Amazon's Leadership Principles
131–140 of 196 posts
Re: Amazon's Leadership Principles
#132The emphasis on "customer obsession" is clearly working, since it has topped the polls for best corporate reputation two years in a row. http://www.geekwire.com/2017/amazon-tops-harris-poll-corpora... I work for Amazon, and I personally am a huge fan of the "LPs" . I consistently find myself mentally consulting them when I'm not sure what to do in a particular situation. I also think it really helps to work in an env…
Is anything in this thread for real? This post talks about a bunch of stuff that sounds like gibberish to someone not working at Amazon. The hell is an LP? More importantly, how does this possibly become the top comment? Also this user has only made 2 comments in a year? That's worse than my throwaways
LP = Leadership Principles. At least that's what I'm assuming from context clues.
Re: Amazon's Leadership Principles
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amazon tries to push Leadership Principles into every part of at least their corporate world. It's supposed to drive decision making for basically everyone, brand new engineers on up (I don't know if they push them lower down the stack). What I'm getting at is it's not solely for "leaders" as in high level folks. > live a life never caring about money (> 200k a year) I'm in my 3rd year as an engineer here (and of my…
is SDE II an L6 position?
No
EDIT: Whoops
Re: Amazon's Leadership Principles
#134I take Reed Hasting and Netflix a lot more seriously and their principles. They pay for performance. Amazon just grinds through as many people with low self esteem as possible and pays a poor salary.
"Poor"? Seriously? They offer more than any startup as an engineer, and less than Google and Facebook. Any engineer is in the top 20% of wage earners.
Plenty of valid complaints about Amazon. Pay isn't one of them.
Re: Amazon's Leadership Principles
#135I know a lot of companies have ancronyms, bullet points, or a list of company culture principals. What's everyone's reaction to all of this? Do you take it seriously? Pretend to? Roll your eyes? Find value in them?
This. Probably the most important single thing in my biz life.
They are anchors that are easily measureable. I used and constantly use them to prioritize work, provide constructive criticism, and most importantly know that I am right.
It has cut through next level bosses hard-to-understand decisions;
Even in my now easy life in retail it becomes the foundation for supervision; makes terminations easy (a task I now don't get upset at);
Plus i get great feedback when I personally live up to our values
But it's most useful at interpersonal conflicts about work.
Re: Amazon's Leadership Principles
#136I find a lot of arrogance in this Principles, at some point of view it is even evil. Have anybody knows of another company that throws their leadership principles to your face?
Re: Amazon's Leadership Principles
#137Some 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 was introduced to these at USMC Officer Candidate School and agree wholeheartedly; these principles are effective and I have tried to live into them (as appropriate) as I've taken on manager/director roles in my career. Amazon recently reached out to me to attend a giant recruiting event and included a link to these principles, and the "Are Right, A Lot" line item turned me off completely. There's something about s…
Those USMC principles are fine principles; they exhort leaders to care for and develop the juniors under them. In my experience, in a political corporate environment, behaving that way will hold you back. Instead of "know your marines and look out for their welfare" you should "know your manager and look out for his/her welfare" ie "manage upwards". Instead of "keep your marines informed" you should "keep your manager informed, and only share information with your juniors selectively". Instead of "take responsibility for your actions" you should "ensure failures can be blamed on some scapegoat". If you're "managing out" a weak team member to avoid a payout you should "ensure the task is not accomplished" to build a paper trail justifying their later dismissal.
Re: Amazon's Leadership Principles
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
"They seek diverse perspectives and work to disconfirm their beliefs."
Which is very sensible, but then the principle would be "[Our leaders] Do not assume they are always right".
The wording of this principle is probably the one that gets talked about the most internally. People always bring up changing it, but when they rolled out a new revision of the principles two years ago or so, this one stayed the same. It's a shame, because once properly explained it's probably one of my favorite principles.
Re: Amazon's Leadership Principles
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 lan…
There isn't a 100x difference in salary. Bezos salary is something like 80k. His income is derived almost entirely by stock grants, which are awarded based on company performance. The fact that he's a billionaire is because he founded the company.
Re: Amazon's Leadership Principles
#140I take Reed Hasting and Netflix a lot more seriously and their principles. They pay for performance. Amazon just grinds through as many people with low self esteem as possible and pays a poor salary.
Sorry, but this is bullshit, the pay is great (and based on performance) and self esteem isn't a problem.