Amazon exec says most important lesson from Jeff Bezos were the power of 16 leadership principles

“I felt like I had joined a cult,” Herrington said on a recent episode of Learn and Be Curious with Doug Herrington, Amazon’s internal podcast. He had joined Amazon in 2005 as the vice president of consumables, according to his LinkedIn, working up the ranks to CEO of worldwide Amazon stores by 2022.

“I told my wife, ‘I don’t understand what’s going on,” he recalled. Herrington isn’t the only Amazon employee to describe the company that way, especially in its early days. A 2001 Wired feature titled “Inside the Cult of Amazon” quoted a former employee who described workers as being “brainwashed” into adoring Bezos and embracing 20-hour workdays.

But Herrington ultimately saw his initial skepticism as a rite of passage—one that made him a better leader. And he saw it as a way for Bezos to “get this whole company to row in one direction.”

Still, the company’s now-famous 16 Leadership Principles aimed at defining “how we want our leaders to make decisions, and behave, and work with each other, and solve problems when they’re at their best” at first felt like too much, Herrington admitted. 

Over time, Herrington saw the power in Bezos’ message and how that cultural playbook ultimately became Amazon’s identity. 

“I learned the power of using culture to get everybody on the same page. It just reduces friction if you know where everybody’s coming from,” Herrington said. “And we do it through these Leadership Principles.”

Herrington also clarified Bezos’ leadership principles weren’t like the 10 Commandments etched in stone. In fact, Herrington said many of the principles didn’t even get written down until 2002, about eight years after the company was founded. 

“So Jeff didn’t come down from the mountaintop with these leadership principles carved in stone,” Herrington said. “We wrote them down primarily so that we could start teaching them to other people, and teaching them to all the new people at Amazon.”

Now Herrington sees the principles—from customer obsession and bias for action to dive deep and have backbone—as a unifying language that keeps Amazon’s roughly 1.5 million employees aligned.

How Bezos’ principles became Amazon’s culture

Bezos’s own writings—especially his letters to shareholders over the decades—emphasize many of the same themes as his 16 Leadership Principles: relentless customer focus, long-term thinking, an obsession with invention, and a readiness to “work backwards” from what customers actually need. 

Steve Anderson, author of The Bezos Letters: 14 Principles to Grow Your Business Like Amazon, said Bezos’ leadership principles consistently underpinned Amazon’s strategy as it scaled from a garage-based startup to the world’s second-largest company.

“As I studied the letters, I realized Bezos had ‘hidden in plain sight’ how he had grown Amazon by taking intentional and calculated risks,” Anderson said. “I discovered there were recurring themes (principles) that any business could use to grow like Amazon.”

Beyond Herrington, current Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has prioritized teaching and explaining Bezos’ principles internally, even launching video explanations of each one to help employees interpret them. He even admits even after nearly three decades at the company he is still mastering them to this day.

“I’m still working on it,” Jassy said in Amazon’s Leadership Principles Explained video series. “People change, competitive dynamics change, products change, technology changes. The Leadership Principles are something you have to constantly work at. When they’re applied well, they’re powerful.”

What critics say about Bezos’ principles

While Amazon’s top leadership clearly embraces Bezos’ leadership principles, they haven’t been universally accepted or embraced. As Amazon has grown into a corporate behemoth, the principles are increasingly woven into promotions, performance reviews, and workplace policy, a shift that has drawn pushback. 

But because Jassy claims he hates bureaucracy so much, he, in 2024, announced a plan to increase the ratio of employees to managers. This was a decision based on Amazon’s disdain for inefficiency and having too many stakeholders involved in decision-making. 

“The reality is that the [senior leadership] team and I hate bureaucracy,” Jassy said during a 2024 internal call, the same meeting where he addressed employee questions about Amazon’s strict return-to-work policy, a spokesperson confirmed to Fortune. “One of the reasons I’m still at this company is because it’s not a political or bureaucratic place.”

Bezos’ legacy, and the future of culture

For all the debate, Bezos’ leadership principles remain one of the most distinctive artifacts of the founder’s legacy. They represent an effort to engineer culture with the same intentionality the company engineers its supply chain or cloud-computing services. In a company that has never shied away from bold experiments and disruption, the principles are as much about how decisions are made as what is decided.

Herrington, once bemused by how cult-like the principles seemed, now views them as an indispensable guide for culture at Amazon—and one that’s stood the test of time and will continue to do so.

“As my colleague Russ [Grandinetti] says: ‘There was never a Camelot where we were perfect. Our leadership principles were always the behaviors that we aspired to live by when we were at our best,’” Herrington said. “But the way that we do that is we keep on communicating them and talking them and teaching them. And I try to do that every day.”