In the competitive world of business, striving for excellence is key. All of the Amazon Leadership Principles lead to this, but the Amazon Leadership Principle “Insist on Highest Standards” explicitly states that “excellence” is the standard. But this Amazon Leadership Principle is tricky. It is difficult to apply it correctly and equitably. Of all the Amazon Leadership Principles, this is the one I’ve seen repeatedly used incorrectly and, at times, almost vindictively.
“Insist on the Highest Standards” is not always the right mindset. Sometimes, a “B+” approach is the smart approach if it keeps you learning fast and getting feedback. The “highest standard” or “A+” standard often takes too much effort. But in certain circumstances, the “A+” standard is the right. Like I said, it’s tricky.
Using this Amazon Leadership Principle takes wisdom, good intentions and being a master leader yourself. Let’s dive into Amazon Leadership Principle #7: Insist on the Highest Standards and learn how to apply it correctly!
Amazon Leadership Principle: Insist on the Highest Standard
Amazon Leadership Principle: Insist on the Highest Standards
In other chapters of The Amazon Way, I outlined numerous ways Jeff Bezos and the leadership team at Amazon have maintained “unreasonably high” standards of quality. The question is, how has such a large, complex organization managed to embed these standards into the DNA of the organization, from entry-level customer service representatives to the CEO himself? The answer begins with the seriousness and consistency with which the company applies its stated values—the Amazon leadership principles. Those principles are challenging, even inspiring, but they are also exacting in their demands.
Here’s the most important thing about the Amazon Leadership Principles: most of them refer to the expectations that Amazon has for leaders. It sends a subtle but powerful message that empowers every Amazon employee to act and think like a leader. When everyone behaves like a leader, it acts as a forcing function for the relentlessly high standards that Jeff insists upon.
Jeff believed that his workforce, like his technology, should constantly be improving. He believed every new hire should improve the talent pool in the same way that every new technological process should improve efficiency and eliminate operational friction. And as the organization grew beyond the size where Jeff could personally enforce his high standards of performance, he developed instrumentation and metrics to play that role. One of these standards-enforcing tools is the service level agreement.
Service Level Agreements
A service level agreement (SLA) is a kind of contract that specifies the precise standards to which a particular service will be held. A well-written SLA will define the inputs, outputs, and metrics that will be used to define acceptable quality and performance. At Amazon, SLAs are used to define expectations for the services provided to both external and internal customers.
Because bad customer experiences are simply not acceptable at Amazon, SLAs are written in such a way that the worst experiences are still very, very good compared to the rest of the industry. When you settle for the median, mediocrity sets in. That’s where many companies get SLAs wrong.
Jeff relentlessly conveys to his team that even small service failures are far from trivial. For example, one of Amazon’s metrics shows that even a minuscule 0.1-second delay in a webpage loading can translate into a 1 percent drop in customer activity. For that reason, the Amazon SLA specifies that the worst page load time—experienced by customers no more than one-tenth of one percent of the time—must be three seconds or less. These SLAs are heavily negotiated. Part of the weekly metrics review is discussing and understanding the root causes of SLA failures and the planned fixes. What’s probably most impressive is that everything at Amazon has an SLA—everything. For instance, the time between an image’s upload and the moment it appears on the website has an SLA. So does the time it takes to change a third party’s inventory from ten to eight. If it can be measured, it is—and an exceptionally high standard of service is attached to it.
This dedication to real-time metrics and SLAs is one of the most unique aspects of Amazon. Most organizations don’t have the ability to collect and manage this much near-real-time data. They don’t have the ability to insist on SLA instrumentation and agreements or the investment mentality to make this happen. Doing so is not cheap, but at Amazon, instrumentation is a non-negotiable launch requirement for any new program.
As a result, Jeff and his leadership team always have a very clear picture of the organization’s health. Needless to say, if your numbers don’t reflect Jeff’s expectations, you’ll hear about it soon enough.
“Cookies or Cookies & Crumpets?”
In 2003, I was co-leading with the launch of a third-party store devoted to gourmet food. Amazon uses a hierarchy of “browse nodes” to organize its items for sale. Each node represents a category of items for sale rather than the items themselves. For example, a browse node includes Harry Potter books rather than an individual title from the J.K. Rowling book series. Browse node IDs are positive integers that uniquely identify product collections, such as Literature & Fiction (17), Medicine (13996), Mystery & Thrillers (18), Nonfiction (53), or Outdoors & Nature (290060). Amazon uses over 120,000 browse node IDs in the U.S. market alone.
Jeff and the small group running the launch were having a conversation about the relevant browse nodes for the gourmet food store. It was one of those times when Jeff was in a really good mood. He was enjoying himself. Perhaps partly for this reason, we spent literally twenty minutes deeply discussing whether or not one browse node should be “Cookies” or “Cookies & Crumpets.” A crumpet, Jeff argued, is actually a thick and flat savory cake, not a cookie, and thus deserved to be recognized as such.
The level of detail involved in this discussion bordered upon the absurd, but Jeff was entirely engaged and deadly serious about the decision’s importance. To this day, whenever I catch myself thinking that a decision is not that important, I ask myself, Cookies, or Cookies and Crumpets?
After reading this story, you might think, Jesus, what a micromanager! How does anything ever get done? You’d have a point. Many of Jeff’s standards are unreasonably high. And as a result, efficiency is occasionally sacrificed. In fact, some of the worst leaders I encountered at Amazon were the ones who hid behind ridiculous standard critiques. They became parrots of ideology instead of being pragmatic in its application. Like any good idea or concept, the idea of high standards can be carried to a non-productive extreme.
Most of these bureaucratic parrots didn’t last long, however. Because Amazon is a culture of metrics and performance, everything eventually comes out in the wash.
More than a few ex-Amazon employees have described the organization as a large company that functions like a startup, which means, I believe, that they feel as if they were required to do excellent work at a frenetic, breakneck pace while still adhering to time-consuming processes like the long-form written narrative and other elaborate communication processes.
This is all true. But here’s the thing. If you want to work for Jeff, you have to understand that the leadership principles are more than just nebulous guidelines. None of the fourteen principles mention the need for a healthy work-life balance. That is not an accident. Jeff expects all of his people to function as both owners and leaders. He wants you to drive the business as if it were your own car, not some weekend rental.
In talking with current and former Amazon leaders for this third edition of The Amazon Way, I believe that this LP is the hardest one to consistently apply and be used properly. Like any doctrine, these principles can be twisted, misapplied, and become arbitrary. In a high-performance organization like Amazon, if one has a motive, you can typically use this principle to be critical of another employee. Wisdom and good intentions are needed, and the goal always needs to be “How do we get better?” But these high standards exist for many reasons and, in total, create an atmosphere where people know they can’t skate by or deliver sub-excellence work.
One of the original names for Amazon was “Relentless.com.” Eventually, this name was jettisoned because it had too many negative connotations, but that word lives on in Jeff’s insistence on the highest standards. It takes a certain kind of personality to succeed in an organization like Amazon. As an employee, you really do have to adopt a long view, just like Jeff’s, and truly believe you are part of something very big—something that is changing the world.
John Rossman — leadership keynote speaker
Onward!
John
John Rossman is a keynote speaker, innovation coach, and strategy advisor. He writes a free substack newsletter titled The Digital Leader Newsletter. It is a weekly coaching session focused on customer-centricity, innovation, and strategy. He wrote “the book” about the Amazon Leadership Principles.We deliver practical theory, examples, tools, and techniques to help you build better strategies, plans, and solutions—but most of all, to think and communicate better.
