in another way.
A very good boss of mine, someone I respect immensely overall, was asked if our team, which had been together for over two years and had shipped several products, could get team coffee mugs.
At the time, part of the definition of Frugality at Amazon said that we didn’t spend money on T-shirts, which do not help customers.
Rather than buck this trend, he bought the coffee mugs with his own money.
Whether or not he was “Frupid”, he was coerced by the culture into an unnatural act.
A tight-knit, successful team wanted coffee mugs for crying out loud.
This is a small, almost trivial cost.
It would have been repaid 1,000 times if it helped retain or motivate one employee.
One can make the argument, of course, that the lack of corporate swag was a valuable symbol of true frugality.
Perhaps you find this argument compelling; I do not.
What do you do when you run into a principle or policy that is being applied without much thought?
While the main driver behind weaponizing LPs is getting your way, the main driver behind degenerate applications is laziness (intellectually oversimplifying easy rules by not bothering to think about what they mean) or wanting to avoid needing to do work yourself (if the LP is soft and easy to meet, I do not have to do much).
The best way to work through a conflict around this is first to try to politely raise a more thorough or nuanced interpretation. Since the motive is effort avoidance, it can help to explain what is in it for the listener to spend the money, put in the effort, or consider another viewpoint.
Whenever someone is stuck on an oversimplified rule or model, the key is to get them to consider new evidence. Doing this often requires encouraging them to explore a new possibility.
One phrase another good manager taught me.
“What would need to be true…?”
Examples of using this phrase:
“What would need to be true for you to approve this expense?”
“What would need to be true for you to support Fred’s promotion?”
This question works because people are often able to answer a hypothetical — it’s not threatening to answer what it would take.
Once you have a discussion going, it is easier to make progress vs. if you get locked into a positional debate (“Yes we should, no we shouldn’t, YES we should!”).
In the end, all guidelines and principles are only as good as the thought being used to apply them.
They can help prompt us, but like any other sort of pattern, we must do the final work to apply them to our specific circumstances.
Audience Insights
I have consolidated additional ideas worth considering from my LinkedIn audience, including:
Note that Amazon LPs are not holy scripture — they have been rewritten, added, and removed. This indicates that the LPs represent the best thinking at the time, but that they can be updated when new information is presented. Be willing to change your mind when presented with new information.
Find balance in company LPs and the tension between them. If you are unable to identify the tension, it is a signal that you are viewing the problem from a single dimension.
As a leader, know that how you interpret LPs and put them in action has a disproportionate impact on how your team learns and implements the LPs. Double click on educating yourself and your team on how to appropriately exercise LPs.
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I know someone who worked at Amazon while you were there, at a sortation center. They told me that despite a big vinyl decal plastered on the wall there, none of the so-called managers actually followed those principles; they used them against people to prevent them from getting promoted, claiming they had broken rule in the handbook, even going so far as to gossip about them in emails to each other (which they discovered by suing the company for discrimination).
That employee figured out a way to reduce errors that supposedly cost the company a lot of money every time it happened, which they said was an average of 15 times per day, per site. So, he figured out how to eliminate those errors and get the job done more efficiently, which would save the company more than $84 million in the first year alone across all sites. All they had to do is change one thing.
But that person's manager refused to even bring it to their manager, claiming it would cost money, even though it would have cost a few pennies (if that), while saving $84 million or more. In the end, Amazon did nothing, and those errors are still happening every day.
Yep, that's some brilliant management there.
Amazon is not a good company to work for unless you're in management being overpaid for doing no actual work that you're asking everyone else to do for a pittance. Amazon hires and promotes people into management positions who don't even have the minimum qualifications for a job posting, but if a mere Associate applied for any job, they'd have to meet every single qualification to even be considered. So instead of it being about qualifications, it's really all about who's sleeping with whom.