JD's Journal
Everyone we know has experienced their unique journey of life, and along the way they have had their share of success and failure. Each of us have learned important lessons and gathered valuable resources that have allowed us to survive and thrive. This podcast is a place for sharing our stories and our resources for the benefit of others. It's a celebration of the resilience and tenacity of people in all walks of life, our local heroes.
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JD's Journal
Leadership by Design: Amazon's 16 Guiding Principles
Curious about what really drives Amazon's success? After eight and a half years working at the tech giant before entering semi-retirement, I'm pulling back the curtain on the 16 Leadership Principles that form the DNA of one of the world's most innovative companies.
These principles aren't just words on a wall – they're the living, breathing framework that shapes how Amazon hires, operates, makes decisions, and solves problems. From Customer Obsession (where everything begins) to Deliver Results (the ultimate goal), each principle creates a common language across the organization's vast divisions and functions. Whether you're in retail, AWS, logistics, or any other part of the Amazon ecosystem, these principles drive consistency in expectations and behavior.
I take you through each principle, sharing the official definition along with my personal interpretation and real-world observations of how they manifest in daily operations. You'll discover how "Are Right A Lot" enables high-velocity decision-making through the concept of "two-way doors," why "Have Backbone, Disagree and Commit" creates healthy conflict that drives innovation, and how "Frugality" isn't just about saving money but creating elegant, minimalist solutions.
For those considering careers at Amazon, I provide insights into how these principles shape the interview process and what recruiters are looking for when evaluating candidates. As a former Bar Raiser who participated in over 400 interview loops, I've seen firsthand how critical it is to demonstrate alignment with these principles through specific, data-driven examples using the STAR format (Situation, Task, Action, Result).
What fascinates me most is how these principles continue to influence my thinking even after leaving the company. They've become part of my leadership DNA – a testament to their power and universality. Whatever organization you're part of, having a set of principles that are truly lived rather than just displayed might be the most powerful differentiator in creating consistent, sustainable success.
Hi listeners, and welcome to the JD's Journal podcast where, every week or two, my guests and I share some of our life's journey, our successes and failures and the valuable lessons and resources that we've gathered along the way. This podcast is being recorded on the traditional lands of the Dharug and Gundungurra people. We pay our deep respect to elders, past, present and emerging. This land always was and always will be Aboriginal land. The content shared on this podcast is intended to inform and entertain, and it should be applied with your own good judgment. As always, your feedback good and constructive is always appreciated. The podcast is produced by me, so please forgive the occasional glitches from time to time. Anyway, enough of the formalities, let's get on with this episode Well. Hi listeners, and welcome back to the JD's Journal podcast. It's always good to have you here. So the topic of the podcast episode today is the Amazon Leadership Principles and I've got to be honest with you up front. This is an episode that I've had structured and on my queue for over six months now to present, and I don't know why I keep procrastinating on presenting this one, but I guess I feel like it's such an important topic in my mind. I want to get it right, and so I've been really kind of thinking about how do I structure this in a way that's going to give the greatest value to the listener. Right up front, I want to stress this is not an Amazon podcast and this is certainly not a pitch for Amazon either. For those of you who followed me know that after eight and a half years, I left the company at the end of June and I entered semi-retirement, so it might even seem odd that I've chosen now to record and publish this episode. So why do I care? Well, there's a couple of reasons. One, I am a strong believer that companies having values and principles that they really embrace and live by, I believe they're the good companies. I think that it makes a huge difference to have a set of values and principles that are inherent within the DNA of the organization, and I think Amazon has achieved that. Interestingly, and even as a retired individual outside of the corporate environment today, I'm very confident that these Amazon leadership principles are going to continue to be important to me well beyond my years at Amazon. For the sake of brevity, I'm going to refer to these as LPs. Throughout the podcast, I'll probably alternate between LPs and leadership principles, so forgive me for that. The other thing is that Amazon also has tenets and peculiarities, which I won't talk about today. I do plan to do a podcast episode on the tenets, or the structure of tenets, because I think they are also a very powerful framework or very powerful mental model that I think is worth having, but today I'm going to focus on these leadership principles and kind of cover those in details. Now, the other reason why I wanted to do this is that if you perhaps are listening to this and you're considering a role at Amazon in the future, you might find a lot of what I'm going to share in this episode will be incredibly valuable to you as you prepare for the interview process and even the onboarding process, and so I guess a little bit of history that goes with that.
JD:So, back in 2017, I was actually interviewing at the same time for two roles. I was back at Microsoft in a contract role at Microsoft. I'd spent 18 years there previously as a full-time employee. I'd been away for quite a long time, but I was working there as a contractor and I was going through a loop for a product management position there, which was a very interesting role. At the same time, I was interviewing for the role at Amazon and, as I said, the same week. The interview process was going on the same week with both companies and the interview experience was so vastly different. And one of the things that made it so different was that these leadership principles, which I knew about. The recruiters had made me aware of them and do this. I'll encourage you to be familiar with them, but it came through so consistently through all seven interviews that I did at that time and for those of you who who are interviewing now or have interviewed recently, I think of interviews like an audition. You know, I'm involved in community theater, as many of you are aware, and I think the auditioning process is the hardest thing in the world. It's like it scares all of us, I think, so much to go through that process typically, and I think interviewing is somewhat similar. So I always go into these interviews, you know, not only curious but also a little bit pensive about the experience. But these leadership principles came through so strongly and it made me incredibly curious and it made me incredibly interested in the difference there that came through so strongly and it made me incredibly curious and it made me incredibly interested in the difference there that came through and that was the kind of tipping point for me to make the decision to go the Amazon way and not back to where I'd come from, basically at Microsoft. So since joining Amazon back in 2017, I did observe that these 16 leadership principles well, there's actually 14.
JD:When I joined the organization, they were the foundation for how the company operates how they hire, how they lead, how they interact, how they plan, how they do problem solving, how they think about performance, management and development. It's built in uh to the way the organized organization operates, and it was interesting for me. You know, I was kind of imagining how I would use these on a day-to-day basis, but what I observed very quickly is it's not at all cheesy or tacky or inappropriate to to be in a meeting or be in a conversation and use these as part of the language. It's not unusual at all, in fact, to do that and, to some degree, I think what's interesting about it is that the LPs create a common language across all the vast different business divisions and functions and roles and so forth across the organization. It's the thing, more than anything else, that drives consistency in the language and the expectations of the organization.
JD:So, if you are planning to interview for a role at Amazon, you really want to get familiar with these leadership principles. I'll include a link to the principles in the notes, but definitely do that and think about in your life, scenarios and experiences that you've had that may showcase your experience or your utilization of similar principles. That's what an interviewer is going to be looking for. Every interviewer who's meeting with you has been assigned a number of leadership principles to look at in relation to you, and they're looking for stories that reinforce that you have those and that you're using them, even though you may not know them from an Amazon perspective, but you can demonstrate that you're using them If you are interviewing. Another thing that you should definitely be aware of is that the interviewers love the STAR format. So situation, task, action and result and I would think about having, for every one of the 16 leadership principles. Think about having some stories that you can tell and structure those in advance in your head in that star format. If you can articulate them in that way, you're going to have much more success in terms of being able to tell your story to an interviewer and it'll make a big difference in terms of your opportunity to be successful in that.
JD:So my plan for this podcast is to walk through each of those leadership principles, to share the company's description of them and then to share kind of my interpretation and what they mean to me personally. Where I can, I'm going to try to provide some examples of the sorts of interview questions that you might be asked in relation to those LPs, where I think it's appropriate. I'm not going to do that for every one of them. Frankly, we'd we'd end up with a very, very long podcast if I did that, but I want to kind of give you that sense of how that would fit into the model. So, with all of that preamble done and kind of setting the scene and so forth, let's get looking at the leadership principles and we'll start quite deliberately with customer obsession. Until the additional two leadership principles were introduced, as I said, there were 14 leadership principles and to me the customer obsession and deliver results were the kind of bookends of the 14 leadership principles. They kind of start and finish and I think I kind of liked how that worked.
JD:But anyway, customer obsession. So the company's definition of customer obsession is that leaders start with the customer and they work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep the customer's trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers. Now, if you've ever seen Jeff Bezos interviewed and certainly particularly in the early days this was such a strong mantra for Jeff and the way they thought about the company you know from the beginning. The very beginning, selling books in his garage, jeff's maintained that if the company obsesses over the customer experience that they will come back time and time again. And in fact, one of his quotes that I really like is that there are many ways to center a business. You can be competitive focused, you can be product focused, you can be technology focused and you can be business focused, and there are more. But in my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of the day one vitality. I like that quote and I like the message behind that quote, which really was that kind of obsession that we have have or that they have.
JD:I've got to say I was perpetually impressed with how authentically and consistently this principle was applied. And yet I know there's some customer experiences that aren't great, particularly on the retail side. I'm a retail customer of Amazon as well and it's certainly not a perfect story and I guess selling at that scale globally as they do. There's going to be some horror stories that go there, but I've got to say that internally within the organization there's a very authentic focus on identifying and fixing the issues that might impact customers. And even for organizations like the data center team where I was, who kind of never interact directly with our end customers, we still began with the customer in mind. We were thinking about planning or responding to operational issues. The focus was still and is always on how can we ensure that they deliver a positive customer experience? And, frankly, if you're stuck in a state of disagreement around the priorities or whatever, the question is always what's the right decision for the customer? Now, to reinforce this customer obsession and because we like mechanisms, a framework called Working Backwards has been developed and broadly adopted. Backwards has been developed and broadly adopted and they provide training and structure on how to go through this Working Backwards process when developing plans and solving problems and so forth. And there are curriculums and workshops and templates and champions and so forth and even chat rooms dedicated to the Working Backwards model.
JD:Now, if you were interviewing for a role at Amazon, you should expect to be asked questions like tell me about a time when you not only met a customer expectations but exceeded them, or tell me about a time when you were able to identify a customer's need before they knew it. And the interviewer is going to be looking for examples of when you were able to demonstrate that you were going above and beyond for the customer. And they might also ask you to provide an example of when you couldn't meet the needs of the customer and what you did to provide the best customer outcome. You should and I guess that's another point that I want to make on interviewing for Amazon. If you happen to be doing that, to tell only success stories is going to be to your detriment. The company believes in failure. It has built itself on this notion of you know, I write a lot, which is an LP we'll get to in a minute but on the notion of that the greatest learning that you get comes from failure, and a candidate who presents themselves as having never had a failure is not going to be particularly successful. So don't be afraid to tell stories about when things didn't go to plan, but, most importantly, be willing to talk about what you learned from that and how you are different or how you operate differently as a result of that. So, anyway, that's the context in terms of interviewing around the customer obsession leadership principle.
JD:The next leadership principle is ownership. The company definition of ownership is that 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, and they never say that's not my job. Now, the intent behind this leadership principle is pretty straightforward If you see something that needs to be fixed or improved, a risk or an opportunity, you own it. Now, owning it might mean that you take action yourself, or it might obviously mean that you go and find somebody who is the right person who will take responsibility for it. I would say, if that is the case, though particularly if it relates to a customer, going back to the previous LP is that you don't just throw it over the fence and let go. You typically want to make sure that you close the loop and that it is resolved. Anyway, the phrase it's not my job has no place in the vocabulary. Within the organization Again, I got to say in my eight and a half years I. Within the organization again I I gotta say in my eight and a half years I didn't hear that at all, I didn't see people who who deflected, uh, from taking on responsibility, so I think that they were certainly generally living by that value. Um, again, particularly if there's an impact of the customer or the safety and security of of the people and assets the organization as well, I would say ownership has a strong place.
JD:An example could be, for instance, that you're at a social gathering you might be at a barbecue or a or a party or whatever and you hear somebody talking about a problem that they had with an amazon service. That's outside of your scope. You know you could walk away and avoid being identified as that Amazonian in the room, and I like that story. I hear stories about doctors who don't admit that they're a doctor in the room for fear of having to deal with all the questions. So you could pretend not to be an Amazonian and just slink away from that, or you could introduce yourself and try to provide some guidance or commit to looking into information that could help them out, and the Amazonian thing to do, or the Amazonian mental model, would be to try to help, and that would align again back to the customer obsession leadership principle. In an interview, just like customer obsession, the interviewer might be asking questions that solicit your experiences where you substantially demonstrated this LP. They're going to be looking for proof points that you're willing to take personal responsibility and accountability that goes beyond the scope of your role, or that went beyond the scope of your role in whatever roles that you had before, again, particularly where customers were potentially impacted. But you might get questions about you know, working outside of your comfort zone though that relates more to another LP we'll talk about in a minute. Or it might be that you know where you identified something that was impacting customers that had nothing to do with whatsoever but you took action to resolve it. That will go very well.
JD:The next leadership principle is invent and simplify, and the company's definition of that is that leaders expect and require innovation and invention from their teams and always find ways to simplify. They are externally aware. They look for new ideas from everywhere and are not limited by the not invented here syndrome. As we do new things, we accept that we may be misunderstood for long periods of time. Now there's a reason they use the term builder for Amazon employees. You know, as a company they are trying very much to hold on to that startup agile mentality, despite the significant scale of the organization has achieved. The employees at all levels are encouraged to really creatively explore new ways to operate and drive efficiency, reliability and scalability improvements.
JD:In my roles in the infrastructure operations, space Kaizen, the lean approach has been adopted as a mindset and a mechanism to encourage and sponsor innovation from the operational teams, and so often during my tenure there I observed incredibly innovative ideas that have come from within the operational teams themselves often quite junior members that have come up with innovations or improvements that have been ultimately adopted at a regional or even a global level. Necessity is the mother of invention, so it's not surprising that much of the time, it's the people who are actually doing the work who identify the opportunities for innovation to make their jobs more efficient or more effective. The company also recognizes that not all innovative ideas will produce the intended results, and so an innovation that ultimately fails is still considered a success, provided there are lessons learned and it's the norm in many cases that developing improvements in systems and processes is quite iterative, with a series of step improvements over time, and not all of those quote-unquote improvements deliver the results that were expected to be achieved. But provided, again, that there are lessons learned from that, you know, that's not considered to be a failure. It's considered to be a learning opportunity.
JD:The intent behind the marriage of invent and simplify the reason that that comes together as a single leadership principle is really the mission to not just drive changes in systems and processes but, wherever possible, to simplify the work being done or simplify the systems and mechanisms being implemented, which with the intention being that, again, at scale, the more that they can simplify, the less that it's going to be the burden of maintenance and operations of the systems and hopefully, simplification drives a better customer experience. So in an interview, you should expect not only to be asked about how you led innovation or how you came up with brilliant ideas, but also how you made things more simple. And so I would, as you're preparing, if you are preparing think about the scenarios that allow you to demonstrate that you can do that, that you can drive simplification of processes and systems. And that's a pretty good segue to our next leadership principle, which is I write a lot.
JD:The Amazon culture is deliberately fast moving and there's a very specific effort to drive what we call high velocity decision making. There's a real intent to avoid analysis, paralysis or the kind of procrastination that you can see, particularly in large organizations, where decisions take a long time because people want to get in and get all the data and understand what's going on, so forth. So the leadership principle supports the notion that most decisions will be good based on minimal supporting data, along with historical experience and intuition. Back in my days at Microsoft, I can remember Steve Ballmer had a thing that he said in a meeting that I was in, that he expected his leaders to make three significant decisions every day and for two of them to be correct or the right decision. And there's not many things that Steve said that I would repeat frankly, but I think that's a good one. I think this whole notion that we will make decisions or we'll take actions every day, and most of them should be the right ones, but we have to accept that sometimes we'll make decisions that don't make sense.
JD:So a fundamental model that provides support for high velocity decision making is this notion of two-way door decisions or, to put it another way, decisions that can be reversed if they turn out to be the wrong decisions, and so, by default, a one-way door decision is a decision that can't be reversed, and it requires a much higher level of validation and planning than a two-way door decision To me. You know I relate this back to the notion of fail fast, fail small, and I think you know that adage kind of works in terms of that. And I think that adage kind of works in terms of that. I'm going to talk about bias for action shortly, which is another LP that's also enabled by this leadership principle, which accepts that we need to be comfortable to take action although we don't have all the information we would like to have, and with the knowledge that, hopefully, the decision and action that we'll be taking will be reversed quickly if it fails to produce the desired results.
JD:Amazon, as I mentioned earlier, has embraced failure as an essential element of our growth and the velocity of the organization and in support of this they've developed a universal correction of errors mechanism, or a COE mechanism and framework. Universal correction of errors mechanism or a COE mechanism and framework, so when things don't go to plan, particularly again as they impact customers, the factors behind the failure and the lessons learned and the corrective actions are all captured and tracked. At the heart of the COE process is a five wise model, so that ability to kind of peel the onion and get to the absolute root cause of what went wrong. And for those that aren't familiar with the five whys, an example might be a kind of ridiculous example, but it might be.
JD:Let's say, we had a minor car accident as the example and the question you might ask in the five whys is why was the rear end of the car smashed in? And it was because another car ran into the back of it. Okay, so why was the other? Why did the other car run into the back of the first car? Well, because the driver was distracted and didn't observe that the car in front had stopped. Why was the driver distracted? Because they were trying to find the mobile phone which was ringing. Okay, why were they trying to find a mobile phone while they were driving? Well, because they hadn't prepared their phone before they began driving. Or why hadn't they prepared their phone before they began driving? Because they didn't anticipate anticipate receiving a call.
JD:So it's it's I mean, it's not a particularly complex scenario. I'm giving you there just to demonstrate it, but you get the notion, hopefully, that what you're doing is kind of drilling down and drilling down and drilling down, until you get to the point that you, you know well what was the root cause here and then what could I do about it? And I say five whys. The reality is that I've seen five whys that have turned into 15 whys just because of the complexity of the issue. Again, you keep asking why until you get to what you think is the root cause. But it's intended to get to the absolute source of the event. And the real question there is if we were to fix one thing that would ensure that the incident didn't occur again, what would that be? In my simple example above, where the fifth was a failure to prepare for the phone call while driving, the corrective action might be to require that the phone be connected to the car by Bluetooth or cable before the engine can start. It's a kind of silly example again, but it makes the point.
JD:Anyway, I've gone way off topic, bringing it back to what I write a lot, what the leadership principle is all about. It's simply saying that the culture encourages taking intelligent risks, with the knowledge that sometimes they won't be successful, but for the intention of avoiding procrastination or analysis paralysis, and that with every risk, whether it's successful or not, it's an opportunity to learn and gather valuable feedback that can ultimately support the goals for advancement in the future. It's okay to try and fail, but make sure you don't make the same mistake by taking, by taking the lessons and applying them. I actually have a fridge magnet, uh, in my home here that I've had for years that I always relate back to this leadership principle and it says always make new mistakes. And I, and I love that. I think that that perfectly embodies what this leadership principle is all about. So, again, if you're in an interview, what your preparation would be is to think about a time you know where you had to use your intuition and your judgment, and again, I would include examples of where you were successful and examples of where there was failure. But if you failed, then talk about what you learned as a result of that and how you made improvements, and how you made improvements and how you avoided making the same mistake twice.
JD:All right, with that, let's move to the next one, which is learn and be curious. This is one of my favorite leadership principles. The company's definition of learn and be curious is that leaders are never done learning and always seek to improve themselves. They are curious about new possibilities and they act to explore them. Curious about new possibilities and they act to explore them. I've got to say for anybody coming into Amazon, regardless of the level of industry experience and domain knowledge they have, they're going to find that we or that they are going to get used to not being an Amazonian anyway that they approach things differently. I've seen so many examples of very seasoned infrastructure folk who've been hired into the organization electrical engineers, mechanical engineers et cetera who came in confidently and you know with all their industry experience that they feel like they're starting an apprenticeship again, that because the company operates quite differently in many ways to the way the industry operates, that there is a learning curve regardless of your industry experience.
JD:In most cases I expect people go through a fairly steep learning curve. In fact, those who come to this conclusion quickly and embrace the Learn to Be Curious culture definitely have a better experience. Those who resist and try to stick to their previous knowledge without you know, without the flexibility, will struggle. So the scale and rate of evolution here is is tremendous. For that reason the learning curve actually never levels out. Again, I would say that in my eight and a half years there I never got to a point of complacency around knowledge because things change and evolve at such an incredible rate New and changed products and solutions and processes mean that as soon as you think you've got it worked out, it's going to change, and so maintaining your curiosity and never assuming that you know everything is a survival strategy and it's also what keeps the roles fresh and exciting.
JD:And, frankly, if you are somebody who is motivated by learning, you will enjoy the environment. If you're somebody who just wants to do cookie cutter work every day, sorry, do repetitious work doesn't change probably not the environment for you. So in my role I was surrounded by amazonians who've got significantly more experience and knowledge and are probably a lot smarter than I am. So I I got very comfortable at being the dumbest guy in the room, which which means that I wasn't afraid to ask what might be stupid questions. In fact, I think I probably was asking stupid questions until the very last day. Thankfully, that's pretty pervasive across the organization, so my dumb questions were pretty welcomed and pretty answered, and I think it's not again not an abnormality to be curious at all times.
JD:The next leadership principle is hire and develop the best, and the definition for the company is that leaders raise the performance bar with every hire and 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. We work on behalf of our people to invent mechanisms for development, like career choice. So our builders or their builders, as they like to refer to the employees are really critical for the success of everything that the organization does. At the end of the day, it's the people who do the work, and so, when hiring new talent, they aim to recruit people who raise the bar and bring diversity in all of its forms to the organization. I'm a huge fan of the recruiting platform and the and the process at amazon and the very heavy emphasis on the lps, but also the heavy emphasis on on diversity and avoiding unconscious bias. I think, overall, they've done a tremendous job. At that.
JD:I was acting in the role of a bar raiser since January 2021. I became a recruiting bar raiser and, as a result of that, I had the privilege of participating in the hiring of new employees across roles in business units that are across the organization, and the bar raiser is an independent participant in the interview loop process often almost normally from different, unrelated business units, who provides objectivity to the interview process and the candidates and then facilitates the debrief and decision-making process once the interview loop's completed. Since 2021, as I said, I was a bar raiser and I participated in around 400 interview loops during that period. I loved it because it gave me the opportunity to learn so much about the broader organization, the different uh business strategies and different roles and and competencies across the organization and it it allowed me to connect with people that I would never have connected with being in the infrastructure space, so that allowed me to expand my network across the commercial sides the organization in in all sorts of areas. So I again I think think it was that and mentoring were really the things that got me excited in terms of connecting across the organization.
JD:It doesn't stop once the recruiting process is done and we need to continuously develop our employees, both in their technical and functional competencies, but also their leadership skills. We know that's important for the growth of the organization, but we know that it's also important in any organization for the retention of employees, because we know that one of the biggest reasons that people leave organizations is that they feel like they're not growing, and so forth. Within Amazon, to support that, there's an endless array of online training available, both internally as well as external resources that they've licensed. There's self-learning, classroom and workshop format, training programs and planning tools for managers and their and their employees to to map out career development, growth pathways and and training plans and so forth, and so it's a very structured set of content and mechanisms there to support the ongoing development processes. Mentoring is also highly encouraged at all levels of the organization and there's a platform for mentor-mentee matching so that basically both parties would put their profiles in their skill sets and their aspirations and so forth. And the tool provides, you know, the ability for it to kind of map and help you identify mentees if you're a mentor and mentors if you're a mentee, and then kind of provides some structure for the process.
JD:I generally in my over the eight years that I was there, I would I certainly had mentor relationships going pretty much all the time Towards the end. It wasn't unusual for me to have half a dozen or more active mentor relationships in play and you know, apart from the, I think, the joy that comes from seeing folk achieving their growth goals, again, I love the learning. I love how much I learned. I think sometimes I got more out of those relationships than the mentees did, just because of the knowledge that I was gaining about different parts of the organization. So you know, supporting all forms of professional and personal development of the employees just isn't important to support the competencies and capabilities of the workforce. But, as I said, you know the the employees tell us constantly that one of the primary reasons they stay with the company or they leave is how they they feel their development and growth is being supported by their manager in the company. And so you know, in any large, in any organization I should say large any organization having a focus on the continuing development of your people is an important way to make sure that they feel respected, empowered and nurtured and that they feel like there's a future for them.
JD:The next leadership principle is insist on the higher standards, and the definition is that 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 high quality products, services and processes. Leaders ensure that all defects do not get sent down the line and that problems are fixed so they stay fixed. So you'll see this blending with other LPs like ownership and customer obsession. No question about it. I guess the key thing here is that they are never satisfied. They're always looking for ways to increase the quality, the reliability and efficiency of their processes and systems, and the most successful builders are constantly looking for opportunities to fine-tune systems and processes or blow them up and make radical changes that deliver better results.
JD:Back in my microsoft days, there was a a lot of focus on that similar thing, and they used to have a line there that I love, which was make trouble and good things will happen, or, if it ain't broke, break it. I see the same right to support this. You know, we really want to not assume that because we've been using a process for a long time that it's great, sometimes you've got to go in and and really break it or challenge it to see real results. To support this wherever practical, they build metrics and reporting into the systems that enable them to make changes and then monitor how that moves the needle. You know, and and again, it's an iterative, often an iterative process. So a small change I can then see is there a positive effect? Um, and if it is, then we lock it in, we double down on it. If it's a negative impact, then we ask the questions. We get curious and peel the onion and understand. You know why we made this change. We're supposed to drive improvement, did it not do that? We roll back and we try something else whenever possible.
JD:Um, they they are data and mechanism driven, and the way I think about this is simply that you know again the old adage what you measure, you manage. Or where there's transparency, there's accountability as well. I think that one's a very important one. I can see the data that's going to drive accountability on me to make sure that I'm optimizing and improving what's going on. I can think of so many good examples of my time there where just merely by establishing good metrics, good reporting on the performance of a system or a process and making this available as a regular communication via a dashboard or a report, substantial improvements were achieved. And I'm not going to go in detail because of confidentiality, but one of the programs that I ran in the last couple of years that I was there, the. The improvements that were achieved, but by literally nothing more than providing transparency, were quite staggering.
JD:As you probably already realize, there is an inherent relationship between this lp and invent and simplify. As you know, we're constantly innovating to make things better. You might also wonder how this lp correlates with bias for action, and I write a lot, as you know. There is a tension between the need to move swiftly, sometimes in a kind of scrappy fashion, and the goal of having exceptionally high standards. I think the tension is actually healthy, as it compels action to kind of move swiftly when needed and then refine the solution constantly, kind of raising the barrier over time. So again, going back to that kind of two-way door decision-making process, is you move, you move quickly, particularly if customers are impacted, but then you measure and then you iterate and you improve, and so, again, I think this correlates and aligns quite nicely with the startup mentality that the company's trying to maintain.
JD:The next leadership principle is think big. The definition is 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. Now I think this lp speaks for itself in many ways and probably seems a little obvious. Where I believe its value is is when you work for an environment that's as high paced as theirs is. It's pretty easy to be so absorbed by the technical stuff that you're dealing with every day that it becomes a bit like groundhog day and you, you come back every day and do the same thing over and over again, just because of the velocity that you've got.
JD:Um, I've already talked about invent and simplify and assist on a higher standards is very important leadership principles. But how do you create opportunities for significant advancements in those areas if you're focused on kind of tactical thinking and operational thinking only and encourage to identify future states like bold future states, bold visions and strategies that are going to enable significant leaps of improvement and growth? Some of these are driven by the identified challenges or deficiencies in the quality of an existing process and system. They're driven by the necessity to fix things that are materially impacting the reliability or effectiveness of processes. But, as I said, we talked about insisting on the highest standards, they're never satisfied and the Think Big LP reminds us to never be complacent when things might appear to be humming along perfectly. It's important to step back and spend time and focus on how to take things to the next level.
JD:In some organizations I've experienced this expectation opportunity to think big, to strategically explore opportunities for advancement, are reserved for leaders at the more senior levels. But at Amazon, in that culture, the expectation and opportunity is there for all levels of the organization. You know, whether you're a vice president or an entry-level employee, in your first year of employment, you know you are encouraged to think uh big, to think uh grand in terms of of what, what you can drive as terms of change. Junior employees who take the time to think differently about the tasks that they're performing and visualize these grand ideas. They can then document them as narratives and had them, you know, reviewed, which will drive significant impact on the on the organization globally. So I will probably talk about narratives in a future podcast because I think they're important as well. Amazon is an interesting culture in the sense that, far from being a powerpoint style companies where people get up and do grand presentations about their bold ideas and so forth ideas, decisions, reports and so forth are all done as documents and reviewed as a document, and that's that's a mechanism which drives detail, that drives structure into those presentations and also accountability. Again, when I joined the company back in 2017, I was kind of shocked by the approach. Uh, it was pretty uncomfortable for me as a, as an old microsofty, uh, not to be going in and present a powerpoint presentation. I do recall very well presenting my first paper in september of that year, um, but I learned to love the narrative process and, as I say, I'll probably do a session on that at some point because I think it's a great structure.
JD:Anyway, moving on, the next LP is bias for action, the definition being that speed matters. In business, many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study. We value calculated risk-taking. We've kind of talked about this LP a little bit already, but they move very fast, sometimes frighteningly fast, and, as I mentioned when I talked about Arvide, a lot culturally they're super sensitive to anything that looks like procrastination or analysis paralysis, particularly when it relates to customer experience or safety or security or the availability of their products and services. The LP reminds them not to follow important decisions and actions, not to allow sorry important decisions and actions to sit and fester. You know, given that I was based on the other side of the planet from the majority of the leadership team, it was not unusual for me to wake up in the morning and discover that something significant happened overnight and that substantial changes to policies and processes have been implemented while I was sleeping. This being the case, you know, good communications are critical and they've established some mechanisms to ensure that we're kept in informed of those critical changes.
JD:One of the most intense periods of rapid action and change I've experienced were the early days of the COVID pandemic. I'm sure many of you on this call experienced similar things. But as this kind of panned out authorities across the world and across the region were navigating this massive threat and trying their best to predict and protect their communities, which sometimes meant declaring new policies and restrictions and rules affecting staff and families every day, and for us, those in here, australia and other countries, those often affected our staff's ability to travel to and from our facilities as well, as you know, the implementation of things like screening and sanitization and reporting requirements. In response to those changing requirements, the internal policies and processes also changed on a daily basis and, like rapid, rapid action was required at the beginning of every day to ensure that we were compliant while ensuring that we continue to deliver the platform for our customers. To ensure that we were compliant while ensuring that we continue to deliver the platform for our customers. I'm proud to say that, despite the craziness of those changes at the times, the teams frankly adapted incredibly well to the changes and never missed the beat on delivering the platform. I didn't see anything really significant in terms of misses at all. Frankly, it was incredible to see how well the teams rallied and stayed focused on making sure we delivered the platform, given that I'm in a security role, or I was in a security role until a month ago.
JD:Similarly, you know things happen in security very quickly. A new vulnerability is identified, a new event takes place, and you really have to move at lightning speed to make sure that you close that risk, you close that threat as quickly as you possibly can, and so this bias for action was completely essential to ensure that we were complying with our security culture and delivering on the security commitments we were making to our customers culture and delivering on the security commitments we're making to our customers. Again, thinking about this from an interview perspective, you know what an interview is going to be looking for is examples where you can demonstrate that you could move at lightning speed, that you could assimilate enough information and have enough intuition to be able to move rapidly in the situations that require it, again balancing that with the need to maintain the highest standards, insist on the highest standards, and so that's always the trade-off right Is that ability to do that, and that's what the interviewer is going to be looking for is that you can make intelligent decisions, trade-off decisions, when it's the right thing to do.
JD:The next leadership principle is frugality, and the definition is to accomplish more with less Constraints breed resourcefulness, self-sufficiency and invention. There were no extra points for growing headcount, budget size or fixed expense. I would say this is probably one of the more poorly understood leadership principles that I observed in my time there, often being interpreted as purely a financially driven principle. The more accurate interpretation is that they have a strong belief in kind of minimalistic approaches to solving problems and delivering solutions for customers. An example of this that you might have heard of is the notion of two pizza teams, which describes the fundamental belief that the maximum number of people working on an outcome or a challenge can be fed with just two pizzas. I would say you know, an ideal team size is six or less people. That's just my opinion. But this notion of small groups of people this is true when it comes to the kind of frilly things that we put on solutions Often, you know, the branding and so forth internally isn't something that we want to invest significantly.
JD:I mean, what we're going to focus on is the functional value or the core value. And so you know. Similarly, our systems, or the systems they built, were often described as scrappy, and that doesn't imply that they were unreliable or poor, but they are kind of bare metal. Fit for purpose, without the trimmings, is the key thing. It's kind of the minimum product that delivers the value that's required. Again, you think about the velocity of change in the organization. This makes perfect sense. Again you think about the velocity of change in the organization. This makes perfect sense. No-transcript have been gained as the organization has scaled and as the systems have matured and so forth, and that is definitely driven by this kind of notion of frugality at the core.
JD:The next leadership principle, I think is one of the most important ones, to be honest with you, and it's earn trust. The definition being leaders listen attentively, speak candidly and treat others respectfully. They are vocally self-critical and even when doing so is awkward or embarrassing. Leaders do not believe that their or their team's body over smells of perfume. They benchmark themselves and their teams against the best. So you know, integrity, humility and candor. They matter right, particularly in an environment where the goals are so aggressive and the challenges are sometimes so significant. Having the confidence and the integrity and the support from your workmates is essential. Hidden agendas, backstabbing, passive aggression, politics and so forth these things erode trust. At the same time, you do want to receive critical feedback that supports your growth and successful outcomes. So not speaking up when you see something is wrong is another way of eroding trust. I used to talk to the new employees and one of the things I used to say is that we didn't hire you to be a wallflower Stay. Staying silent when things aren't right doesn't demonstrate that you are a value to the organization at all, and so you know.
JD:This notion of earns trust is both the ability to treat everybody with respect and compassion and humility, but also the ability to take feedback and to take ownership when it's you know, when it's something that is in your court, something that you should be responsible for, and so you know. If you're, say, you're working on a narrative, for instance, to support a goal and you share it with your peers, you want to have the confidence that they are going to give you critical and constructive feedback on that, and to achieve that, you have to respond to that feedback in a way that encourages them to continue to provide feedback. When your manager or your subordinates, or if they've got feedback on your performance, the expectation is that you will take that feedback, you will value that feedback and appreciate that feedback, and so, again, I think this is an incredibly valuable leadership principle and it's probably one of the ones, more than any other, that I will continue to cherish as a civilian now outside of the corporate environment, outside the Amazon environment. The next leadership principle is dive deep.
JD:The definition is that leaders operate at all levels. They stay connected to the details, they audit frequently and they're skeptical when metrics and anecdotes differ. No task is beneath them detail. And when it's required that you can go very deeply into the data or the details relating to the problem, the solution or the opportunity in front of you, they are a data-driven organization on the whole. Um, there's definitely some elements of emotion behind some decisions, to be completely frank, but but overall, the company, uh culture and mindset is data-driven. But they also do believe that the anecdotes are vital indicators. And so you know, as the definition describes, we prefer to have both the data and the narratives there, or the anecdotes or the commentary, and if they're out of congruence, then that's where the curiosity comes in. That's the opportunity to say hang on a minute, I've got data, I've got metrics here that are telling me one thing, but the customers are saying something else. What's really going on here?
JD:You know, one of the things that impressed me about the organization is the well. It actually impressed me and kind of frightened me, to be honest with you is that the ability and the willingness of extremely senior leaders in the organization to go right into the details when needed. And uh, you know I talked about the correction of errors, or the coe process, and, and often, if something has gone wrong, um and a coe has been created, particularly again if it impacted a customer. So if there was a a systems issue that caused services to be unavailable, or if there was a product in a retail environment that was unavailable because of a supply issue and so forth, that could result in a quite detailed correction of errors, which would which would be reviewed often in a meeting would be reviewed by quite senior leaders, and you know I've been a part of some of those where there's been issues that have affected service availability and so forth, and in those reviews I was incredibly impressed with the ability of senior executives to dig into the explicit elements of the technology or the processes relating to where the the issue occurred, and I've been quite staggered at times about their level of knowledge at that level of, at that level of detail, at the level of granularity of the, of the system or the mechanism or the data, and the conversations that have taken place to drive results.
JD:Now, I will make one point on this is that you might get the sense that those meetings are incredibly uncomfortable meetings. The COE process is an incredibly uncomfortable process. It actually isn't, and I've talked about this previously. Is that the? What impressed me is that the, the core of the coe, is looking at the facts, it's looking at the data, it's looking at the systems, but the thing it doesn't look at is individual people, and so it's never from my observation, it's never been a witch hunt. It's always been a focus on you know what, what did a role do, what did a role do, what did a system do, and so forth, and how can we make sure that doesn't happen again.
JD:So in that process, you know again, the leaders in those review processes are not afraid to ask questions that might seem lame, as it's better to ask those questions and to learn than to miss the opportunity because you're trying to save face. And so one of my favorite VPs who's no longer with the company as well, but it was a regular thing for him to say was you know, I'm probably about to say something really stupid, I'm probably about to ask a really stupid question, but here it goes. And by using that language, you know, I think it creates an environment where the participants in the meeting, at all levels, regardless of how junior they are, have economists, almost invited to speak up and to share their experiences, and so forth. Anyway, it's a little bit of a divergence from the LP, but I think it's an important thing to understand. And there's questions on the dive deep leadership principle. What the interviewer is going to be looking for is that it's going to be your ability to speak specifically in the detail level about things, the ability to demonstrate that you can get into the minutia and peel the onion. I guess that's the other thing that I would say to you about the interview process for Amazon. If you can't talk in specifics, if you can't get to facts and include data, metrics, numbers, percentages, whatever, it's going to have a significant impact on your credibility as a candidate. So be ready. Be ready and particularly around again the Dive Deep LP be ready to talk very specifically about what you are doing.
JD:The next leadership principle is another favorite of mine have backbone, disagree and commit. The definition is that leaders are obligated to respectively, challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting. Leaders have conviction and are tenacious. They don't compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly. Now, anybody who's worked for me in the recent decades, even before Amazon, knows that I love conflict. I really do. I love conflict Provided it's constructive, provided it's not personal. I think conflict is incredibly powerful. I mentioned before that wallflowers are not valued.
JD:I believe that If you're being hired into an organization or if you're part of an organization and you're not contributing your perspective, your ideas, your knowledge and expertise, then you have no right to be there. You shouldn't be there. You should be contributing at all. The meaning I take away from this leadership principle is that it's my responsibility to have the courage to speak up and be willing to openly challenge decisions or the status quo constructively. And then the bit that some people do find challenging is when the decision is made on the direction, to commit to it and to do everything you can do to make it successful.
JD:I'm sure, like me, you know people who, when a decision doesn't go their way, will do whatever they can to make sure the decision results in a failure. They want the opportunity to say see, I was right. That is not the right mental model at all, and the whole notion behind the commit part of how backbone, disagree and commit is that by all means, speak up, be vocal, have your opinion, challenge conventional thinking, disagree that's a healthy thing to do. Uh, I I told my own direct reports in in both of my roles at amazon and previously. Um, I love people who are willing to bang the table because they feel so damn passionate about their perspective, but when the decision is made, everybody is committed to the overall success of the outcome of that, and that's really the key there. And so, trust me, it is detrimental if you are the stick in the mud that wants something to fail because it wasn't your decision.
JD:As an interview candidate, this is a good one to really prepare for. Really think about some scenarios where you can talk about the hill that you're willing to die on, where you can talk about those situations where you were taking the unpopular position in a meeting for the sake of what's right and what your rationale behind that was and how you went about that and what your rationale behind that was and how you went about that. But you also want to be able to talk about times when you fully supported a decision or a direction that you didn't agree with, but you were focused on it for the value, for the benefit of the customer and the outcome. So think about that and be prepared for that. So the last of the 14, the original LPs and, as I said, the other side, bookend, is deliver results, and the definition is that leaders focus on the key inputs for their business and deliver them with the right quality and in a timely fashion. Despite setbacks, they rise to the occasion and they never settle.
JD:Now, I would say, at the end of the day, this is the reason that we're here is to deliver great results and outcomes. Amazon, like most companies, is a meritocracy theoretically it's intended to be a meritocracy and people aren't rewarded on effort. It doesn't really matter if it took you, you know, 60 hours to get the job done. That's not what matters. What matters is the outcome that you achieved and the impact that it had for the customer and for the company. Similarly, excuses for not getting things done aren't well received that the people in the organization are resourceful, inventive and tenacious to be able to find ways to deliver on their goals and commitments. And so you know again, at the end of the day, I think this is where it all comes together right. Delivering results is the reason for you existing in whatever organization, in whatever capacity in your home life, whatever is getting outcomes is the key thing here, and so I think this one rounds out the original leadership principles quite nicely, package them up quite nicely Again from an interview perspective. Be prepared to talk about results that you achieved and how you achieved them. Be prepared to talk about how you achieved those results with headwinds, with challenges, and how resourceful you were in finding ways to get the job done. So we're going to move to the two additional LPs that were added to the organization.
JD:I'm going to say I'm still not convinced their leadership principles in the true sense. They're different, and you'll see how they're different in their definition. I think they're important, don't get me wrong. I think they're incredibly important, but I'm still not convinced that they are strictly speaking leadership principles. But anyway, I digress. So the first of those that I'm going to talk about is strive to be the earth's best employer, and the definition is 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 themselves are my fellow employees growing? Are they empowered, are they ready for what's next? Leaders have a vision for and a commitment to their employees personal success, whether that be at amazon or elsewhere. What a noble set of statements there. You know, I I do love this, um, this, and I think it is important. So what does it mean? Well, as leaders, they're committed to create an environment that enables the employees to do their best work, to feel like they're heard, valued and respected, that they're realizing their development goals and they feel like they have a connection to their workmates and they feel like they're part of a community.
JD:There's so many focus areas that fit within the scope of this LP. Some of them I've touched on along the way, but I'm going to share a few more that might be of interest. So one of them is the way that the organization thinks about performance reviews and feedback. There is a semi-annual performance review or talent review process, and I'm not aligned with every part of it, the way that it works, but I think a good part of it, a very strong part of it, is a mechanism called Forte. Forte is a 360 feedback mechanism. So for anybody who's done 360 feedback, this includes leaders, subordinates, customers, peers, stakeholders, who provide feedback on what they perceive are the superpowers and the growth areas of you, based on, often, the leadership principles, along with narratives on both, and then, generally speaking, the average person gets between 12 and 20, maybe more feedback providers in each of the cycles and then their manager and they can review the collective feedback along with their performance goals and the KPIs to provide an overall assessment of performance.
JD:The feedback is the feedback process is well structured. It's supported by a purpose-built app that invites for the feedback, aggregates the feedback, anonymizes the feedback and then kind of presents it in such a way that's very apparent to the employee and their manager where they're seen as strong and where they're seen as needing growth and also who sees them that way. You know, I think again that distinction between a subordinate and a customer and a peer and a stakeholder allows you to understand. If you're getting feedback on one of your lps, let's may like make it earns trust. If you're seeing that you're getting particular feedback, maybe positive feedback on earns trust from your manager and negative feedback on earns trust from your customers. There may be the way that you're engaging with people is different and it's conditional depending on who you are, and so that's a great growth opportunity for you. That's incredibly valuable feedback. So the Forte feedback process, I think incredibly valuable feedback. So the Forte feedback process, I think fits in very nicely with the Earth's Best Employer model, because I think it provides a rich set of feedback on a regular basis that helps you grow yourself and helps you be honest with yourself about where your growth opportunities are, along with that career growth conversations and professional development. The company has built mechanisms to support the dialogue between employees and their managers around their aspirations and their and their identified growth areas and allows them to build plans that that help them continue to develop their growth and track the growth, track the, the projects they've completed, the training they've completed, and so forth, but with the with the aim of kind of moving towards a direction of some kind, actually having a plan. And so the company has built a number of tools that support that that I think are aligned with what this LP is trying to deliver.
JD:On diversity, the company has had a strong position on diversity. It was one of the things that I was so incredibly attracted to from the very beginning. Um certainly a focus on gender diversity. My own team um in security, which is a very testosterone driven industry, in general we had a focus around gender diversity and at the time when I left the organization we were around 30 female representation which, frankly, in a security role is, I think, is pretty remarkable, even in a contract space, as we'd made a lot of progress in terms of gender diversity. Beyond that, you know affinity groups to support different cultural diversities and different diversities organization so many different affinity groups in fact. Um gender diversity uh is supported through groups like women at amazon, women in security, women in engineering and so forth. Um those, those groups coming together support uh and foster the development and the camaraderie of women across the organization quite powerful. I had the absolute honor of being an advisor to the leader of the Amazon Women in Security chapter for the APAC region in the latter stages of my time there and it was an absolute joy to have an opportunity to work with those teams to support the growth of women in the organization Around the LGBTQIA plus community. I was directly involved with Glamazon while I was there. I've kind of talked about that previously, but Glamazon has done tremendous work across the globe in supporting the LGBTQIA plus communities there and continues to do so. I've worked with other groups such as Asians at Latinos at people with disabilities, the body positivity peers and the black employee networks and many others. I think the focuses around those different diversity groups and the support that's provided by those groups both bottoms up and top down support provided for those groups very much aligns the notion of strive to be the best employer. I think creating that kind of safety and support and sense of community is a very powerful thing to do.
JD:Amazon adopted a very unique approach to monitoring employee sentiment. I was pretty shocked by it when I first joined the company, but the connections platform, the connections survey that they use, asks every employee one question every day. Literally, you come in the morning, in my experience, and sometime in the morning a pop-up will happen on your desktop and you'll be asked a question. The question might relate to different categories of topics. It might relate to leadership, it might relate to safety, inclusion, job satisfaction, manager satisfaction, team collaboration, career development. And, because they're asking a question on a daily basis, question on a daily basis, the data coming together at a global, at a regional, at a divisional, at a team level over time provides trends, provides indications in terms of how things are as they are today, but also are they moving in the right direction or the wrong direction? And so, in support of that, managers have access to a dashboard of their organization that's always available to them to go in, that dashboard, and so that again gives you belief for you to look, as a leader, at the trends, the comparisons with benchmarks, with other organizations that are like your organization, and as well as recommendations for managers to take if there are organizations that are like your organization, and as well as recommendations for managers to take if there are trends that are indicating, um, a negative movement in in terms of those categories, like incredibly powerful. I've never again. I've never seen, uh, a customer sentiment mechanism that asks a question every day. Um, I, uh, I. I really valued that as a leader, that ability for me to know that there was a concern around professional development, for instance, and then the ability to take an action as a leader and then monitor that over the months that followed to see did that move the needle in the right direction or did that not work? And can I do something else? That kind of intelligence as a people leader, particularly with a geodiversified organization across multiple locations and cultures, is gold, absolute gold.
JD:The last one I want to talk about and there are many others, but the last one I'll talk about is the work around community and particularly in the infrastructure space. Um, the organization has a group called in communities. Uh, this team, um are responsible for the outreach piece. What do we do when we move into a new location and we start building these big gray ugly buildings, uh, next to farmland communities and we start, uh, working in in communities where we may be building on, you know, in areas where it was farmland or it was rural or whatever. In particular I'm just using that scenario as an example there's a responsibility there to make sure that we are neighbours that are adding value, that we are respecting and supporting those communities and hopefully making things better for those communities.
JD:And that's where this InCommunities team come into play. And initially, you know what I kind of viewed this team as being is the team that you know took us out to do fun events like fixing fences and painting walls and, you know, giving out goodie bags and food bags and so forth. But I learned as I worked with this team they did so much more. They worked with local NGOs and global NGOs to do quite substantial things that have massive impacts of benefit for the community. I had the absolute honor to be involved with the opening of multiple childcare centers and libraries in community environments in India and Indonesia and other areas where there's such a necessity for investment, where the company was able to make a massive difference.
JD:During the COVID pandemic, I know that we provided COVID kits and sanitary kits and so forth for many communities around the place. I know we've invested in clean water, fresh water in those environments and then STEM, tremendous investments in education for these communities. That will ultimately change those communities for good. That will ultimately bring new opportunities for those communities that wouldn't have been possible without the investments. So that's the outward impact of that. But the other thing that mustn't be forgotten is that there are studies that show very real positive effects cognitive and physiological effects of giving, of the act of giving and contributing. And so not only do I believe that the CSR work being done by the in-communities teams is doing good things for the community, doing good things for the company brand and all those sorts of good things, but I do believe that it provides real, real benefits to the employees from a health perspective, from a well-being perspective and from a self-respect perspective. So I'm a huge fan of the work being done by that team and have incredible respect for those folks.
JD:So the last leadership principle I'm going to touch on before we wrap up is that success and scale bring broad responsibility, and again, the definition is that we started in a garage but we're not there anymore. We are big, we impact the world. 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 every day with a determination to make better, to do better and to be better every day. We must begin every day with a determination to make better, to do better and to be better for our customers, our employees and our partners and the world at large, and we must end every day knowing that we can do even more tomorrow. Leaders create more than they consume and always leave things better than how they found them Again.
JD:I love the language in this. It doesn't roll as easily as the other leadership principles. It's quite long, but the notion behind it is incredibly powerful and I do think that an organization of the scale of Amazon or any of the others that I've worked for, this is the right model. This is the right mental model is that this accountability to have a positive impact on the world not just our people, but the world around us is incredibly important and I think you know we've seen this in many ways. I talked about the CSR activities above, and I think that's an important thing. I think a lot of the work that's being done around efficiencies, around employment, around education I think those things are incredibly valuable as well.
JD:The company made some very significant statements and commitments around the adoption of sustainable power and I think they they are great commitments. We've seen it as well in terms of packaging and the retail side and so forth, so I think sustainability fits with this within the realm of this one as well, but I just think it's a really tremendous leadership principle. It's just a little bit different and I see it more of a kind of I don't know a cultural norm maybe, but I do it. I think it's incredibly powerful. So that really kind of rounds out the 16 leadership principles. Hopefully that's been a useful insight for you.
JD:Again, I'm not suggesting that any company should adopt these 16 leadership principles, but I do think any organization should have a set of principles, should have a set of principles that aren't just a plaque that sit on the wall that you look at every now and then.
JD:I think having them as embedded and incorporated into the dna of the organization is is what differentiates, and I do think amazon has largely achieved that. I think that was a differentiator for me was that this is not only there as a document or as a plaque, but it's actually inherent within the language, within the mechanisms, within the standards of the organization. And, as I say, I think it's going to have a lasting effect on me, probably for the rest of my life. Anyway, thank you for joining again. As always, I would welcome any questions or feedback that you've got on this episode or any of the other episodes. Um, looking forward to talking to you again soon. I've got some guests coming on to some of the upcoming episodes very shortly, but in the meantime I do hope you're living your best life and do be good to each other out there. Thank you.
