When Amazon ordered most workers back to the office three days a week in February 2023, Pamela Hayter was not happy about the end of a popular pandemic-era arrangement.
But Hayter, a program manager, was bothered on a deeper level: Because the policy effectively meant that only people living near an Amazon office would be able to continue working at the company, she believed Amazon was violating one of its sacred tenets to “hire and develop the best.”
What’s more, by announcing the mandate with little warning or buy-in, Hayter believed, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had betrayed his duty to “earn trust,” another important part of the Amazon code.
At Amazon these tenets, known as Leadership Principles, are much more than suggestions. They are a way of life that employees are judged on before they are even hired, steeped in from the moment they join, and scrupulously followed thereafter with the devotion of religious converts.
Hayter’s next move was a case in point: With the help of some of the 30,000 other employees who joined an internal Slack channel she’d created, she drafted a memo to lay out their concerns about the return-to-work mandate. The memo was exactly six pages long.
Like the Leadership Principles, six-page memos (“6-pagers,” in Amazon lingo) are part of a unique work culture forged within the giant internet company over the years and considered as much of a contributor to Amazon’s world-beating success as any blockbuster product or individual, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos himself.
In reality, these principles and the processes they produce are among Amazon’s grandest innovations.
The customs and practices are widely imitated: More than a dozen books promise to teach managers the secrets to the principles and processes; consultants do brisk business helping firms import Amazon’s methods into their organizations; CEOs load their emails with Amazonian axioms.
And yet, as the Hayter episode shows, the Amazon Way is a fragile concept even within Amazon itself. Jassy defended the return-to-work decision as a judgment call; after all, another company leadership principle notes that “leaders are right a lot. They have strong judgment and good instincts.” But the clash between employees and the CEO over who was being more faithful to the code reveals a growing tension that some fear could erode the pillars of the $2 trillion company.
More than three years after Bezos passed the CEO baton to Jassy, as Amazon recently celebrated its 30th birthday, the durability and staying power of Amazon’s foundational work culture are being watched closely by many inside and outside the organization.
Fortune spoke to two dozen current and recently departed Amazon executives and managers about how the famous Amazon Way is holding up in the post-Bezos era. Many of those interviewed paint a picture of a company where the key principles and practices remain core but have become less universally agreed upon. Increasingly, some insiders say, the leadership principles have become weaponized, diluted, or applied inconsistently.
PowerPoint presentations, once strictly verboten, now pop up occasionally. Longtime leaders who embodied the principles in their every move have moved on.
Perhaps in response to some of these new realities, Amazon recently disseminated to employees an hourlong video course hosted by Jassy himself explaining the company’s 16 leadership principles.
“The leadership principles are not something that you just memorize or that you just study for a couple of hours, or you try once or twice and you’ve got them,” Jassy says in the intro. “It’s something that you have to practice a lot.”
Margaret Callahan, an Amazon spokesperson, said that the company regularly updates internal resources and training, including on topics pertaining to the company’s culture. She said that Amazon’s culture—defined by the leadership principles, a “writing culture,” and working backward from customers’ needs—remains strong: “It’s what has driven innovations such as Prime, AWS, the Kindle, Alexa, the Climate Pledge, and Project Kuiper, just to name a few.”
The success of these products, and Amazon’s continued financial growth, indicate that the company is far from facing any immediate crisis. On Thursday, Amazon will report its second-quarter financial results, with Wall Street analysts expecting double-digit revenue and profit growth.
As Amazon seeks to extend its dominance into the next 30 years, however, the leadership principles and special work culture will almost certainly collide with the questions that have challenged so many corporate paragons of the past: Is having a sacred playbook an asset that companies should preserve at all costs, or does it become a liability holding companies back as the world around them changes? And, perhaps more important, is there a point at which a company’s size, growth, and industry-spanning tentacles make a unified culture of decision-making and inventing impossible?
True believers in the Amazon Way
Customer obsession.
Bias for action.
Disagree and commit.
There are 16 Leadership Principles at Amazon. Any Amazon employee can recite most of them by heart (those who can’t won’t last very long).
There are also the various homegrown Amazon practices: the two-pizza rule, which holds that cross-functional, or “single-threaded,” teams focused on a specific goal or project should be lean enough that two pies could suffice as a team meal. There’s also rabid attention paid to so-called input metrics of a certain business—think selection or price—rather than output metrics such as revenue.
And then there’s the intense focus on written narratives, including the 6-pager, a planning document that describes in storylike fashion a goal for a business line and how to go about accomplishing it, or a new project or plan (one variant of the 6-pager is the so-called PRFAQ, written in the style of a press release announcing the hypothetical future product, and the focal point of Amazon’s “Working Backward” product-development approach). Before a key meeting, all attendees sit silently, reading the memo to themselves. Only then is a discussion permitted to begin in earnest.
It sounds almost cultlike, Amazon insiders acknowledge. But as former Amazon Prime Video boss Bill Carr notes, the payoff is that historically Amazon employees up and down the corporate ladder understand things at a “granular level.”
“The executives at Amazon are just so much more well-informed about what is going on in their company, in terms of metrics, in terms of the initiatives that teams are doing, in terms of what’s working, what’s not working,” said Carr, who left in 2015 but is the coauthor of the book Working Backwards and cofounder of a consulting firm by the same name, which both aim to guide business leaders on how to apply Amazon’s principles and practices to their own businesses.
Executives at Amazon brim with personal examples of the power of the leadership mottoes. Ideally, multiple principles can mesh together on a project to help unleash a single breakthrough product or service.
Beryl Tomay, a 19-year Amazon veteran and vice president of its transportation division, points to one recent success story that involved “regionalizing” the company’s network of U.S. warehouses so that each facility serves a distinct geographic area. The multiyear project has lowered costs, led to more environmentally friendly trucking routes, and allowed customers to get their goods faster, the company has said.
From brainstorming the initial idea to executing, the project called for a collection of Leadership Principles— from “customer obsession” to “thinking big.” Tomay reels off more of them with the zeal of a true believer: “There’s a ‘simplify’ part [and] there’s also the ‘invent’ part. ‘Dive deep’ too. Going super deep into what our topology looks like, and what our inbound inventory placement looks like.”
If mission statements and corporate values are viewed as empty slogans within many companies, at Amazon the Leadership Principles and special practices are embraced with genuine sincerity.
“It’s critically important for an organization to have something like this if they are actually meaningful,” said Stephan Meier, chair of the management division at Columbia Business School and author of the forthcoming book The Employee Advantage.
But, Meier adds, “if it’s not lived, if it’s not on top of people’s minds, if it doesn’t have any implications of how you would make decisions or treat each other, they are completely meaningless.”
It’s precisely this warning that made some Amazon insiders uneasy with what happened a few years ago.
An erosion of trust
On July 1, 2021, Amazon did something it hadn’t done in many years: It added two new leadership principles to its list. “Strive to be Earth’s best employer” was one new principle. “Success and scale bring broad responsibility” was the other.
When these were introduced, Amazon was facing intense media coverage over the swell of unionization efforts in its warehouse network, as well as antitrust and environmental scrutiny. And with Bezos scheduled to hand over the CEO reins a few days later, the introduction of the two new principles served as a convenient opportunity to demonstrate a company committed to progress under his successor.
Inside the company, though, the reaction among many employees was swift and brutal: “They are clearly a marketing ploy and they devalue the rest of the Leadership Principles,” one former senior manager of more than 10 years who left the company recently told Fortune. “Total bullshit,” opined a former longtime communications employee at Amazon who was still at the company at the time, and who summed up the new principles as “playing the reputational game versus guiding how you think.”
The problem, explained a former Amazon vice president, is that the pair of new leadership principles are so radically different from the other 14 that it makes it tougher for employees to grasp the essence of the overall principles and to act on them. “I’ve got to think that that’s somewhat challenging for the rank and file. The fact that there are so many LPs, and the fact that these last two are so abstract,” the former VP said.
The expansion of the number of principles has coincided with what some Amazon insiders describe as an erosion of trust in the principles, or at least in the way their colleagues understand and apply the principles, which are meant to influence everything from new-product ideation to employee evaluations.
Several longtime managers told Fortune that they felt the overall intent of the leadership principles has now shifted in many situations from guidelines on how to make the right decision, to more punitive usages that come across mainly intended to point out flaws. Such weaponization of leadership rules to criticize or squash dissent has always been a reality to a certain extent. “Earn trust” has been especially problematic in this regard, according to some women of color, and a former Amazon VP has written about leadership principles being weaponized by leaders when “they lack the power to give orders” and thus resort to “a crude attempt to apply the LP not as intended, but as a way to ensure an outcome.”
Even knowing that, many who spoke to Fortune believe the issue has worsened in recent years as Amazon has hired many executives from outside the company. (Most of those who spoke to Fortune requested anonymity, either because they are not permitted to talk to the press without permission as current Amazon employees, or because they feared retaliation for speaking candidly even as former employees.) One current Amazon senior manager said they’ve consistently observed bosses new to the company use the principles “as weapons to put those who aren’t favorites in their place,” while employing other principles to build up their favorites.
“Sometimes I’ll hear, ‘It’s amazing you had this “bias for action”’ … and other times when I believe I’ve had ‘bias for action,’ they will say, ‘You weren’t data-driven [from the leadership principle “Dive deep”] enough.’”
Another employee, a longtime AWS manager, said his superiors over the last few years frequently wielded “Disagree and commit”—a maxim intended to prevent groupthink during project planning while ensuring unity once a plan has been agreed upon—as a cudgel to quash any level of pushback.
Callahan, the Amazon spokesperson, said that the two new principles are as important as the others, and that they all play a role in evaluating new hires as well as the performance of current employees.
But there are other signs of change within the organization too. Several current managers who spoke to Fortune said that PowerPoint presentations have supplanted written narratives in some cases over the last two years—not in a dominant way, but in a noticeable one nonetheless. In the Prime Video division, for example, new executives who have come to the company after long careers outside of Amazon have been known to chafe at the heavy focus on narratives.
“There’s a lot of resistance from outsiders at the executive level,” one current manager said.
“We have this S team that is very religious about Amazon’s culture and gets it,” he said, “but they brought in an enormous amount of senior execs in the level or two below the S team from [other] companies and they brought in their culture and were never given a real, ‘This is how we do things at Amazon.’”
New executives who joined right before or immediately after COVID-19 shutdowns also struggled to grasp the supreme importance of business review documents like the weekly, monthly, and quarterly business reviews that exist elsewhere in the business world but are foundational inside Amazon.
“There’s huge value in the QBR when everyone sits together and puts everything on the table,” a former director-level executive who left Amazon last year said. “But when you’re doing it over video and have to limit the number of attendees because there’s too many people, and you’re really worried about anything in there that’s too sensitive to be leaked, then the QBR becomes an onerous burden.”
Bezos was a guiding light and real-time model
Some ascribe the fraying of Amazon’s distinct work culture in part to the change in the CEO suite, even while acknowledging Bezos’s wandering focus in this area during the final years of his tenure.
“In the last two years, Andy should have been more attuned to this,” one current Amazon manager who has spent 15 years at the company said in an interview.
As chief executive, Bezos for many years served as the guiding light of the Amazon Way, providing real-time lessons in how to interpret the leadership principles in different situations and how to know which ones to employ when.
The modeling was crucial for a set of principles which, as everyone who spoke to Fortune agreed, are often in tension with one another. How can you both “dive deep” while having a “bias for action”? How can you truly employ “customer obsession” if you also have to make sure that “frugality” is core to what you do?
“Jeff’s brain just doesn’t work like other people’s brains,” adds Carr, who experienced 15 years of firsthand observations before leaving the company in 2015, and who stressed that he could only speak about Amazon’s culture as it was during his time at the company. “By learning from him, then you could start to take those paths, too, and teach people about why that’s the path we would take.”
Those who joined right before the pandemic, or during the madness of 2020 and 2021, had little time to learn and adapt. Learning through meeting interactions over videoconferencing, for example, was much less conducive to osmosis than in-person interactions, either planned or serendipitous run-ins, several sources said.
“They really struggled to understand the culture, but that wasn’t on them,” said another, an Amazon director-level executive who left the company recently after nearly a decade. “That’s on the changing of times and remote work.”
Amazon’s Callahan said that for the last five years, new senior Amazon leaders at the director and vice president levels attend a three-day training on the company’s culture taught by peers, and are paired with other Amazon colleagues to help them adapt to the company in other ways. However, Callahan declined to respond to questions about whether this practice was put on hold during the pandemic and, if so, for how long.
Many longtime standard-bearers of the company’s DNA have also walked away in recent years. Jeff Wilke, Bezos’s longtime right hand and the CEO of Amazon’s core consumer business, left in 2021; Dave Clark, a longtime head of Amazon’s warehouse and delivery operations who eventually replaced Wilke, departed Amazon a little more than a year later, reportedly in part owing to Jassy’s hands-on managing style.
With so much change at the top, executives like Jamil Ghani are trying to step up. The global leader of Amazon Prime joined the company eight years ago and says that providing on-the-fly lessons and guidance about the leadership principles and Amazon customs, like written narratives, is an important part of his job.
“I often tell the team that the point of your work is not the doc; that the point of your work is to create a doc that can inspire the right meeting, the right discussion,” Ghani told Fortune. “In the best meetings, you actually don’t even talk about the document. Everybody has the same context and information and then you have a discussion.”
In the event that a leadership principle has been misinterpreted or misapplied—including, as he acknowledges occasionally occurs, in situations when one is being used punitively—Ghani swoops in.
A Bible with many religions
One of the beauties of Amazon’s leadership principles has long been that they are detailed enough to serve as North Stars but broad enough for leaders to mold them as necessary depending on the type of decision or current environment.
“Think of the LPs like the Bible,” a former member of Amazon’s exclusive senior executive team, known as the S-team, told Fortune. “Amazing how many religions are based off the same text.”
Tomay, the VP of transportation, says staying nimble sometimes requires tweaking longtime practices. In the last year, she’s told her teams to reserve the six-page memo for only the most important meetings and encouraged them to craft a one-pager first. If there’s an alignment on the path forward after reviewing the one-pager in, say, a 30-minute meeting, that person or team will get the green light to go off and dive deep in creating a 6-pager.
“The company has shifted and grown,” she says, “so you have to keep adapting.”
With 1.5 million employees, Amazon is one of the largest employers in the world. And it has successfully expanded into lucrative markets like cloud computing, advertising, and entertainment. But with online retailers like China’s Shein and Temu gaining momentum, and AI threatening to reshape the entire business landscape, Amazon’s ability to adapt without losing what makes it special is sure to be tested in the years to come.
Meier, the Columbia Business School professor and author, points to Toyota as one legacy corporation worth studying in this regard. “Toyota had those very clear principles on how to treat employees and make decisions, and I think it served them really well,” he says. “As a result, they sustained some of their success over transitions.”
The auto giant, whose stock hit an all-time high in March, is 87 years old, almost three times as old as Amazon.
It’s currently on its 12th president.
