Amazon Employee Quotes

Chances are you have a job. Chances are your job sucks. But you’ve learned a few things from this job, mainly, YOU DON’T LIKE BEING AN EMPLOYEE!

In early 2002, as part of a new personal ritual, he took time after the holidays to think and read. (In this respect, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, who also took such annual think weeks, served as a positive example.) Returning to the company after a few weeks, Bezos presented his next big idea to the S Team in the basement of his Medina, Washington, home. The entire company, he said, would restructure itself around what he called “two-pizza teams.” Employees would be organized into autonomous groups of fewer than ten people—small enough that, when working late, the team members could be fed with two pizza pies. These teams would be independently set loose on Amazon’s biggest problems.

I see companies these days where thoughts of “exits” are foremost in the minds of top management and board, and it is so clear that this value will infect the decision making down to the smallest choice by the most junior employee. Do we create something that is good, or just that seems good and might get us acquired or funded?

The goal was to get employees to distill a pitch into its purest essence, to start from something the customer might see—the public announcement—and work backward.

Steve Jobs was known for the clarity of his insights about what customers wanted, but he was also known for his volatility with coworkers. Apple’s founder reportedly fired employees in the elevator and screamed at underperforming executives. Perhaps there is something endemic in the fast-paced technology business that causes this behavior, because such intensity is not exactly rare among its CEOs.

Amazon also noted that it now has 132,600 employees, up 37 percent in the last year. That’s larger than Microsoft, which had 128,000 employees as of June 30 and before its plans to lay off 18,000 workers.

The wealthiest man in the twentieth century mastered the art of minimum-wage employees selling you stuff. The wealthiest man of the twenty-first century is mastering the science of zero-wage robots selling you stuff.

Amazon had recruited these workers as part of a program it calls CamperForce: a labor unit made up of nomads who work as seasonal employees at several of its warehouses, which the company calls “fulfillment centers,” or FCs.

The job description he wrote for his very first employee said, “You must have experience designing and building large and complex (yet maintainable) systems, and you should be able to do so in about one-third the time that most competent people think possible.

As Amazon grew, we realized that despite our best efforts, we were spending too much time coordinating and not enough time building. That’s because, while the growth in employees was linear, the number of their possible lines of communication grew exponentially.

Meanwhile, Amazon’s treatment of warehouse workers had been making headlines since 2011. That’s when an investigation by the Allentown Morning Call newspaper revealed what were—quite literally—sweatshop conditions. When summer temperatures exceeded 100 degrees inside the company’s Breinigsville, Pennsylvania, warehouse, managers wouldn’t open the loading bay doors for fear of theft. Instead, they hired paramedics to wait outside in ambulances, ready to extract heat-stricken employees on stretchers and in wheelchairs, the investigation found. Workers also said they were pressured to meet ever

the Amazon hiring process has a flywheel effect—it pays greater and greater dividends the longer it is used. Ideally, the bar continues to be set higher, so much that, eventually, employees should be able to say to themselves, “I’m glad I joined when I did. If I interviewed for a job today, I’m not sure I’d be hired!

The bottom line is that most technology businesses simply don’t require many employees (think of all the robots roaming around Amazon warehouses), and this will only become truer with time. It’s been estimated that globally, 60 percent of all occupations will, in the next few years, be substantially redefined because of new disruptive technologies. 60

These are not fever dreams. They are near inevitabilities. It’s an easy prediction to make—that Jeff Bezos will do what he has always done. He will attempt to move faster, work his employees harder, make bolder bets, and pursue both big inventions and small ones, all to achieve his grand vision for Amazon—that it be not just an everything store, but ultimately an everything company.

You can work long, hard, or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose two out of three.” Bezos makes no apologies. “We are working to build something important, something that matters to our customers, something that we can all tell our grandchildren about,” he says. “Such things aren’t meant to be easy. We are incredibly fortunate to have this group of dedicated employees whose sacrifices and passion build Amazon.com

Bezos kept pushing for more. He asked Blake to exact better terms from the smallest publishers, who would go out of business if it weren't for the steady sales of their back catalogs on Amazon. Within the books group, the resulting program was dubbed the Gazelle Project because Bezos suggested to Blake in a meeting that Amazon should approach these small publishers the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle. As part of the Gazelle Project, Blake's group categorized publishers in terms of their dependency n Amazon and then opened negotiations with the most vulnerable companies. Three book buyers at the time recall this effort. Blake herself said that Bezos meant the cheetah-and-gazelle analogy as a joke and it was carried too far. Yet the program clearly represented something real--an emerging realpolitik approach toward book publishers, an attitude whose ruthlessness startled even some Amazon employees. Soon after the Gazelle Project began, Amazon's lawyers heard about the name and insisted it be changed to the less incendiary Small Publisher Negotiation Program.

Security is a big and serious deal, but it’s also largely a solved problem. That’s why the average person is quite willing to do their banking online and why nobody is afraid of entering their credit card number on Amazon. At 37signals, we’ve devised a simple security checklist all employees must follow: 1. All computers must use hard drive encryption, like the built-in FileVault feature in Apple’s OS X operating system. This ensures that a lost laptop is merely an inconvenience and an insurance claim, not a company-wide emergency and a scramble to change passwords and worry about what documents might be leaked. 2. Disable automatic login, require a password when waking from sleep, and set the computer to automatically lock after ten inactive minutes. 3. Turn on encryption for all sites you visit, especially critical services like Gmail. These days all sites use something called HTTPS or SSL. Look for the little lock icon in front of the Internet address. (We forced all 37signals products onto SSL a few years back to help with this.) 4. Make sure all smartphones and tablets use lock codes and can be wiped remotely. On the iPhone, you can do this through the “Find iPhone” application. This rule is easily forgotten as we tend to think of these tools as something for the home, but inevitably you’ll check your work email or log into Basecamp using your tablet. A smartphone or tablet needs to be treated with as much respect as your laptop. 5. Use a unique, generated, long-form password for each site you visit, kept by password-managing software, such as 1Password.§ We’re sorry to say, “secretmonkey” is not going to fool anyone. And even if you manage to remember UM6vDjwidQE9C28Z, it’s no good if it’s used on every site and one of them is hacked. (It happens all the time!) 6. Turn on two-factor authentication when using Gmail, so you can’t log in without having access to your cell phone for a login code (this means that someone who gets hold of your login and password also needs to get hold of your phone to login). And keep in mind: if your email security fails, all other online services will fail too, since an intruder can use the “password reset” from any other site to have a new password sent to the email account they now have access to. Creating security protocols and algorithms is the computer equivalent of rocket science, but taking advantage of them isn’t. Take the time to learn the basics and they’ll cease being scary voodoo that you can’t trust. These days, security for your devices is just simple good sense, like putting on your seat belt.

GET BEYOND THE ONE-MAN SHOW Great organizations are never one-man operations. There are 22 million licensed small businesses in America that have no employees. Forbes suggests 75 percent of all businesses operate with one person. And the average income of those companies is a sad $44,000. That’s not a business—that’s torture. That is a prison where you are both the warden and the prisoner. What makes a person start a business and then be the only person who works there? Are they committed to staying small? Or maybe an entrepreneur decides that because the talent pool is so poor, they can’t hire anyone who can do it as well as them, and they give up. My guess is the latter: Most people have just given up and said, “It’s easier if I just do it myself.” I know, because that’s what I did—and it was suicidal. Because my business was totally dependent on me and only me, I was barely able to survive, much less grow, for the first ten years. Instead I contracted another company to promote my seminars. When I hired just one person to assist me out of my home office, I thought I was so smart: Keep it small. Keep expenses low. Run a tight ship. Bigger isn’t always better. These were the things I told myself to justify not growing my business. I did this for years and even bragged about how well I was doing on my own. Then I started a second company with a partner, a consulting business that ran parallel to my seminar business. This consulting business quickly grew bigger than my first business because my partner hired people to work for us. But even then I resisted bringing other people into the company because I had this idea that I didn’t want the headaches and costs that come with managing people. My margins were monster when I had no employees, but I could never grow my revenue line without killing myself, and I have since learned that is where all my attention and effort should have gone. But with the efforts of one person and one contracted marketing company, I could expand only so much. I know that a lot of speakers and business gurus run their companies as one-man shows. Which means that while they are giving advice to others about how to grow a business, they may have never grown one themselves! Their one-man show is simply a guy or gal going out, collecting a fee, selling time and a few books. And when they are out speaking, the business terminates all activity. I started studying other people and companies that had made it big and discovered they all had lots of employees. The reality is you cannot have a great business if it’s just you. You need to add other people. If you don’t believe me, try to name one truly great business that is successful, ongoing, viable, and growing that doesn’t have many people making it happen. Good luck. Businesses are made of people, not just machines, automations, and technology. You need people around you to implement programs, to add passion to the technology, to serve customers, and ultimately to get you where you want to go. Consider the behemoth online company Amazon: It has more than 220,000 employees. Apple has more than 100,000; Microsoft has around the same number. Ernst & Young has more than 200,000 people. Apple calls the employees working in its stores “Geniuses.” Don’t you want to hire employees deserving of that title too? Think of how powerful they could make your business.

our explosive growth was slowing down our pace of innovation. We were spending more time coordinating and less time building. More features meant more software, written and supported by more software engineers, so both the code base and the technical staff grew continuously. Software engineers were once free to modify any section of the entire code base to independently develop, test, and immediately deploy any new features to the website. But as the number of software engineers grew, their work overlapped and intertwined until it was often difficult for teams to complete their work independently. Each overlap created one kind of dependency, which describes something one team needs but can’t supply for itself. If my team’s work requires effort from yours—whether it’s to build something new, participate, or review—you’re one of my dependencies. Conversely, if your team needs something from mine, I’m a dependency of yours. Managing dependencies requires coordination—two or more people sitting down to hash out a solution—and coordination takes time. As Amazon grew, we realized that despite our best efforts, we were spending too much time coordinating and not enough time building. That’s because, while the growth in employees was linear, the number of their possible lines of communication grew exponentially. Regardless of what form it takes—and we’ll get into the different forms in more detail shortly—every dependency creates drag. Amazon’s growing number of dependencies delayed results, increased frustration, and disempowered teams.

CODE OF BUSINESS CONDUCT AND ETHICS Amazon.com employees should always act lawfully, ethically, and in the best interests of Amazon.com. This Code of Business Conduct and Ethics (the “Code of Conduct”) sets out basic guiding principles. Employees who are unsure whether their conduct or the conduct of their coworkers complies with the Code of Conduct should contact their manager or the Legal Department. Employees may also report any suspected noncompliance as provided in the Legal Department’s reporting guidelines referred to in paragraph IX below.

lawfully, ethically, and in the best interests of Amazon.com. This Code of Business Conduct and Ethics (the “Code of Conduct”) sets out basic guiding principles. Employees who are unsure whether their conduct or the conduct of their coworkers complies with the Code of Conduct should contact their manager or the Legal

Putting together a slideshow makes it all too easy for employees to only skim the surface of their ideas while creating the illusion of an intelligent argument.

Unlike John Lasseter’s bosses at Disney, Bezos was open to the entrepreneurial contributions of Amazon’s individual employees—even when those ideas were outside what Wall Street (and even his own board of directors) considered the company’s core business. AWS represents precisely the kind of value creation any CEO or shareholder would want from their employees. Want your employees to come up with multibillion-dollar ideas while on the job? You have to attract professionals with the founder mind-set and then harness their entrepreneurial impulses for your company. As Intuit CEO Brad Smith told us, “A leader’s job is not to put greatness into people, but rather to recognize that it already exists, and to create the environment where that greatness can emerge and grow.

Starbucks considers a product’s success not only in terms of consumer acceptance but also in terms of employee

While he was charming and capable of great humor in public, in private, Bezos could bite an employee’s head right off.

Google, for example, states, “[Our] affection for our canine friends is an integral facet of our corporate culture. We like cats, but we’re a dog company, so as a general rule we feel cats visiting our offices would be fairly stressed out.” Amazon has a similar policy, simply requiring that employees register the dog and be responsible for good canine citizenship (barking and peeing are no-no’s). Other large companies with dog-friendly policies include Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream, Clif Bar, the Humane Society headquarters, Build-A-Bear Workshop headquarters, and the software maker Autodesk. And, of course, many small businesses around the country.

certain employees can only trade Amazon.com securities during designated trading windows, and certain employees must obtain pre-clearance from the Amazon Legal

What is it like to work at an Amazon warehouse during the annual holiday rush? One Amazon warehouse employee kindly narrated the "nonstop chaos" for us over the past month.

Bezos proclaimed at the time, according to numerous employees: “Developers are alchemists and our job is to do everything we can to get them to do their alchemy.

During one memorable meeting, a female employee pointedly asked Bezos when Amazon was going to establish a better work-life balance. He didn’t take that well. “The reason we are here is to get stuff done, that is the top priority,” he answered bluntly. “That is the DNA of Amazon. If you can’t excel and put everything into it, this might not be the place for you.

for several years starting in 2004, Bezos visited iRobot’s offices, participated in strategy sessions held at places like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , and became a mentor to iRobot chief executive Colin Angle, who cofounded the company in 1990. “He recognized early on that robots were a very disruptive game-changer,’’ Angle says of Bezos. “His curiosity about our space led to a very cool period of time where I could count upon him for a unique perspective.’’ Bezos is no longer actively advising the company, but his impact on the local tech scene has only grown larger. In 2008, Bezos’ investment firm provided initial funding for Rethink Robotics, a Boston company that makes simple-to-program manufacturing robots. Four years later, Amazon paid $775 million for North Reading-based Kiva, which makes robots that transport merchandise in warehouses. Also in 2012, Amazon opened a research and software development outpost in Cambridge that has done work on consumer electronics products like the Echo, a Wi-Fi-connected speaker that responds to voice commands. Rodney Brooks, an iRobot cofounder who is now chief technology officer of Rethink, says he met Bezos at the annual TED Conference. Bezos was aware of work that Brooks, a professor emeritus at MIT, had done on robot navigation and control strategies. Helen Greiner, the third cofounder of iRobot, says she met Bezos at a different technology conference, in 2004. Shortly after that, she recruited him as an adviser to iRobot. Bezos also made an investment in the company, which was privately held at the time. “He gave me a number of memorable insights,’’ Angle says. “He said, ‘Just because you won a bet doesn’t mean it was a good bet.’ Roomba might have been lucky. He was challenging us to think hard about where we were going and how to leverage our success.’’ On visits to iRobot, Greiner recalls, “he’d shake everyone’s hand and learn their names. He got them engaged.’’ She says one of the key pieces of advice Bezos supplied was about the value of open APIs — the application programming interfaces that allow other software developers to write software that talks to a product like the Roomba, expanding its functionality. The advice was followed. (Amazon also offers a range of APIs that help developers build things for its products.) By spending time with iRobot, Bezos gave employees a sense they were on the right track. “We were all believers that robotics would be huge,’’ says former iRobot exec Tom Ryden. “But when someone like that comes along and pays attention, it’s a big deal.’’ Angle says that Bezos was an adviser “in a very formative, important moment in our history,’’ and while they discussed “ideas about what practical robots could do, and what they could be,’’ Angle doesn’t want to speculate about what, exactly, Bezos gleaned from the affiliation. But Greiner says she believes “there was learning on both sides. We already had a successful consumer product with Roomba, and he had not yet launched the Kindle. He was learning from us about successful consumer products and robotics.’’ (Unfortunately, Bezos and Amazon’s public relations department would not comment.) The relationship trailed off around 2007 as Bezos got busier — right around when Amazon launched the Kindle, Greiner says. Since then, Bezos and Amazon have stayed mum about most of their activity in the state. His Bezos Expeditions investment team is still an investor in Rethink, which earlier this month announced its second product, a $29,000, one-armed robot called Sawyer that can do precise tasks, such as testing circuit boards. The warehouse-focused Kiva Systems group has been on a hiring tear, and now employs more than 500 people, according to LinkedIn. In December, Amazon said that it had 15,000 of the squat orange Kiva robots moving around racks of merchandise in 10 of its 50 distribution centers. Greiner left iRo

People are trainable. They can be trained to be either employees or entrepreneurs.

Amazon tried to combat employee delinquency by using a point system to track how workers performed their jobs. Arriving late cost an employee half a point; failing to show up altogether was three points. Even calling in sick cost a point. An employee who collected six such demerits was let go.

It’s an easy prediction to make—that Jeff Bezos will do what he has always done. He will attempt to move faster, work his employees harder, make bolder bets, and pursue both big inventions and small ones, all to achieve his grand vision for Amazon—that it be not just an everything store, but ultimately an everything company.

Bezos refined the formula even further. Every time a new feature or product was proposed, he decreed that the narrative should take the shape of a mock press release. The goal was to get employees to distill a pitch into its purest essence, to start from something the customer might see—the public announcement—and work backward. Bezos didn’t believe anyone could make a good decision about a feature or a product without knowing precisely how it would be communicated to the world—and what the hallowed customer would make of it. Steve

The reason there are more employees than entrepreneurs is simply because our schools train young people to become employees.

Brokaw asked, highlighting the fact that Amazon was hemorrhaging money as it grew. “Sure,” Bezos replied, “P-R-O-P-H-E-T.” And by 2019 Amazon stock would be at $2,000 a share, and the company would have $233 billion in revenues and 647,000 employees worldwide.

A recent report in the New York Times highlighted the intense pressure on Amazon’s white-collar employees, those working on software, product development, and marketing. Employees faced “annual cullings,” often based on anonymous feedback from colleagues, who were all competing against each other; they openly wept in the office under the pressure; facing a boss described as an “insatiable taskmaster,” some employees worked for days without sleeping. Perhaps most troubling were the reports of employees in deep personal distress, facing family crises or even cancer diagnoses, who were given little to no flexibility and faced serious repercussions for their corresponding shortcomings.

On one side of the desk sits a bowl of dog biscuits for employees who bring their dogs to the office (a rare perk in a company that makes employees pay for parking and snacks).

if the potential employees made the mistake of talking about wanting a harmonious balance between work and home life, Bezos rejected them.

Steve Jobs was known for the clarity of his insights about what customers wanted, but he was also known for his volatility with coworkers. Apple’s founder reportedly fired employees in the elevator and screamed at underperforming executives. Perhaps there is something endemic in the fast-paced technology business that causes this behavior, because such intensity is not exactly rare among its CEOs. Bill Gates used to throw epic tantrums. Steve Ballmer, his successor at Microsoft, had a propensity for throwing chairs. Andy Grove, the longtime CEO of Intel, was known to be so harsh and intimidating that a subordinate once fainted during a performance review.

The entire company, he said, would restructure itself around what he called “two-pizza teams.” Employees would be organized into autonomous groups of fewer than ten people—small enough that, when working late, the team members could be fed with two pizza pies. These teams would be independently set loose on Amazon’s biggest problems. They would likely compete with one another for resources and sometimes duplicate their efforts, replicating the Darwinian realities of surviving in nature. Freed from the constraints of intracompany communication, Bezos hoped, these loosely coupled teams could move faster and get features to customers quicker. There were some head-scratching aspects to Bezos’s two-pizza-team concept. Each group was required to propose its own “fitness function”—a linear equation that it could use to measure its own impact without ambiguity. For example, a two-pizza team in charge of sending advertising e-mails to customers might choose for its fitness function the rate at which these messages were opened multiplied by the average order size those e-mails generated. A group writing software code for the fulfillment centers might home in on decreasing the cost of shipping each type of product and reducing the time that elapsed between a customer’s making a purchase and the item leaving the FC in a truck. Bezos wanted to personally approve each equation and track the results over time. It would be his way of guiding a team’s evolution.

We will continue to focus on hiring and retaining versatile and talented employees, and continue to weight their compensation to stock options rather than cash. We know our success will be largely affected by our ability to attract and retain a motivated employee base, each of whom must think like, and therefore must actually be, an owner.”21

The Just Do It Award is an abnormally large, well-worn Nike sneaker given to employees who exhibit a Bias for Action. It usually goes to a person who has come up with a clever idea outside the scope of their job. What’s peculiarly Amazonian about the award is that the idea doesn’t have to be implemented—nor does it have to actually work if it is—in order to be eligible.

growing as rapidly as Amazon, which jumped from roughly 600 employees in 1997 to 9,000 in 2000, and then to 100,000 by 2013 (as of this writing, in 2020, Amazon is approaching one million employees).

Nike, Microsoft Amazon and similar companies went public relatively early in their growth cycles. As a result, public investors had the opportunity to participate in 95 to 99% of their overall price appreciation. Founders, early employees and VCs took all the risk. Most of the reward was left for grabbing – anyone could’ve bought those stocks on the secondary markets.   As the Federal Reserve prints more money and interest rates remain low, an increasing percentage of capital is flowing into risky asset classes like venture capital and “angel investing.” This capital has chased up valuations in the pipeline preceding IPOs, making the IPOs feel more like the end of the journey, not the beginning. Thus,

Apple’s founder reportedly fired employees in the elevator and screamed at underperforming executives. Perhaps there is something endemic in the fast-paced technology business that causes this behavior, because such intensity is not exactly rare among its CEOs. Bill Gates used to throw epic tantrums. Steve Ballmer, his successor at Microsoft, had a propensity for throwing chairs. Andy Grove, the longtime CEO of Intel, was known to be so harsh and intimidating that a subordinate once fainted during a performance review.

Amazon by comparison had about 230,000 employees, and Wal-Mart boast a massive 2.3 million employed around the world with 1.5 million just in the US alone.

Later Bezos recalled speaking at an all-hands meeting called to address the assault by Barnes & Noble. “Look, you should wake up worried, terrified every morning,” he told his employees. “But don’t be worried about our competitors because they`re never going to send us any money anyway. Let’s be worried about our customers and stay heads-down focused.”15

One of the speaking programs I deliver is entitled, "Service with a Smile . . . How to Create a Sensational Customer Experience." Smiling is at the heart of my teaching because when employees smile while delivering service, it tells the guest/client/customer . . . You matter. You are important. We are glad you are here. We appreciate your business.

Despite his famously hearty laugh and cheerful public persona, he is capable of the same kind of acerbic outbursts as Apple’s late founder, Steve Jobs, who could terrify any employee who stepped into an elevator with him.

All of the other stuff—autonomous vehicles, drones—is just chaff, designed to keep customers and, even more so, employees pumped up.

At L2, we track migration patterns between the largest firms, including traditional agencies and the Four. WPP is the world’s largest advertising group. Some 2,000 of its former employees have migrated to Facebook or Google. By comparison, only 124 former Facebook or Google peeps left to go work at WPP. Consider the reverse migrants—124 that went back to WPP. Many of them, it turns out, had only interned at Facebook or Google, and went to WPP when they weren’t extended offers in Palo Alto or Mountainside.21 The ad world today is increasingly run by the leftovers. L2 Analysis of LinkedIn Data.

Look, you should wake up worried, terrified every morning,” he told his employees. “But don’t be worried about our competitors because they`re never going to send us any money anyway. Let’s be worried about our customers and stay heads-down focused.

Look, you should wake up worried, terrified every morning,” he told his employees. “But don’t be worried about our competitors because they ` re never going to send us any money anyway. Let’s be worried about our customers and stay heads-down focused.

Amazon realized the importance of recruiting developers early  —  moving its entire organization to services-based interfaces. At the time, this was revolutionary; while everyone was talking about “Service Oriented Architectures,” almost no one had built one. And certainly no one had built one at Amazon’s scale. While this had benefits for Amazon internally, its practical import was that, if Amazon permitted it, anyone from outside Amazon could interact with its infrastructure as if they were part of the company. Need to provision a server, spin up a database, or accept payments? Outside developers could now do this on Amazon’s infrastructure as easily as employees. Suddenly, external developers could not only extend Amazon’s own business using their services  —  they could build their own businesses on hardware they rented from the one-time bookstore, now a newly minted technology vendor.

Bezos informed his technical staff that henceforth every point of communication within Amazon would be through an interface (API) that could be exposed externally, that there would be no exceptions, and that anyone who didn’t follow this rule would be fired. Unsurprisingly, within a few years every service within Amazon was exposed via these APIs. As discussed previously, this not only increased Amazon’s own ability to dynamically reassemble its own infrastructure, it meant that Amazon’s services could be anyone’s services. Individual developers could use Amazon’s own servers and storage almost as if they were Amazon employees. Anyone with the time and inclination could build their own storefront, their own application, their own services that drove business back to Amazon. Technologists often talk about the “Not Invented Here” problem: the reluctance to adopt something invented elsewhere. Bezos’s mandate was the polar opposite of this: it was a realization that Amazon could never be all things to all people, but that it could enable millions of developers to use Amazon services to go out and target markets that Amazon itself could never reach.

Employees remember that when the home and kitchen category was introduced in the fall of 1999, kitchen knives would fly down the conveyor chutes, free of protective packaging. Amazon’s internal logistics software didn’t properly account for new categories, so the computers would ask workers whether a new toy entering the warehouse was a hardcover or a paperback book.

Bezos’s counterintuitive point was that coordination among employees wasted time, and that the people closest to problems were usually in the best position to solve them.

Career Choice is a program where we prepay 95 percent of tuition for our employees to take courses for in-demand fields, such as airplane mechanic or nursing, regardless of whether the skills are relevant to a career at Amazon. The goal is to enable choice. We know that for some of our fulfillment center employees, Amazon will be a career. For others, Amazon might be a stepping-stone on the way to a job somewhere else—a job that may require new skills. If the right training can make the difference, we want to help.

This can have devastating consequences for the fast-growing company. Over a short period of time, say a year, the number of employees can leap from 50 to 150 in a startup, or from 150 to 500 or more during a later phase of rapid growth when the business model is promising and the funding is in the bank. Seemingly overnight, the new employees can vastly outnumber their predecessors, and this dynamic can permanently redefine the corporate culture. Brent Gleeson, a leadership coach and Navy SEAL combat veteran, writes, “Organizational culture comes about in one of two ways. It’s either decisively defined, nurtured and protected from the inception of the organization; or—more typically—it comes about haphazardly as a collective sum of the beliefs, experiences and behaviors of those on the team. Either way, you will have a culture. For better or worse.”2

Stay Loyal to People, Not Organizations Mitt Romney was wrong—corporations aren’t people. As British Lord Chancellor Edward Thurow observed more than two centuries ago, business enterprises “have neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be condemned.” As such, they do not deserve your affection or your loyalty, nor can they repay it in kind. Churches, countries, and even the occasional private firm have been touting loyalty to abstract organizations for centuries, usually as a ploy to convince young people to do brave and foolish things like go to war so old people can keep their land and treasure. It. Is. Bullshit. The most impressive students in my class are the young men and women who have served their country. We benefit (hugely) from their loyalty to our country, but I don’t think we (the United States) pay them their due. I believe it’s a bad trade for them. Be loyal to people. People transcend corporations, and people, unlike corporations, value loyalty. Good leaders know they are only as good as the team standing behind them—and once they have forged a bond of trust with someone, will do whatever it takes to keep that person happy and on their team. If your boss isn’t fighting for you, you either have a bad boss or you are a bad employee.

He also exposed them to a steady stream of Jeffisms: about one-way and two-way doors; how double the experimentation equals twice the innovation; how “data overrules hierarchy” and there are “multiple paths to yes”—an Amazonian notion that an employee with a new idea who gets a negative reaction from one manager should be free to shop it to another, lest a promising concept get smothered in infancy.

He was a ravenous reader, leading senior executives in discussion of books like Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma, and he had an utter aversion to doing anything conventionally. Employees were instructed to model his fourteen leadership principles, such as customer obsession, high bar for talent, and frugality, and they were trained to consider them daily when making decisions about things like new hires, promotions, and even trivial changes to products.

Decision-making. Done the Amazon way, employees are empowered to make Type 2 decisions. When an employee is able to make a decision on behalf of the company, particularly to help a customer, they are likely to feel empowered—a vital way to connect with the values of the company.

Pay to Quit … was invented by the clever people at Zappos, and the Amazon fulfillment centers have been iterating on it. Pay to Quit is pretty simple. Once a year, we offer to pay our associates to quit. The first year the offer is made, it’s for $2,000. Then it goes up one thousand dollars a year until it reaches $5,000. The headline on the offer is ‘Please Don’t Take This Offer.’ We hope they don’t take the offer; we want them to stay. Why do we make this offer? The goal is to encourage folks to take a moment and think about what they really want. In the long-run, an employee staying somewhere they don’t want to be isn’t healthy for the employee or the company.”—Bezos (2013 Letter)

Not requiring total agreement for everything. To make that happen, Amazon has a “disagree and commit” system for employees, including Bezos. The idea is that everyone won’t agree on a given decision, but it’s still possible for people who disagree to work toward the same goal—they are all in it for the common goal: what’s best for the customer. Bezos mentioned not being sure about a proposed Amazon Prime television series, partly because of his level of interest in it, and partly because of the business terms of the deal. He said: “They had a completely different opinion and wanted to go ahead. I wrote back right away with ‘I disagree and commit and hope it becomes the most watched thing we’ve ever made.’ Consider how much slower this decision cycle would have been if the team had actually had to convince me rather than simply get my commitment.” —Bezos (2016 Letter)

Promote Ownership Q: Do you offer any compensation to your team in the form of company “ownership”—including a share of profits or growth? Q: Do you regularly communicate to your team your short-term goals and your long-term goals for the business? Q: Is there an incentive (or a barrier) for employees to improve or fix areas of the business outside of their own department or responsibilities?

we are working to build something important, something that matters.” —Bezos (1997 Letter) “We never claim that our approach is the right one—just that it’s ours—and over the last two decades, we’ve collected a large group of like-minded people. Folks who find our approach energizing and meaningful.” —Bezos (2015 Letter) “We challenge ourselves to not only invent outward facing features, but also to find better ways to do things internally—things that will both make us more effective and benefit our thousands of employees around the world.” —Bezos (2013 Letter)

Three inward innovations illustrate Amazon’s workplace culture: Career Choice, Pay to Quit, and Virtual Contact Center. Amazon is also at the forefront of continuing education for its team, implementing a program called Career Choice, where it prepays 95 percent of tuition for employees to take courses for in-demand fields, such as airplane mechanic or nursing, regardless of whether the skills are relevant to a career at Amazon. For some, Amazon will be their long-term career of choice. For others, Amazon recognizes it might be a stepping-stone on the way to a job somewhere else and they might need new skills to get that job. Amazon is more than willing to help them attain those skills, even if another company will benefit from Amazon’s investment in education.

Virtual Contact Center allows employees to provide customer service support for certain products from home. As Bezos puts it, “This flexibility is ideal for many employees who, perhaps because they have young children or for another reason, either cannot or prefer not to work outside the home.” —Bezos (2013 Letter)

For Amazon, savings are more than a corporate competitive matter. Indeed, the company holds “frugality” up as one of Amazon’s Leadership Principles as it “breeds resourcefulness, self-sufficiency and invention.” In an interview with CBS’s Bob Simon for 60 Minutes, Bezos connected frugality to his #1 rule: Think about the customers’ needs first. “It’s a symbol of spending money on things that matter to customers and not spending money on things that don’t,” Bezos explained to Simon.33 The company still hands out the “Door Desk Award,” a title given internally to select employees who have a “well-built idea” that creates a significant savings for the company and enables lower prices for customers. It’s not just blog names and door desks that keeps the Day 1 mentality visible, either. When Amazon grew to occupy its own office building in Seattle, Bezos named the building “Day 1.” On the side, Bezos added a placard34 reminding everyone who enters the building of the founding Day 1 principle from the 1997 Letter to Shareholders: “There’s so much stuff that has yet to be invented. There’s so much new that’s going to happen. People don’t have any idea yet how impactful the Internet is going to be and that this is still Day 1 in such a big way.” —Bezos (1997 Letter)

that, “as unlikely as this string of events is, we are evaluating options to make this case even less likely.” After those incidents, employees had to write a

I constantly remind our employees to be afraid, to wake up every morning terrified. Not of our competition, but of our customers. Our customers have made our business what it is, they are the ones with whom we have a relationship, and they are the ones to whom we owe a great obligation. And we consider them to be loyal to us—right up until the second that someone else offers them a better service.” —Bezos (1998 Letter)

Emphasizing customer obsession allows Amazon employees to become solution-focused rather than problem-focused. Bezos wants to always be ahead of the game… he wants to “solve problems before they happen,” meaning he doesn’t want screw-ups to happen in the first place.

Wael Ghonim, the Egyptian Google employee who helped launch the Tahrir Square revolution in early 2011 that toppled Hosni Mubarak, tells the real story. His words come from a TED talk he gave after he was freed from jail and escaped Egypt.

The original idea, favored by Jack Welch, former CEO of GE, was that every company should aim for a certain level of turnover, whatever the consequences. The system was rife with perverse incentives. Peers who sabotaged others’ work could save their own jobs; managers might hire less-capable people on their teams to keep from having to fire existing employees whom they favored. Despite the system’s drawbacks, Welch’s influence was so far-reaching that stack ranking was adopted at many of today’s tech giants, where it wreaked havoc on morale and productivity for decades. Eventually, its negative effects became well known enough to make the practice a liability at companies chasing workers whose specialized talents made them scarce, such as engineers. In the mid-2010s, companies including Google, Microsoft, and Amazon abandoned it.

My Amazon had under 150,000 employees. By the end of 2020, it had an astounding 1.3 million employees.

For example, he suggested that every leader should be required to take a course called “As Life Happens,” to learn how to sensitively manage an employee whose personal life might be interfering with their work obligations. Niekerk recalled that colleagues who read his paper said that it was among the best analyses they had seen of the cultural challenges that were so obviously plaguing the company at its twentieth anniversary.

Jeff Bezos, who is the founder and CEO of Amazon and the richest person in modern history, graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton and in the firm’s early days recruited employees from among American Rhodes Scholars studying at Oxford.

Hire the right people. “We will continue to focus on hiring and retaining versatile and talented employees,” he wrote in an early shareholder letter. Compensation, especially early on, was heavily weighted to stock options rather than cash. “We know our success will be largely affected by our ability to attract and retain a motivated employee base, each of whom must think like, and therefore must actually be, an owner.” There are three criteria he instructs managers to consider when they are hiring: Will you admire this person? Will this person raise the average level of effectiveness of the group he or she is entering? Along what dimension might this person be a superstar? It’s never been easy to work at Amazon. When Bezos interviews people, he warns them, “You can work long, hard, or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose two out of three.” Bezos makes no apologies. “We are working to build something important, something that matters to our customers, something that we can all tell our grandchildren about,” he says. “Such things aren’t meant to be easy. We are incredibly fortunate to have this group of dedicated employees whose sacrifices and passion build Amazon.com.” These lessons remind me of the way Steve Jobs operated. Sometimes such a style can be crushing, and to some people it may feel tough or even cruel. But it also can lead to the creation of grand, new innovations and companies that change the way we live. Bezos has done all of this. But he still has many chapters to write in his story. He has always been public spirited, but I suspect in the coming years he will do more with philanthropy. Just as Bill Gates’s parents led him into such endeavors, Jackie and Mike Bezos have been models for Bezos as he focuses on missions such as providing great early-childhood education to all kids. I am also confident that he has at least one more major leap to make. I suspect that he will be—and is, indeed, eager to be—one of the first private citizens to blast himself into space. As he told his high school graduating class back in 1982, “Space, the final frontier, meet me there!

Bezos had a traditionalist’s view of the media business. In his first address to Post employees at the 15th Street building in September, he declared his faith in “the bundle,” the collection of news, culture, and entertainment coverage that makes up a newspaper. He also lamented the rise of so-called aggregators, which summarized other organizations’ work, like the Huffington Post. But he had no compunctions about casting aside the paper’s local ambitions and deprioritizing its print edition in favor of a more ambitious future online. “You have to acknowledge that the physical print business is in structural decline,” he told his new employees. “You have to accept it and move forward. The death knell for any enterprise is to glorify the past, no matter how good it was—especially for an institution like The Washington Post.

The US chief technology officer and one of her deputies are former Google employees. • The acting assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s antitrust division is a former antitrust attorney at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, the Silicon Valley firm that represented Google. • The White House’s chief digital officer is a former Google employee.

One of the top assistants to the chairman of the FCC is a former Google employee and another ran a public lobbying firm funded in part by Google. • The director of United States Digital Service, responsible for fixing and maintaining Healthcare.gov, is a former Google employee. • The director of the US Patent and Trademark Office is the former head of patents at Google.

It proved once again that giving employees the right tools to solve problems and relying on their good judgment is a powerful combination.

The nature of the Amazon Leadership Principles is borne out in processes and practices throughout the company. For example, the six-page narratives that the company uses in place of PowerPoint decks to present quarterly and yearly business updates require both the writer and reader to Dive Deep and Insist on the Highest Standards. The Press Release/Frequently Asked Questions process—aka PR/FAQ—reinforces customer obsession, starting with customer needs and working backwards from there. (See chapters four and five for a detailed discussion of both the six-pager and the PR/FAQ.) The Door Desk Award goes to a person who exemplifies Frugality and Invention. The Just Do It Award is an abnormally large, well-worn Nike sneaker given to employees who exhibit a Bias for Action. It usually goes to a person who has come up with a clever idea outside the scope of their job. What’s peculiarly Amazonian about the award is that the idea doesn’t have to be implemented—nor does it have to actually work if it is—in order to be eligible. The stories we tell in part two of this

If you were to ask recently hired Amazon employees about what has surprised them most in their time at the company so far, one response would certainly top the list: “The eerie silence in the first 20 minutes of many meetings.” At Amazon, after a brief exchange of greetings and chitchat, everyone sits at the table, and the room goes completely silent. Silent, as in not a word. The reason for the silence? A six-page document that everyone must read before discussion begins. Amazon relies far more on the written word to develop and communicate ideas than most companies, and this difference makes for a huge competitive advantage. In this chapter we’ll talk about how and why Amazon made the transition from the use of PowerPoint (or any other presentation software) to written narratives, and how it has benefited the company—and can benefit yours too. Amazon uses two main forms of narrative. The first is known as the “six-pager.” It is used to describe, review, or propose just about any type of idea, process, or business. The second narrative form is the PR/FAQ. This one is specifically linked to the Working Backwards process for new product development. In this chapter, we’ll focus on the six-pager and in the following chapter we’ll look at the PR/FAQ.

Managing dependencies requires coordination—two or more people sitting down to hash out a solution—and coordination takes time. As Amazon grew, we realized that despite our best efforts, we were spending too much time coordinating and not enough time building. That’s because, while the growth in employees was linear, the number of their possible lines of communication grew exponentially.

Because these processes and practices are embedded in every meeting, document, decision, interview, and performance discussion, following them becomes second nature over time. And any employee who violates them draws attention to themselves like a person loudly scratching their fingernails across a chalkboard. If, for example, a person spoke up at a meeting and suggested an idea that was obviously geared toward short-term considerations and ignored significant longer-term ones, or proposed something that was competitor- rather than customer-centric, there would be an uncomfortable pause before someone pointed out what was on everyone else’s mind. While this practice may not be unique to Amazon, it is a defining element of its success.

I also think about what to say in the exit interview. I know not everyone gets invited to do one in person, that a lot of employees just get a form to fill out. But I’m in the ninety-eighth fucking percentile. I’ve worked across five different organizations and had a hand in hiring many hundreds of people. Plus I’m a woman in leadership, that population Amazon keeps saying it’s trying to grow. Of course I’ll get a real exit interview, right?

Bezos told employees that they could count on Amazon’s customers, those who had embraced the company and the services it provided, to remain loyal—right up until someone else, be it a significant competitor or a small start-up, gave them more of what they wanted.

Have you ever been frustrated by a company representative who couldn’t help you with an issue because of “company policy,” “procedures don’t allow for that,” or they were “only following orders”? If so, you have experienced an employee not resisting proxies. At Amazon, “company policy” or any other proxy is no excuse for doing the wrong thing for the customer.

Focus on High Standards Q: What are the three or four important characteristics of your highest-performing, highly-successful employees? Q: Do you (and your hiring managers) focus on those characteristics when hiring? Q: Who is responsible for “quality control” at your company—and how are they doing?

They also present opportunities for Amazon employees to discuss what Day 1 means with each other and outsiders. When a new person comes to Amazon, if they don’t know already, they might ask why so many people use doors as desks. When a new vendor comes to the Day 1 building, they might ask about the building’s name or read the placard on the side. Each time an employee, vendor, investor or visitor asks such a question, it creates an opportunity for the Day 1 mentality to be reinforced in the mind of the person answering.

In several conversations I had with former Amazonians, one of the cultural distinctives at Amazon is the ability for virtually any employee to come up with an idea, pitch it to their manager, and if the idea is good enough, receive permission to experiment to validate the premise. If it works, the idea will be implemented throughout the unit, team, group, or division. Amazon’s culture is one where everyone has a chance to innovate and see innovations through to implementation.

So how did Amazon grow from just Bezos and a few developers to 647,500 employees and maintain their “peculiar” culture? I believe one of the biggest reasons is they have tried to be intentional about not letting success “go to their heads.” As I said in the beginning, Amazon is not a perfect company. But obviously, they are doing something right.

And by 2019 Amazon stock would be at $2,000 a share, and the company would have $233 billion in revenues and 647,000 employees worldwide.

Maintain Your Culture Q: Can you articulate what your company culture is? Q: If you asked the same question of your employees, would their answer be the same as yours? Q: What can you do to reinforce the key (positive) elements of your company culture?

In the case of the former, he tries to decentralize the process. At Amazon he created what he calls “multiple paths to yes.” In other organizations, he points out, a proposal can be killed by supervisors at many levels, and it needs to pass through all those gates in order to be approved. At Amazon, employees can shop their ideas around to any of the hundreds of executives who are empowered to get to yes.

TEACH LEADERSHIP CLASSES at Amazon for our most senior executives. I also speak to interns. Across the spectrum I get the question about work-life balance all the time. I don’t even like the phrase “work-life balance.” I think it’s misleading. I like the phrase “work-life harmony.” I know if I am energized at work, happy at work, feeling like I’m adding value, part of a team, whatever energizes you, that makes me better at home. It makes me a better husband, a better father. Likewise, if I’m happy at home, it makes me a better employee, a better boss. There may be crunch periods when it’s about the number of hours in a week. But that’s not the real thing. Usually it’s about whether you have energy. Is your work depriving you of energy, or is your work generating energy for you?