The Amazon Leadership Principles

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The 14 Amazon Leadership Principles define everything at the company. They are the Constitution of Amazon, and in order for you to have even a prayer of a successful interview, followed by an effective career at Amazon, you would have to morph your thinking, behavior, and decision-making by these Leadership Principles.

The Amazon Leadership Principles are:

Customer Obsession - everything at Amazon begins and ends with the customer. You have to imbue customer obsession in your veins. This is likely going to become your Number One most favorite principle and will be incredibly important for your success. You need to learn Customer Obsession right out of the gate, in order to be successful at Amazon;

Ownership - at Amazon, everything is your problem. You are the owner. You have to exhibit ownership and being an owner and learning how to act as an owner is going to be crucial for your success at Amazon, right out of the gate;

Invent and Simplify - this is a significant muscle you should develop. In your Amazon career, you will be asked to invent results and the overall outcome, without there being a clear roadmap for you to arrive at this final state. Invent and Simplify is a crucial element and experience you should develop to ensure you succeed at Amazon;

Are Right, a Lot - Right a lot is one of those principles that are tough to teach because in order to be right a lot, you need to have accumulated a sufficient amount of experiences, which are going to inform your gut of what the right outcome should be without having enough data;

Learn and Be Curious - you have to learn, re-relearn, and un-learn new knowledge and concepts at Amazon very quickly. You have to remake yourself professionally in a short amount of time;

Hire and Develop the Best - as soon as you detect a candidate who raises the Amazon bar, you should hire them. If this candidate is better than you, you should promote them to a higher level than you occupy. No matter what, you should invest time and effort to diligently develop the people on your team, so they can raise the bar on themselves, as their Amazon careers progress. Conversely, if you identify an under-performer, you should quickly place them on a plan to correct their performance and get back on the right track;

Insist on the Highest Standards - High standards develop over the long run. In his 2017 Letter to the Amazon Shareholders, Jeff Bezos explained in quite a bit of detail that you have to give High Standards and the process of compounding, the time to work and the time to be effective;

Think Big - thinking big naturally requires a long amount of time to be effective. It's hard to Think Big and come up with clean-sheet break-through innovative solutions in a short amount of time;
Bias for Action - this Leadership Principle is tightly related to Deliver Results. You have to display enterprise and the ability to figure things out, frequently with a limited amount of resources, and exhibit action;

Frugality - you might be in for some rude awakening, when you join Amazon, especially if you come from a well-funded startup or another established Fortune-ranked company. You will quickly find out that at Amazon there aren't necessarily as many perks as you are used to, in your former life. That's OK. Just be prepared for the realization - you're going to get some coffee; you're going to get some tea and water. Amazon's culture is quite frugal;

Earn Trust - in order to earn trust, you are going to be engaged in a relationship with someone at the company or an external partner for a continuous period of time. It is hard to earn trust immediately. As Jeff Bezos says frequently, earn trust is accumulated over a very long time and it could be lost in an instant;

Dive Deep - data rules everything at Amazon. You would have to learn a lot in a short amount of time. You would need to learn a brand new mechanism of working compared to what you did in your previous roles. You will likely have to go through a massive Amazon learning curve and truly reinvent yourself. In that capacity, you would need to dive deep and accumulate knowledge and data;

Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit - we encourage you to suspend your sense of disbelief when you join Amazon. Suspend your "immune system" if you will and learn the Amazon way. Once you do, you should definitely show backbone and push back on the things you disagree with. Don't be afraid to show backbone at any point, but try to learn Amazon's structural ways in the beginning, more so than pushing back.

Deliver Results - this is the currency of everything you do; this is your signature and your brand. You have to deliver results; you have to produce output, in order to have a prayer to succeed at Amazon.