Dissecting Amazon Leadership Principles (LPs) for Amazonians & Non-Amazonians
Chat with David Anderson (Former Amazon GM & Tech Director, now Author of the Scarlet Ink Newsletter)
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I wrote part of one of the Amazon Leadership Principles (LPs) and David Anderson wrote one of the most popular posts on the web about the whole list.
Dave came to work for me in his final role at Amazon (in Amazon Games) kicking off a friendship that has continued to flourish as we both enjoy teaching and writing on career advice in our post-Amazon lives. Dave is now the author of the popular Scarlet Ink newsletter.
We teamed up for a deep discussion on the LPs and other leadership topics. Watch our chat below (live attendance was exclusive to our paid newsletter subscribers).
Listen now on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
Takeaways
The goal of the LPs (from Jeff Bezos’ perspective) was to distribute good behavior and good decision-making. The LPs focus a lot on how you work and how you choose what to do. It is how the company operates and Amazonians use the LPs every day.
Amazon integrated and pushed the LPs into the company through 3 main mechanisms: Interviews, Annual Reviews, and Promotion Documents.
Interviews. When 4-5 people are chosen to interview someone (creating the interview loop), each person is usually assigned 2-3 LPs (thus 8-10 of the LPs get covered) and the interviewer’s goal is to figure out if the candidate meets your LPs (e.g. do they think this way, can they think this way, is there evidence they’ve acted in this way).
Annual reviews. Part of your review is your peers saying which LPs you do the best on and which you can do more of.
Promotion documents. Part of all levels and more so at the leadership level.
LPs are not only for people managers. Amazon’s viewpoint is everyone is a leader and the LPs are about individual conduct.
Dave’s favorite LP is “Ownership”. Because it is overriding, meaning if you are an owner you will act in and exhibit the other LPs. For example, if you pride yourself as an owner, you will be frugal (careful how you spend resources), and you will think big (not thinking about shipping the project two weeks from now but what the team and business will look like three years from now). It is also how Dave likes to be managed.
Ethan’s favorite LP (outside of “Ownership”) is “Bias for Action.” Even as Amazon grew, the company was internally designed for speed and favored risk-taking. If you sum up Ethan’s career advice in one word, it will be “Proactive.”
What is subtlety listed in the LP “Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit” is “Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit…or please resign.” Put your badge on the table if you cannot commit to this. Jeff Bezos hated social cohesion and wanted you to fight tooth and nail (disagree) but ultimately if a leader did make a decision you did not agree with, also fight tooth and nail to make it happen. For example, every year Amazon has a list of “unregretted attrition” where managers stack rank their team, as the manager you can provide all the data and arguments why everyone on your team is high performance and must not get fired (disagree), but when your manager says “I understand, but I need to know the weakest person on your team, so I need the list” you then get on board (commit).
The Amazon deal is straightforward: We will pay you relatively well, we will put you on challenging work, and if you do well at it, we will give you more of both those things. You will grow as fast as you could possibly grow because Amazon will keep giving you things if you do not fail, explode, or say “no.” Some companies operate where the manager decides what is a full plate for their team whereas at Amazon, it is your responsibility to decide and vocalize it.
To effectively manage up to a senior leader (Amazon VP or SVP) or hold them in line to LPs, get on the same page on goals, and understand what they are thinking. Get clarity and alignment on priorities, worries, and what each person cares about. Know that sometimes leaders get busy, distracted, or lack information. You can honestly and politely ask “Why is there such a rush on this project? I understand Bias for Action but it seems like you have a lot more energy about it, why is that?” (ask what are they thinking and are they aware of A and B).
I hope this advice helps you plan ahead for your career. If you’re looking for help growing in your organization and leveling up your career, consider my course, Stuck at Senior Manager - How to Break Through to Executive. The next live cohort is September 7-8 (Sat-Sun for busy professionals) and we already have 100+ leaders enrolled from Amazon, Google, Apple, Meta, Walmart, Microsoft, Figma, Citi Bank, McKinsey, Accenture, Dell, Home Depot, Reddit, Flipkart, Uber, Coinbase, Salesforce, NVIDIA, Netflix, and more.
If you’re currently in an executive role (e.g. Director, Sr. Director, VP) and want to optimize performance or advance further, consider my other course, Cracking the C-suite 'How to Get and Master Key Executive Roles' which I co-teach with Sue Bethanis (Executive Coach & CEO/Founder of Mariposa Leadership) who has coached 400+ tech executives and was my best coach when I was an Amazon VP. The next live cohort is October 5-6 and will be capped to 50 executives.
You can learn from the Amazon LPs no matter where you work.
Here are more examples.
The LPs give everyone working at a company a shared shorthand for making decisions. They are like "design patterns" if you understand software - a shorthand form allowing you to reference a significant concept in a few words.
They set a style for the business. Many types of business practices can succeed, but what does not succeed is chaos. A business can have different principles than Amazon and do very well, but a business with no real directional cohesion is much more likely to get paralyzed by differing opinions. The Amazon LPs allow forward progress, and often simply moving forward, even in an imperfect direction, is better.
The LPs can be abused (read more here). They can be dumbed down and applied simplistically without thought. An example of this is turning "Frugality" into just saying no to all expenses. This may look frugal, but it blocks useful progress. Sometimes you need to spend money to make money.
The LPs can also be weaponized (read more here). An example of this is Earn Trust, where any time you disagree with me I say that you are losing my trust to try to force you to agree with me. I am wrongly claiming that any contradiction of my ideas makes you untrustworthy as a partner. Another example is Insist on the Highest Standards, usually wielded when stopping a product launch or promotion, responding with something along the lines of “I just care about high standards so much, I just have to say no.”
To handle this, you must call it out when you see it. You can say: “Let’s decouple whether or not what you’re saying is correct, XYZ LP has a limit (they all have limits), let’s talk about the actual subject and not the LP.”
The LP can retroactively define why we care about things but it should not be the thing that makes the choice.
Despite these flaws, you can learn a ton from the Amazon LPs, either deciding how you want to adopt them or deciding how you want to be different in specific ways.
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