Leading and Innovating with Leadership Principles

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.

There are many formats these principles can take: vision statements that articulate a company’s long-term objectives and what it aspires to be; missions that define the business and its focus; statements of purpose that help a company align roadmaps with its strategy.

These different forms of principles provide a transparent and codified expression of where—and how—a business will focus its attention, resources, and energy. Companies rightly spend a lot of time thinking them through. Principles convey the core values a company believes in and the belief system it will follow in serving their customers and executing its business.

A company’s principles need to form the bedrock of a culture of innovation, and a touchstone that leaders and their teams can come back to daily to help them make better decisions quickly, and at scale. They provide consistency in aligning the workforce to the top business priorities and its customers.

But in order to be truly effective in promoting innovation, these sets of principles can’t just be stated—they need to be used. They can’t simply exist, passively posted on a company website and as placards in conference rooms, occasionally revisited at corporate retreats and employee all-hands meetings. They need to be infused in everything employees do, and leveraged by new hires walking in the door, to teams and their management, to the CEO and their leadership team. Principles need to guide decisions that are made, from day-to-day operations to broad corporate strategic planning.

Establishing this innovative culture through a set of principles is easier at a start-up or small company. Executive leaders, management, and the company’s builders are more accessible and often located more centrally. There is greater opportunity for stakeholders to be together in the same meetings, where a company’s principles can be reinforced face-to-face as decisions are being made in real time.

However, reinforcing principles becomes harder as a company scales. As the business grows and becomes more complex, and as the number of employees swell across different locations and time zones, it is harder to maintain the same energy and emphasis on your principles. The decision-making process that often relies on a company’s founders and senior executives in startup or small business environments becomes weightier—and takes more time—as the business and its operations grow. If there isn’t a purposeful effort and the right mechanisms to help distribute effective, autonomous decision-making, lines of decision-making can become bottlenecks that grind a company’s ability to rapidly innovate to a stand-still.

Amazon is no different, and we went through our own growing pains as the company scaled—geographically and across multiple, diverse businesses. A primary reason why Amazon has been able to maintain our culture of innovation, focusing on customers and working backwards from their needs, is through how we employ Amazon’s Leadership Principles every day.

At Amazon, we hold ourselves and each other accountable for demonstrating 16 Leadership Principles in our daily actions. Our Leadership Principles have a few accompanying sentences that not only describe what each means, but how they should be practically applied. They guide how Amazon approaches business decisions, how we want our leaders to lead, and how we keep the customer at the center of every decision we make.

Many of these Leadership Principles have existed at Amazon from the very start, notably Customer Obsession. The notion of remaining close to your customers, of truly obsessing over their needs and understanding the context behind them, was inherent in Jeff Bezos' very first Letter to Shareholders in 1997, and in Amazon’s mission: to be Earth’s most customer-centric company.

This Leadership Principle states, “Leaders start with the customer, and work backwards.” Ensuring that you remain close to customers and singularly focused on solving their problems helps inspire you to constantly innovate—often in areas you may not have otherwise. At AWS, 90% of what we build is driven by what customers tell us matter to them; the other 10% come from things that may not be directly articulated, but where a deep knowledge of customer needs and pain points allows us to invent new features and services that will surprise and delight them.

While this Leadership Principle acknowledges the need to pay attention to competitors and trends, it prioritizes focusing on your customers’ needs over the long term, and creates a call to action of working vigorously every day to earn and keep customer trust.

While Customer Obsession has existed at Amazon since the company’s literal Day 1, other Leadership Principles have been introduced over time, such as Learn and Be Curious, which was added in 2015. This principle states that “leaders are never done learning and always seek to improve themselves. They are curious about new possibilities and act and explore them.” A CEO’s bold leadership can help set the tone, encouraging talent to experiment, learn, and iterate new ways to meet—and stay ahead of—customers’ needs.

The ability to be open to learn, adapt, and constantly grow your capability to satisfy customer needs also helps keep a company agile in an ever-changing environment. It better equips you to not just respond to what customers want, but proactively invent on their behalf.

All 16 Leadership Principles are used every day across Amazon—by executive leaders and builders alike—as both a unifying belief system and a tool to make rapid, quality decisions. Leadership Principles are easily distributable, and can help guide thinking towards the right direction more often. Are we Thinking Big enough? Is the solution truly Customer Obsessed and based on something we know customers need? Did we Dive Deep sufficiently to inform direction and know that we are driving the most important customer benefit? Are there elements we can move fast with Bias for Action to safely validate assumptions and iterate? Are we Insisting on Highest Standards and raising the bar with the customer experience we are creating? Are we ensuring we Are Right, A Lot and seeking diverse perspectives and disconfirming tightly-held assumptions with the right data?

Amazon’s Leadership Principles are great tools that help us foster autonomous decision making as the company scales, and helps leaders lead beyond their immediate line of sight. However the use of Leadership Principles isn’t confined to just making decisions at Amazon. They are embedded in our hiring processes: we give them to candidates prior to their interview, and evaluate their examples by how their decision-making and problem-solving demonstrates different Leadership Principles. They are used to frame the feedback we give each other—for the Think Big ideas we present, or in growth and development conversations between managers and employees.

In this way, Leadership Principles become a common vernacular that help frame conversations where decisions are hard and complex. They force us to look at problems from many different angles, and balance priorities at the time we need to make a decision. They provide a way for us to challenge and test assumptions, foster diverse perspectives, and raise our own bar on behalf of our customers.

It is not just what the Leadership Principles say, but how we utilize them—every day, in myriad ways—that make them an integral part of the fabric of Amazon’s culture. Developing your company’s own principles and creating purposeful, meaningful ways they can be used will help you create an enduring culture of innovation that grows with your business, and allows you to drive customer-centric innovation at scale and speed.