Article | 7 min read

Leading and Innovating with Leadership Principles

Leading a company's direction and focus

CEOs often implement a set of principles that define their company’s culture, values, and how they will achieve the business’s long-term objectives. CEOs are responsible for leading a company’s direction from the top-down, and for setting the priorities and focus of the business—a set of guiding principles often help express their strategic aims and galvanize employees around a unified purpose.

Leading a company's direction and focus

The DNA of leadership principles

To name a few, some of Amazon’s leadership principles include: customer obsession, invent and simplify, learn and be curious, deliver results

Hear from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy shares his perspective on the 16 Leadership Principles and how they are applied at Amazon.

About the author

Daniel Slater, Worldwide Head, Culture of Innovation, AWS

Dan Slater oversees Culture of Innovation as a part of AWS’s Digital Innovation team. Dan joined Amazon in 2006 to launch the company’s first direct-to-customer digital content offerings. He helped launch the Kindle device and Kindle’s global content marketplaces, as well as Amazon’s self-publishing service, Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). After overseeing the digital business of the top 60 trade publishers, Dan led content acquisition, demand generation, and vendor relations for KDP.

Daniel Slater, Worldwide Head, Culture of Innovation, AWS