[Music] the leadership principles here at Amazon have arguably been the most important part of our being able to scale our culture and Company the first 29 years that we've been a company it's helped us grow to the number of people we have and the number of geographies that we're in in the number of diverse businesses that we're in and build together as just one culture and these leadership principles Have been crafted very carefully over many years and you'll note the leadership principles have a number of principles that are complimentary to one another and then some
others that have tension with one another and that's intentional and that's because in life and in work there there are things that are nuanced it's not simple you know how you want to behave but then life gets in the way and you have certain situations where there's at least a number of Factors at play where you have to navigate between them and so it's very much why the leadership principles are not something that you just memorize or that you just study for a couple hours or you try once or twice and you've got them I
think of the leadership principles as a practice it's something you have to see in action it's something you have to see people who've done it a long time how they exercise the leadership principle it's something you Have to try out yourself and see what works and doesn't work it's something you have to ask questions about it's something that you have to practice a lot and you actually it helps to see it in person too where you can feel what it's like in the room when the leadership principles are practiced well or not I've been at
the company now at this point for about 26 and a half years and I'm I'm getting better at the leadership principles I'm still working On it but it's every situation is a little bit different people change competitive Dynamics change products change technology change and so the leadership principles are something you have to constantly work at and when they're applied well they're powerful they're unique to our culture and they're really worth trying to understand better and to practice more so that's what we're going to talk about today customer Obsession so leaders Start with the customer and
work backwards they work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust although leaders pay attention to competitors they obsess over customers I'm intentionally starting with customer Obsession because frankly everything starts with the customer and works backwards from there at Amazon that's the way we think about our business and it's always been true it's always been palpable in the whole time that I've been here and it's part Of what attracted me to Amazon 26 and a half years ago which was you could really feel that this was a culture and a company that not just talked about
doing right by customers but Walk That Walk we're all customers of so many businesses and we all know what we're treated like and typically companies talk about being customer focused but rarely are and I really think Amazon has always been and you've seen it from the beginning up to now all sorts of Examples of that but you know I remember the First full year I was at Amazon one of the big debates that year was whether or not we should have customer reviews on books detail Pages we were a books only retailer at that point
and the debate really was because Publishers didn't want us to have customer reviews because some of them might be negative but the reality is if you're trying to help customers make the best possible decision for themselves on whether they Want a or not having honest customer reviews is incredibly helpful so we decided to have those customer reviews and you can see that customer focus all the way up to today just look at what happened during the pandemic where we had this very uncertain economy where every company in the world including Amazon was trying to save
money however they could most technology companies looked at that environment and said we're going to find a way to extract Every last dollar from our customers in this tight economy Amazon did the opposite in our Computing business in AWS we proactively went to customers and tried to figure out how we could cost optimize for them where they could save money so they could redeploy that money in the future on projects that actually could help their business and they could live to fight another day in a difficult economy that's pretty different and you can see it
in the how we do our our Product development here at the company as well we won't write lines of code until we do the working backwards documents a press release to make sure that if we built the product we know know that it's going to matter for customers and then a frequently asked questions document where we really try and vet ahead of time all the things customers care about what problem are we trying to solve what will customers care most about what will they be most Disappointed about if we launch with this set of of
features what will they love most all the things that make it work for customers that's what we're always trying to figure out now I have also seen over time sometimes people get confused about how competitors are economics come into play when you think about the leadership principle of customer Obsession people wonder well if um am I being customer obsessed if I'm thinking about sustainability and Economics of what I'm doing and you know of course many of us remember in the early 2000s the company Cosmo which promised one-hour delivery of videos to your house they actually
delivered a lot of ice cream to my house too by the way I I really enjoyed the service but it was not economic and the business lasted or year or two and then it was gone you're not really doing right by customers over a long period of time if you get them excited about something That you can't sustain so of course you have to think about economics when you're thinking about what you're building and and then some people ask well am I being customer obsessed if I think about what competitors have offered and try to
address something competitors have put out that customers like and the reality is that if you're trying to build the best possible customer experience you have to be aware of what competitors are doing and if the Competitors build something that we haven't by the way we're very inventive and we're very customer focused but we're not going to build every single new feature the customers love they going to be others that do so as well and if a competitor builds something that customers love we should be aware of it and we should be inspired by it and
think about how we can improve our own customer experience with with what we learn from what competitors have done So we always are going to have to be aware of competitors and economics and building the best customer experience but we're going to spend most of our waking hour is focused on what we know customers care most about and the reality is that everybody at this company has not just the freedom but really the expectation to look at what customers want and figure out how we can be better and better for them every day are right
a lot leaders are right a Lot they have strong judgment and good instincts they seek diverse perspectives and work to disconfirm their beliefs the right a lot leadership principle is very much proxy for judgment and the truth is that you can do a lot of things right but if you make the wrong decisions on really the key questions we have to answer for ourselves for customer experience in the business you're going to have an issue and we operate in high areas of Ambiguity in many of the businesses that Amazon pursues we're the first to Market
or we're inventing in that space or even when we've built a business that works well we're constantly trying to figure out how to keep changing and improving the customer experience so we always deal in areas that have lots of ambiguity lots of noise around it and we have to be great at this company at sifting through all the different noise and finding the signal and what really Matters for customers and I remember when we first put this leadership principle in place people often got it wrong and what people misinterpreted was they thought well if I'm
really great at the leadership principle of being right a lot it means when we're debating something my idea has to be one the one that carries the day because after all I I would be right a lot and the reality is what we're all trying to do is we're trying to get to the best possible Answer for customers whoever's idea it is and so what what we need to do when we're thinking about a hard issue is we need to get the right people in a room the right people to give feedback it's often why
as Leaders we speak last in the room we want everybody's input we want you know and a lot of times in those meetings what a lot of the leaders are doing is they're thinking about what they going in opinion was and they're seeking to try and and find a different Way you know I'm often questioning my close most closely held beliefs on a particular topic to see are they really right is there another way to think about it can we do better for customers and so the key is to get the right people involved and
giving feedback listen to the different perspectives and then think about what is the best possible answer for customers and for the business it doesn't matter if it was your ID or not in many of the best Meetings I'm in I never even have to express an opinion they the team has sorted it out for themselves but all we care about is leaders is getting to the best possible answer for customers that's our job invent and simplified leaders expect and require Innovation and invention from their teams and always find ways to simplify they are externally aware
look for new ideas from everywhere and are not Limited by not invented here as we do new things we accept that we may be misunderstood for long periods of time for a lot of companies who actually make it as a company they get through the startup stage and make it as a company they make it on the strength of a great Innovative idea however for a lot of those companies it actually becomes really difficult to invent something else new and they spend lots of time just iterating in small ways on that Original invention idea that
made them as a business and it's actually difficult to sustain being successful and how Dynamic a world we live in and how fast technology changes if you're not constantly inventing and Reinventing and I think over the 29 years that we've started Amazon thus far we have been very Vigilant and very strong at continuing to invent and simplify across our business and in some cases it's been whole cloth invention you know Pioneering AWS and cloud computing is a good example of that or pioneering a a digital book reader or a you know a a device that
does natural language understanding and automatic speech recognition um like what we did with devices for Alexa is another example and in many other cases what we've done instead of whole cloth invention is just completely reinvented our existing business and the customer experience associated with it and a really good Example of that is our Market Place business so in the late 90s or so what we noticed being externally aware was that customers were really responding well to companies like eBay and half.com that had a lot of third-party sellers who were offering really broad selection and a
variety of price points to customers and we debated very animatedly inside the company whether we should have a Marketplace offering and the reasons that people were resistant to Doing so at the time were in part because we had all these relationships that we had set up with Distributors and Publishers and we didn't know whether they would be so keen and US allowing third-party sellers in the marketplace or on our website and then we also just couldn't really believe that anybody else particularly third party sellers would take care of customers as well as we did and
so we really fought this and and eventually we decided that we were Going to build a Marketplace offering because at the end of the day having much broader selection for customers and lower prices was better for customers and we're always going to shade on what we think customers want most then we really struggled with the right implementation and what we started with was trying to build an auctions website like eBay and that was a complete met too offering that failed miserably and then we said okay we'll take all our Thirdparty seller selection and we'll put
it in a separate area of our website that we called zops and that's where all the third party selection will be but of course that turned out to be a cold ass back in a place where nobody wanted to go to and it wasn't until we came up with the simplifying assumption that we will have all our thirdparty selection on the same detail Pages as our first party retail selection where all the traffic was which by the way in Retrospect seems blindingly obvious but the time was a real aha for us until we made that
simplifying assumption we did not have a Marketplace business and once we did we actually found the marketplace offering really took off and that turned out to be a really good decision for customers um because they got much broader selection and even lower prices and for our business because about 65% of the units we sell today are Marketplace items so we have to Constantly be pushing ourselves to invent and reinvent what's possible for customers think big thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy leaders create and communicate a bold direction that inspires results they think differently and look
around corners for ways to serve customers all of us have to be looking around Co Corners we cannot be content with where we are part of being a great inventor is being able to look around corners and you have to Constantly be asking what are the next big breakthroughs for customers what is a customer problem that needs solving look at technology and and the technology that's around the corner how is that going to change the customer experience what are other companies going to do that we know customers are going to love where we're going to
want to be there first and we're going to want to deliver that for customers earlier if you want to build a company That lasts over a hundred years that lasts all of us you cannot run the same playbook for decades at a time and what's interesting is even though that makes perfect sense to most people it still tends to be hard for people to change to pursue a different tack than what they've been taking to take risks and that's where leaders who are great at the think big leadership principle are so important and so important
to our company and so important in business and If you look at the goals that we've taken if you look at things like for years and years the way people expect to get products from our e-commerce business was over many days and taking that to a a model of no more than two days and then taking that to more often one day and then taking that to same day and eventually with drones and what we're doing with prime a we we should be able to take it into a couple hours or less that's very different
or if you Think about inventing the Next Generation infrastructure technology capability with cloud computing and AWS or if you think about looking at the 400 to 500 million households in this world that do not have Broadband capabilities and giving them that connectivity or if you think about building the world's most helpful personal assistant or if you think about how we can reinvent the consumption of Automotive Products or if you think about what has been a hopeless Area in this country for many years in healthcare and trying to reinvent that customer experience these are bold initiatives
that are not simple to do and these types of initiatives require thinking big and it's it's what you do if you want to serf customers better and it's part of what make not only makes Amazon unique but also gives us a unique impact in the world dive deep leaders operate at all levels stay connected to the details Audit frequently and are skeptical when metrics and anecdotes differ no task is beneath them you could argue that there is a bit of tension between the Strategic part of think big and the detail orientation of dive deep and
often times people will say well which do you want you know do you want the Strategic part or do you want the detail part and the answer of course is yes we want both Amazon is unique from other companies and that we expect our people To not only be strategic but to be willing to roll up their sleeves and be great at getting into the details there are so many people who can fill up loads of whiteboards around office rooms um with great ideas but who don't know how to get the details of those ideas
right and the reality it is that the details of any idea are what matters most that's what people actually see what customers actually see it's part of by the way why the narrative format that we write Papers and communicate in and the working backwards documents are so useful because it's you know whereas in a PowerPoint you can speak at a super high level and you don't have to get into the details it is hard to fake the details in a narrative and getting the details right really matters every every product every business that I have
ever been a part of or seen in Amazon have been made or broken by how great we were at getting the details right for Customers good leaders find mechanisms to inspect and audit the details and to understand anecdotes and the right teams understand that the leaders who are who who are looking at what they're doing and working with them on the details are doing so to help them to help them be right a lot and Achieve great results for customers and then the other piece is that with anecdotes there are often times especially at our
size where you have These big metrics I'll take an example if you ever look at operational performance metrics things like performance against um uh service level agreements or error rates or latency you they're they're measured across really large numbers and they can look perfectly reasonable and then when you actually get into the details of it you find well you hear this anecdote that this customer was unhappy about something or you have a friend who told You that this didn't work out for them or you get an email from a customer who says why is it
is this the case and when you actually follow those anecdotes you find that there actually is a problem that may not be showing up in the broader metric because the we we cover so many people they don't register in the metric but at our scale even a 1% impact or half a percent impact is millions of people so follow the anecdotes inspect the details because It's where you often find the real issues that can impact customers insist on the highest standards leaders have relentlessly high standards many people may think these standards are unreasonably High leaders
are continually raising the bar and drive their teams to deliver highquality products services and processes leaders ensure that defects do not get sent down the line and the problems are fixed so they stay fixed customers have very high Expectations of us and they should and by the way it's where we've set the bar and in this day and age it's it's it's essential it's it's so easy in this day and age for customers to switch to change the internet makes that super simple and gives customers very good information and it means that you can't rest
on what you've done for the last 10 years the last 20 years historically we have had very high standards perhaps unreasonably high but it's the right Level for what we're trying to accomplish and in my opinion having high standards is one of the most critical under underpinnings for teams I've constantly seen it Amazon I've seen it at Amazon I've seen it with friends I've seen it with with all sorts of kids and organizations I work with higher expectations lead to better results and as Leaders here and as individual contributors here as the business grows and
is the scope of what you all work on Grows you can't be in every meeting and that means if you're able to in the meetings you're in set the expectations set the standards High model what good looks like it's highly leveraged because it means that in the meetings that you can't be in all the people who see you model it in the other meetings you're in can take that to those meetings and can spread it to the rest of the organization during the pandemic I feel like most companies had to relax their Standards a little
bit just to be able to get through what was such a difficult time and and probably for us too and I think that we've all been fighting the last couple years to get back to those almost unreasonable standards that we had for several years and I would just say we've made a lot of progress but keep fighting that is a fight worth fighting it's it's what customers expect to us from us and it's where they're going to gravitate toward the companies That keep increasing what's possible for customers and have those really high expectations deliver best
for customers bias for Action speed matters in business many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study we value calculated risk taken speed disproportionately matters in every business at every stage of the business you're in in every industry segment that you're in at every size of company that you're in unless you have a Monopoly and I don't know companies that exist as monopolies anymore speed really matters and there are some companies who get to a stage where they just believe they can't be fast and I saw this a lot in my last
job when I was managing the AWS business I met with many Enterprise CEOs who said look you don't understand we can't move fast anymore we have security concerns we have compliance concerns concerns we've gotten really big we have a culture that's slow and The reality is that isn't true speed is not pre-ordained it is a leadership and a culture decision and if you want to organize and prioritize and you value speed you can move quickly even if you historically haven't and so you you know you have to think about decisions in a certain way most
decisions that any organization takes can be characterized as either oneway door or two-way door decisions and the the thing to think about is imagine walking through a door There are certain doors you can walk through where if you walk in the room and you've made a mistake you can walk right back through that door and no harm and those are two-way doors and then there is a smaller number of decisions where if you walk through that door maybe you can walk back through the door maybe you can't walk back through the door it would be
very hard to walk back through that door and those are one way do our decisions the overwhelming Majority of decisions that we make all the time here at Amazon are two-way door decisions and those decisions should be made at the team level and you should make them quickly you should be thoughtful about them I wouldn't make them in a hairbrained way but you should make them quickly and if you get it wrong walk back through that door one way door decisions as I said are going to be a very small number of those and those
you should take time to think Through carefully but most are two-way door decisions then you also have to have the right mindset and the right urgency about decisions don't take weeks to get done what could be done in days or hours and by the way that sounds super obvious and you would be surprised how often you find teams that take weeks to get things done that could be done in days or hours you have to have this idea in your head that we live in a world of closing Windows and we had this um for
the first many number of years of Amazon I think we still have in lots of places but where there's a closing window there's a land rush and if you think about the areas in which we are building businesses and customer experiences we are competing against the most well-funded capable talented companies who are all pursuing the same types of things that we're going after these are races and so you have to think of it Like that like we are pursuing Clos closing windows types of opportunities and you want to show up every day every week thinking
about how when I leave this week will my customers be better off than when I started the week now is there a tension between having the highest standards and having a bias for Action yes there can be a tension because the reality is in moving fast you can't launch a a subpar customer experience by the way launching a subpar Customer experience also breaks the customer Obsession leadership principle and so just just like I said earlier leadership principles inherently have tension in them because you actually want to be very um proficient and fantastic for customers across
a lot of dimensions and sometimes those Dimensions will will intersect and conflict and part of our job part of the Nuance of leadership principles is to figure out how to find the right balance Between them but you can be fast while still having high standards I've seen it for 29 years at the company so we need to think of ourselves and this is the way I think about the company as being the world's biggest startup and that's the way we need to behave that's the way we need to act and we need to keep asking
ourselves why can't we move faster for customers ownership leaders are owners they think Long-term and don't sacrifice long-term value for short-term results they act on behalf of the entire company Beyond just their own team they never say that's not my job ownership that leadership principle is a mindset and a way to behave and in many ways it's the most attitudinal of all these leadership principles yes it means when you tell your team you've got something that you've got it and that you don't have to be be reminded constantly of getting it Done but it also
is a way of thinking about the business and the company it's more holistic and long term great owners are always asking themselves what would I do if this were my personal money and we used to talk about this um anecdote a lot which is the difference between renters and owners so if you have an apartment and it's Christmas time and you buy a Christmas tree sometimes a renter will actually amazingly nail the Christmas tree into the wood floor you Would never do that if you own that apartment and those wood floors we have to think
like owners I was speaking with a young professional actually just a few weeks ago um and I was asking that person about their new job they don't work at Amazon I was asking them about their new job and and and the store that they work in and um I was asking them if they had any ideas for how they could increase the revenue of the store that they're Working in and they said well I'm not really that interested in that you know I don't get paid more if if I come up with an idea for
more Revenue I don't get a commission on that it's not really my area and I thought that's not ownership by the way this young person will get this is this is a really young person but but my point is that's not how we think about ownership that's not what we want we want people who feel like owners who think about problems More holistically if they see an issue and they don't know if it has an owner to resolve it they find that owner they don't just assume that Sarah or John has it if they see
something that looks like it's half finished or they don't know if there's going to be the right pass off to somebody they make sure that there is that pass off and if there isn't then they take care of it themselves owners Ure the problems are owned that they have a path to resolution and they drive It themselves if needed and when there's a hard problem owners don't punt it for somebody else owners figure out how to pull a group of people together to find the right solution for customers they think about the the issues from
an entire Co company perspective and they think about it long term that's what we want in owners and that's what we expect fality accomplish more with less constraints breed resourcefulness Self-sufficiency and invention there are no extra points for growing headcount budget size or fixed expense when I last did a presentation on leadership principles to a large group of people was about four years ago and when I got to this leadership principle I said frugality is pretty straightforward and on the face of it it is pretty straightforward but as I thought about it over the last
four years we have hired so many new people who come from So many different backgrounds and contexts that I thought it might be useful to just share how we really think about what frugality is there's a reason that we have door desks and we have always had door desks it's a signal to ourselves that we want to be Scrappy that we don't want extra garnishing that we we're trying to be as Frugal as possible there's a reason that our former CFO Mark Peak um famously at an all company meeting said I'll bend over For a
penny because when you build a company whose Foundation was based on a singled digigit operating margin retail business basis points matter all those things matter for a long time people thought we had a real business model disadvantage because we had this retail business that was a high volume relatively low margin business in fact some people may still think we have that disadvantage I think it's an advantage for all sorts of reasons but especially Because constraints breed resourcefulness and invention that has always been true and it also be breeds being great operators of high volume low
margin businesses which very few companies are particularly very few technical companies I saw this fality come into play many times um you know if I go back when we were starting AWS people forget we built S3 which is our simple storage service and ec2 which is our elastic compute cloud with 13 Person teams 13 person teams those were both built and I remember in the early days people would say to us well what do like this is not reasonable to expect to build something great with 13 person teams I'm competing against companies who have teams
10 times the size of to this team and of course those teams built amazing pioneering still leading products because they had to be inventive you Know constraints breed resourcefulness I also remember as we were scaling out AWS which is a huge logistical business that the fact that we had so many people who grew up in our retail business which is a very strong operating high volume relatively low margin business we were better at operating that type of business and finding ways to to be more cost effective for customers than other technology companies when you save
money On everything you do it means you can invest more in giving people customers lower prices and giving them more capabilities now this all seems I think fairly logical particularly if you've lived in this culture for a long time but what's interesting is over the last several years as Amazon has become a much larger company I mean we're a company that has $500 billion do plus of Revenue the numbers get so large that people almost get numb to some of these Numbers I mean I remember when I had to ask for 50 people or a
million dollars it felt like so much money and now I hear sometimes people saying things like well I don't know it's only $100 million or you know to start this idea you know I only need 65 70 people don't get numb to those numbers our very best people our very best teams our very best businesses do more with less and if you work in a business that has more generous margins than our retail Business don't spend more just because you have margins to support it Be Frugal every bit you can save on you can give
back to customers in the form of lower prices and more capabilities and I would also say don't believe that the best way to build your career and to develop your career is to have large teams that is not the case we want and value people who build amazing customer experiences and amazing businesses as leanly as possible that's how we think about great People that's how we're going to think about in our promotion process and that's the way we want to operate together learn and be curious leaders are never done learning and always seek to improve
themselves they are curious about new possibilities and act to explore them this leadership principle is arguably the one that I have seen most differentiate the people I've worked with a really long time and where they have grown their career Substantially versus those that stayed stagnant and I would say that for some people at a certain point and I can't tell you why I have my own thesis but but at a certain point they find it too threatening or too difficult to keep learning and I will tell you that the second you think there's little left
for you to learn is the second that you are unwinding as an individual and as a learning professional you have to be ravenous and hungry to find ways to Learn it's not easy to do even though if you have the right mindset it's quite simple to do you have to look at you have to think about the idea that you don't know everything and that there's a lot to learn and even if you've spent many months or Years Learning a certain area that it may flip upside down very quickly instead of that feeling threatening and
scary you have to think about that as being part of the fun of what you do and by the way our jobs and Our lives would be so much more boring if we knew everything there was to know and so what you have to do is you have to think about you have to be honest at looking at a situation and what customers care about and you have to be um able to self assess and be self-aware what am I doing well and what's the team doing well and what do we need to get better
at and you have to think about what do you want to change and then you actually have to build a real plan to Change there are actually a lot of people I know that are terrific about speaking about how they're going to learn what they've learned and what they're going to change who are really lousy to actually affecting the change you have to both have a plan on how you're going to change and then make that change but that is the difference between often continuing to build great customer experiences and businesses and not and growing
and not try to get Better even a little bit better every single day every single week that you come into work have backbone disagree and commit leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting leaders have conviction and are tenacious they do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion once a decision is determined they commit Hol it at Amazon you are not just empowered To speak up if you think we're doing something wrong for customers of the business you're expected to do so regardless of level
I can tell you that I get a lot of emails all the time from everybody at the company at every level about ideas they have and I value them and I appreciate them I Told You So is an expression that's completely useless at Amazon because it's a failure one way or the other it's either I didn't speak up when I was supposed to speak up and Have backbone or that I'm not fully committing to the decision that we made and disagreeing and committing we have this concept that we've talked about a long time in the
company about social cohesion and social cohesion is this notion that people often will compromise with one another to get along and so the canonical example is you know you look at a ceiling and one person says it's 10 feet and the other person says no it's 14 feet and they say let's compromise It's 12 feet well it's usually not 12 feet you know there's usually some answer that's closer to the truth now most issues that we deal with every day are not as simplii simple as what I just said they're much more complicated much more
nuanced but the point Remains the idea for us is to be truth seeking we're not trying to compromise with one another to make each other feel better or to get along we are trying to get to Truth for what matters To customers that's what we got to make decisions based on and then after whatever debate we have on issues and some issues are so difficult that we debate it for across many meetings and many weeks but once we make that decision we have to as a group disagree and commit and wholly commit to that decision
even if you were on the other side of what got decided to be pursued now this again seems fairly obvious but it's sometimes difficult because we hire Smart people and we hire people who have a lot of mission passion and it's hard to let go of what you think matters most for customers but at a certain point businesses have to make decisions otherwise they can't move they they will be stagnant and once we make a decision we have to all get on board because the the areas that we're pursuing as businesses they have such large
expanses with so many things to solve for customers with so many capable Competitors that we need to focus all our energy rowing the same way so have backbone disagree and commit is a very important leadership principle to be great at earn trust leaders listen attentively speak candidly and treat others respectfully they are vocally self-critical even when doing so is awkward or embarrassing leaders do not believe their or their team's body odor smells of perfume they Benchmark themselves and their teams against the best so people sometimes get this earned trust leadership principle wrong and they sometimes
confuse it with meaning being nice to one another or having social cohesion or not challenging each other in meetings I won't challenge you if you don't challenge me or this person you know isn't trustworthy because they challenge me a group of people that's wrong that's not what we mean what we mean by earn Trust is being honest authentic straightforward listening intently but challenging respectfully if you disagree and then delivering what you said you would so if you want to earn trust if you say you've got something deliver it if you think we're we're doing something
wrong for customers of the business speak up if you own something and it's not going well own it say it's not going well be self-critical and fix it if you think we're not as Good as we're saying we are Benchmark it use data and show us that we're not as good and vice versa sometimes I've seen teams waste time by beating themselves up when they're actually better than they think use the data and show us I'll tell you a short story that's a personal story a little bit embarrassing but but I'll share it that I
think is illustrative back in the would have been in the early 2000s I was co-leading the marketing team and we were presenting Our op1 our operating plan uh to the s team and back then we were still using PowerPoint presentations and we had a slide deck there was 220 slides if you can believe it it was like a six-hour meeting and I was presenting the first 80 slides or something like that and about 10 slides in Jeff interrupts me and he says all your numbers are wrong on this slide and I was taken a back
and I said uh why do you say that and within a few seconds of him starting To dissect these numbers I realized that he was right and that all the numbers on that page were wrong and I was of course um embarrassed and I said you're right those numbers are wrong and he said well why should I believe believe anything else in this presentation if those are wrong and I said well I hope you will because we have 210 more slides in this presentation and you know it turned out that we didn't have any more
errors like that in the rest of the presentation we Got through it and it was it was very good learning experience but I didn't get done with that presentation and I wasn't resentful or mad at Jeff for pointing that out I learned a very valuable lesson on what it means to dive deep and what it means to have ownership over the detail in your presentations and I earn trust by owning it being vocally self-critical and actually getting better and improving it and providing a much better presentation and Account for what was truth the next time
I presented a much broader group strive to be earth's best employer leaders work every day to create a safer more productive High performing more diverse and more just work environment they lead with empathy have fun at work and make it easy for others to have fun leaders ask themselves are my fellow employees growing are they empowered are they ready for what's next leaders have a vision for and commitment to their Employees personal success whether that be at Amazon or elsewhere this is one of our um newer two leadership principles and it's really a leadership principle
that's Broad and could be interpreted lots of different ways and indeed sometimes people do interpret a lot of different ways you know the as a company we can't decide to do to be all things and to do all things for everybody at the company and so there are times when employees will want us to pursue a Certain Tack and and um you know and if we don't do it they say well if you're really earth's best employer you would have done that and of course you can't do all of those things so I thought I
would tell you what I think of as the best possible place to work for employees I think that working at a place who whose mission is to make customers lives easier and better every day is very inspiring not just saying it but doing it walking that walk and then A company that's willing to that not only makes customers lives better and easier every day but that is also able and willing to do it on a very large scale if you think about the number of customers that you impact and then a company that's willing to
invent and to invest to bet it's not as inspiring at least to me to work at a company that's running the same playbook for many years at a time being willing to look at what customers care about and invent in their Behalf is pretty inspiring and then being able to commit to those Investments for long periods of time not running away the first time you see any lack of traction or any problems really working through how to get to the right solution for customers and for the business and then doing all that at a place
where you have a group of people that's smart passionate and motivated and trying to work together as a team and has passion about the mission that We're pursuing together to me that's what constitutes a great place to work and Amazon is very unusual in being so compelling in all those Dimensions now are the things that we can do better for employees to be a better place to work unquestionably and there's there's many of them ranging from um how we can make it even safer and our fulfillment Network for our employees to how we can um
train and and and improve our managers so they develop our our Teammates careers the right way continue to have a more diverse and inclusive uh employee base inste of teammates there's lots we can do to keep getting better we will not be bored anytime soon but I I think it's really I think it's a pretty amazing place to work but with ways that we're going to keep getting better success and scale bring broad responsibility we started in our garage but we're not there anymore we are big we impact the world and we are far from
Perfect we must be humble and thoughtful about even the secondary effects of our actions our local communities planet and future Generations need us to be better every day we must begin each day with the determination to make better do better and be better for our customers our employees our partners and the World At Large and we must end every day knowing we can do even more tomorrow leaders create more than they consume and always leave things better than how They found them I think of this leadership Principle as largely being great community members in the
narrow and Broad communities in which we reside and we have to keep asking ourselves constantly whether the communities in which we reside are better off because we're there and if they're not then we need to take action about that and it's not just the jobs that we bring we bring a lot of jobs to a lot of communities but it's also the other contributions to The fabric of those communities things like affordable housing where we've invested over $ 1.8 billion in affordable housing in you know uh in the Puget Sound area or the Arlington Virginia
area or the Nashville area or helping with the unhoused challenges we have in a lot of our cities if you look in in in The puet Sound area with our partnership with Mary's place I think we're the only Corporation or company that I know that houses families In our corporate buildings we have over 200 family members um housed overnight every night in our in our buildings and over a thousand family members a year it's also helping with food security we've partnered with 35 different cities um uh to serve over 10 million free meals to over
880,000 families in need it's helping with education you our our philanthropic educational efforts have impacted over 3.9 people in nine countries in the past year and our Amazon future Engineer program uh has committed $16 million in over 400 scholarships to students who wouldn't otherwise be able to go to college and pursue a a career in technology or how we use what we can uniquely do to help with World crises if you think about natural disasters we we've delivered over 23 million relief items in 44 unique incidents in this past year these are all things that
we've done across the company to try and be better Community Partners over 150,000 amazonians in this last year have volunteered and efforts that we worked on together so we've always had a lot of individuals across the company who've given back to their communities as a company we waited for several years until we were profitable to to be more involved in our communities but if you look at the last number of years we have really changed how we interact with communities including being the top um Company Giver to the Pu Sound area for the last couple
years hire and develop the best leaders raise the performance bar with every High ear in promotion they recognize exceptional talent and willingly move them throughout the organization leaders develop leaders and take seriously their role in coaching others we work on behalf of our people to invent mechanisms for development like career choice anybody who's ever been a Part of building something big and world class and hard knows it's never an individual that does it it's always a team and a team is comprised of great people and by great I mean many of the leadership principles that
we've been talking about it's people who are smart who are right a lot who are inventive who can look around corners and be be strategic and think big who are into the details who uh are are able to move quickly who have high ownership who have The right customer obession that's what we mean by great people and those are the people we trying to find and those are the people that deliver the best results for customers it's part of the reason by the way that when we do hiring Loops the individual interviewers each take a
leadership principle that's how we Define great people and when you're in a hiring Loop and you're in a hiring meeting you have to ask yourself the team has to keep asking Is this person at the bar do they raise the bar and if the answer is no you should not hire even if you have time pressure to hire people to get moving on a project do not lower the bar the thing that matters most for customers and what we get done for the business and frankly for a lot of all of us who are inspired
by the people we work with is to work with people we respect and admire do not lower the bar who we hire is one of the most important decisions we make every Day every week every year the reality is that one half of the hire and developed leadership principes is about hiring the other is really about developing people and as a manager you have to be organized and thoughtful about what a person does well and what they need to grow one of the interesting things that's happened over the last several years is that I think
for a lot of companies and for a lot of people it's been harder to give people more critical Feedback it's really much more popular to tell people what they're great at and what their superpowers are and by the way that is really important to recognize but if you have great people and you have people who are truly hungry to learn and be curious and get better they want to know they need to know what their growth areas are and leaders and managers have to be good at coaching it's not a right for you to be
a manager you could be a really good individual Contributor but it doesn't mean that you should be a manager it's a privilege to be a manager and part of that privilege comes with the responsibility for thinking about and actively developing the people on your team and coaching them and I can tell you at least myself and I know many people would say the same thing the managers I worked for who had the biggest impact in my career were not necessarily the ones that were the nicest to me I like when people were Nice to me
don't get me wrong but what really made the difference were those leaders who recognized what I was good at but really identified where I needed to grow to get to where I wanted to get and to realize my full potential and that's what we have to do as managers of people we want to help people grow and learn and get to their full potential deliver results leaders focus on the key inputs for their businesses and deliver them With the right quality and in a timely fashion despite setbacks they rise to the occasion and never settle
I intentionally wanted to end with this leadership principle because you can get everything else that we've talked about right you can be customer obsessed you can be right a lot you can be inventive you can be strategic and think big you can you know dive deep you can be speedy you can have the right ownership you can hire the right teams and the reality is If you fail on delivering none of it matters where the rubber meets the road for customers is what you actually deliver for them and there are two macro forms of delivery
there are outputs and there are inputs outputs are really high level metrics the ultimate output for a public company is your stock price and other outputs are things like free cash flow or your Revenue your operating margin but it's very difficult to manage the outputs actively I remember um Earlier in my career I had a manager and um I would sometimes go visit that manager and um he had an office a small office it was completely dark except for the light the glow from his monitor and I would sometimes go to visit him and I
would walk by and I'd see him go oh and I'd say what happened and he'd say well I was looking at daily sales and we just went from being up 0.5 of 1% year-over year to being down 7 of 1% year-over year and I always thought that was so Odd I said well can you actively affect that by looking at the Monitor and he said no but it's really important and of course it's important because if you don't have the right outputs for the business then you don't really have a business but you cannot really
actively manage the outputs what drives the outputs are the inputs those the actual initiatives that we're all pursu doing to change the customer experience in the business and that's what if you look at Almost all our key accomplishments that we focus on as teams and across the Este team they're almost exclusively inputs because that's what can make a difference I'll say one last thing about delivery that I often see people get wrong which is there's so much work that goes into delivery you know you have to define a product you have a working backwards document
you you make several versions of that working backwards document you have to hire a team you Have you know there all sorts of changes along the way as you get into actually building the product implementing it that when you get to delivery and you get to launch people take this deep breath and they kind of feel like they're done and the reality is that launch or delivery is not the Finish Line it's the starting line it actually gets you to the starting point where you have something that you can actually build and make something meaningful
out Of very few of anything things I've ever seen be successful at Amazon have launched with an initial launch and all of a sudden become big Breakaway hits you always have to launch you have to see what customers react to you have to get feedback from customers and you have to iterate and the very best companies and the very best teams are fast and organized about launching but then they're constantly iterating that's how You get you get seven eight nine launches where you're iterating quickly and all of a sudden you wake up and you realize
I have something really meaningful That Matters to customers that's what delivery looks like those are a few words and and at least my take on our leadership principles as I said earlier being great of the leadership principles is not a memorization exercise it's not a oneandone exercise it's something it's a practice it's Something you have to work at constantly and you have to ask questions and you have to try different things and you have to keep keep getting better at practicing these leadership principles but when we're great at this together it's very very powerful this
has been in my opinion one of the the most important secret sauces for Amazon our first 29 years and I believe it will be so the next 29 years I look forward to working on it getting better and better at it Together so thank you for taking the time to listen
