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Amazon's Leadership Principles

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Re: Amazon's Leadership Principles

#71

Post by yAnonymous »

golergka wrote: post #68
rodionos wrote: post #65

This isn't a jibe at Amazon, but I wouldn't call it Principles. Principles is something you adhere to when there's no financial gain involved. When defense contractors use the terms Values, Excellence, Honesty etc - it just undermines the effort. There should be a better word to describe this, perhaps Weights and Constraints when making decisions at Amazon. It's difficult to come up with something as good as Azimov's…

I don't quite understand - what is it about financial gain that makes it incompatible with principles?

Nothing. He doesn't know the meaning of the word, that's all.

Re: Amazon's Leadership Principles

#72

Post by draugadrotten »

enraged_camel wrote: post #57
6stringmerc wrote: post #12

Leaders are willing to take a 100x salary compared to their line employees because they know they can hustle hard enough to live up to the expectations. I'm very excited to see the helmet cam video of Jeff Bezos serving a customary 8-10-12-14 hour shift at the Dallas Amazon Fulfillment Center and walk out with a smile. Can you do what you ask of others? That's leadership. No, really. Principles not tested in the fire…

That seems like the Tu Quoque fallacy to me. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque Basically, just because someone doesn't practice what they preach does not make the thing they preach any less valid. To give an extreme example, if someone argues against domestic violence, then you find out they beat their wife, you don't suddenly go "gosh, clearly domestic violence is not bad, otherwise you wouldn't partake in i…

> To give an extreme example, if someone argues against domestic violence, then you find out they beat their wife, you don't suddenly go "gosh, clearly domestic violence is not bad, otherwise you wouldn't partake in it!"

No, but one would say "You are beating your wife, you are a hippocrite and have no moral authority to preach to me what I should or should not do".

If the Amazon leadership is "beating their wifes", they have lost the moral authority to lead the Amazon staff.

Re: Amazon's Leadership Principles

#73

Post by [deleted] »

bgwhn wrote: post #46
Bahamut wrote: post #36

Some of these are contradictory - in addition, some of these aren't really even leadership principles of much merit outside the company they're created for. Here is an example of a proven set of leadership principles that is a worthwhile read: http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/usmc/leadership.htm . Someone who can embody all of these principles that the Marine Corps espouses is someone I can respect immensely regar…

I used to work at Amazon, and I liked their leadership principles. They're intentionally contradictory, but that's just an acknowledgement that perfection is impossible. When you choose to focus on one aspect of your career, that's often going to be at the detriment of something else. This also means that there's always room for career development and self-improvement.

[deleted]

Re: Amazon's Leadership Principles

#74

Post by golergka »

yAnonymous wrote: post #71
golergka wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't quite understand - what is it about financial gain that makes it incompatible with principles?

Nothing. He doesn't know the meaning of the word, that's all.

I have to admit, I have the same opinion. But I'm always delighted to be proven wrong, and would appreciate good arguments against it.

Re: Amazon's Leadership Principles

#75

Post by aanm1988 »

TheGRS wrote: post #13

Do these leadership or company principles ever truly have any effect on employees or products? I've seen them thrown around at my company on a few occasions, but they never feel like they drive much beyond trying to be one of those gaudy motivational posters.

OH absolutely.

They are contradictory enough that you can get dinged on one for following another at review time.

Frugality means putting up with lousy hardware and cramming people into working environments to the point where people start bringing up OHSA w.r.t. number of toilets.

Customer obsession means getting an email about a feature used by a couple percent of users and having to spend a week scrambling because the strategic decision you made (to drop the feature in a major release because you need to get it out) has now been declared wrong. Sev-S was a popular term (S-team being Jeff and his directs).

Bias for action means break extremely important OS features that support multiple products because of pure incompetence. Note that this should really conflict with customer obsession and are right a lot, but oh well.

One thing I found odd was that are right a lot/disagree and commit don't seem to matter if the opposing argument is your manager wanting to do other stuff.

My less snarky response would be that they do spread this stuff around. It has some positive impacts around things like customer obsession, which Amazon is great at. Bias for action can be a good motivator for the right type of person, see something wrong and you go fix it. That said it's not problem free. Frugality is made fun of a lot, because it often goes from sensibly frugal to just cheap.

Re: Amazon's Leadership Principles

#76

Post by antowa »

I would say it is such a misleading principles. Don't believe it. The actual 'core' meaning of the principles is: work for Amazon without any complaint. It turns developers in Amazon out to be ruled by the higher leaders. Very capitalism.

Re: Amazon's Leadership Principles

#77

Post by aanm1988 »

neocodesoftware wrote: post #44

am amzn shopper. for a data driven company these 10 commandments are a priori? are the results of decades clinical research? is there an extensive bibliogrpahy? peer review? or is this newspeak? can't amzn do better? a ted talk has more data. thats my backbone. i disagree and i am committed to emoticons. :)

They slap "unless you know better ones" on everything, so if you have go ahead and bring it up.

Re: Amazon's Leadership Principles

#78

Post by throwaway6556 »

knucklesandwich wrote: post #32
6stringmerc wrote: post #12

Leaders are willing to take a 100x salary compared to their line employees because they know they can hustle hard enough to live up to the expectations. I'm very excited to see the helmet cam video of Jeff Bezos serving a customary 8-10-12-14 hour shift at the Dallas Amazon Fulfillment Center and walk out with a smile. Can you do what you ask of others? That's leadership. No, really. Principles not tested in the fire…

> Leaders are willing to take a 100x salary compared to their line employees because they know they can hustle hard enough to live up to the expectations. > I'm very excited to see the helmet cam video of Jeff Bezos serving a customary 8-10-12-14 hour shift at the Dallas Amazon Fulfillment Center and walk out with a smile. Can you do what you ask of others? That's leadership. Sometimes I just have to sit and marvel a…

The shilling is high with this one. I think he's using the "repeat it until it becomes true" tactic.

Re: Amazon's Leadership Principles

#79

Post by jrimbault »

maxlybbert wrote: post #62
6stringmerc wrote: post #12

Leaders are willing to take a 100x salary compared to their line employees because they know they can hustle hard enough to live up to the expectations. I'm very excited to see the helmet cam video of Jeff Bezos serving a customary 8-10-12-14 hour shift at the Dallas Amazon Fulfillment Center and walk out with a smile. Can you do what you ask of others? That's leadership. No, really. Principles not tested in the fire…

> Leaders are willing to take a 100x salary compared to their line employees because they know they can hustle hard enough to live up to the expectations. There are several reasons for the salary differential. But, fundamentally, one issue is that some things don't scale linearly. To use a simpler example: Richard and Maurice McDonald created a hamburger stand in 1948. They created the original recipes, came up with…

> When it comes time to divvy up the revenue, how do you reflect the fact that companies don't necessarily scale linearly based on the effort and contributions of their founders and executives?

Do I even have to spell it out? There shouldn't be a 100x factor between the lowest and highest salary. There's no degree of merit that should guarantee that privilege.

Merit doesn't scale linearly, if I wanted to use your language, but there's no reason income should follow the same model. I really want to know what's the reasoning for allowing such ridiculous income gaps. If there's money left at the end of the year and the company doesn't want to invest more (which should be the first thing to do?), why pay the executives even more when the employees would benefit far more from the bonuses.

Re: Amazon's Leadership Principles

#80

Post by ACow_Adonis »

Bahamut wrote: post #36

Some of these are contradictory - in addition, some of these aren't really even leadership principles of much merit outside the company they're created for. Here is an example of a proven set of leadership principles that is a worthwhile read: http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/usmc/leadership.htm . Someone who can embody all of these principles that the Marine Corps espouses is someone I can respect immensely regar…

I felt compelled to write a response.

I didn't know what to expect seeing that it was a link to the Marine Corps...

But essentially, I agree. The examples in that link are about as close as you can get to some actual generally inspiring leadership principals.

The amazon leadership principals, by contrast, look and sound like empty corporate marketing fluff.

By comparison, far from being something that makes them stand out and sound different, it makes them sound exactly the same as every other big company :(

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