The Ownership Leadership Principle is a cornerstone for driving the success of Big Bets. Leaders who think and act like owners approach every decision with a long-term perspective, ensuring that their actions create sustainable value for the entire organization. In the high-stakes world of Big Bets, short-term thinking can derail even the most promising initiatives. Leaders must resist the temptation to focus on quick wins and instead stay committed to the long-term goals that will ultimately define the success of their Big Bet. The Ownership Leadership Principle means taking full responsibility for outcomes and never passing the buck—it’s about embracing the bigger picture and acting on behalf of the entire company.
In the context of Big Bets, ownership also requires leaders to break down silos and collaborate across teams. Leaders who embody this principle understand that their role extends beyond their immediate responsibilities and teams—they act on behalf of the entire organization. This holistic mindset is critical for Big Bets, which often involve multiple departments, functions, and stakeholders. Leaders who take ownership ensure that no aspect of the initiative is neglected, and they actively contribute to the success of the overall effort, even if it’s outside their direct purview. They never say, “that’s not my job,” because they recognize that the success of a Big Bet depends on a collective effort.
Ultimately, the ownership mindset is essential for creating clarity, maintaining velocity, and prioritizing risk and value—all critical habits in Big Bet Leadership. Leaders who think like owners are relentless in their pursuit of excellence and are willing to make tough decisions for the long-term benefit of the organization. They are fully invested in the outcome and take personal responsibility for driving success, ensuring that their Big Bets deliver not just for their teams, but for the entire company, its customers, and stakeholders.
Whenever I discuss the ownership leadership principle, I think about a famous story in Amazon company lore about a Christmas party early in the life of Amazon, which was held at a rented facility in downtown Seattle. When the employees responsible for setup realized they didn’t have a stand for the Christmas tree, someone decided to nail its trunk directly to the wooden floor. What the hell? they thought. We’re just renting the place.
Always on the lookout for symbolic gestures to drive home his principles, Jeff pounced on the incident. For years, he used this unfortunate solution to highlight the shortcomings of the renter’s mentality. “Owners would never nail a tree into the floor.”
One of the biggest mistakes you can make as a leader at Amazon is sacrificing long-term value for short-term results. Jeff wants his people to approach every business situation as an owner, not a renter.
Of course, Amazon enjoys the luxury of a CEO who can think about investments with a horizon that spans years, even decades. Most public companies must respond to the quarterly demands for steady growth in sales, profits, and stock value from the board, the shareholders, and Wall Street. Amazon is able to place long bets and nurture them to maturity without as much focus on short-term results. When you look at business opportunities through a lens that’s in multiple years or longer, suddenly Jeff, as a personal investment, buying the Washington Post may not seem like such a crazy idea. And from the get-go, Jeff has sold investors on this idea of the long term. That’s partially why Amazon gets very different—and much higher—stock valuations than other companies. It’s also why investing in scale is so vital to Amazon.
How does Jeff build and maintain this sense of ownership among his team members? One way is by hiring the right people. The company has built an effective and scalable system for recruiting, managing, and developing high-performing talent. Another way is by instilling a sense of accountability throughout every stratum of the organization. As co-owners of Amazon, every employee must be unflinching in his accountability and honesty. The highest level of customer service is impossible to achieve without a high degree of accountability and a willingness to be direct, open, and honest—especially when things are not going well.
During my time at Amazon, we had a philosophy called “the open kimono.” If you weren’t willing to be completely honest about where you, your project, or your numbers stood, then there was simply no chance of attaining your goals. You had to open your kimono and willingly expose the faults, errors, and limitations of your situation. And as I learned in that 2003 S-Team meeting, if you started caveating or waffling about why you were not hitting objectives, Jeff wouldn’t hesitate to tear that kimono off for you. I distinctly remember him asking one poor soul who’d been rambling and tergiversating in an effort to explain away some mistake, “Which do you think you are exhibiting—gross stupidity or sheer incompetence?”
When asking for a report on a failed project, all Jeff ever wanted to know was the following, “Here’s what didn’t work, why it didn’t work, and how we’re going to change.” If a project looked as if it might be heading for disaster, all he wanted to hear was, “We don’t think it’s going to work; let’s try something else.” While an honest mea culpa didn’t guarantee that Jeff wouldn’t pounce, at least it allowed you to retain a certain measure of self-respect, and your job. This balance of driving for success and accountability while realizing that some ideas are not going to work lets the organization “fail forward.” Sometimes execution is poor, and that is a performance issue. Sometimes the idea is simply not quite the right idea, and so you learn, adjust, and move forward.
The Ownership Leadership Principle
Simply declaring that everyone in the company is an owner and that he or she will be held accountable for decisions and actions is not enough, of course. There are a number of crucial connecting principles that help transform ownership from a vague aspiration into a daily reality.
The most direct manifestation is that every employee receives stock as part of their employment package. Every employee benefits when the Amazon stock value increases.
Yes, it is Your Job. Amazon employees quickly learn that the phrase “That’s not my job” is an express ticket to an exit interview. Ownership means not only mastering your domain but also being willing to go beyond the boundaries of your role whenever it’s needed to improve customer experience or fix a problem.
Such boundaryless behavior requires an understanding of details and metrics, which goes two to three degrees deeper than normal. It was not uncommon for senior people at Amazon to be able to talk with knowledge and authority about details of a project that was not in their own department, let alone under their direction. It also implies a readiness to speak up and contribute without having to be asked. For example, if you have something valuable to offer in regard to a specific program, you don’t wait to be invited to the next meeting about that program—you simply show up.
You Own Your Dependencies. Of course, everyone in business depends on others for success. Those around you—colleagues, team members, outside suppliers and partners, those in other departments who touch your work—contribute essential elements that make you effective. This means that when they let you down, they can also cause you to fail, sometimes miserably.
At Amazon, one of your primary directives is to identify and tenaciously manage every potential business-derailing dependency you have. It is not okay to fail because of a breakdown of dependencies. That’s a failure of leadership and, as you’ve seen, there is not much wiggle room for excuses at Amazon. When called to account for a problem caused in part or in whole by a dependency breakdown, you must be able to say, “I did these things to manage my dependencies. I went above and beyond the reasonable in my efforts to manage them.” That means having rock-solid contracts, service-level agreements, and penalties in place, as well as continual, active management of communications. You can assume nothing.
In that 2003 S-Team meeting, Jeff broke down the process of managing dependencies in three easy steps (while, of course, yelling and wildly gesticulating like a madman):
- Whenever possible, take over the dependencies, so you don’t have to rely on someone else.
- If that is impossible, negotiate and manage unambiguous and clear commitments from others.
- Create hedges wherever possible. For every dependency, devise a fallback plan—a redundancy in a supply chain, for example.
Taking absolute responsibility for every possible dependency under your purview is no small task. This is one reason that very few have the rigor, determination, and tenacity to make it in a leadership role at Amazon. It is a company of control freaks run by control freaks and lorded over by the king of control freaks. As one ex-engineer famously said, Jeff Bezos is such a control freak he “makes ordinary control freaks look like stoned hippies.”3
And since your own team is one of the most important dependencies under your authority, your ability to mentor those around you is a key metric during your annual evaluation. That means your success is intrinsically linked to the success your people have acquired over the course of their careers at Amazon.
Amazon’s Real Superpower—Patience
“The two most powerful warriors are time and patience.” – Leo Tolstoy
Third Time is a Charm
When I started at Amazon, patience was a virtue because we had limited resources. Patience today seems less a virtue, but it is still a superpower. In joining Amazon to lead the launch of the Amazon Marketplace, my role as Director of Merchant Integration was directly responsible for creating the mechanisms for onboarding and managing the company’s thousands of independent retailers. However, I also had major supporting responsibilities to the sales efforts to sign up these retailers as well as all the technical work impacted to launch the business including catalog systems, payments, detail page, search and browse, and order pipeline. Since our mission was to make buying from a third-party seller as seamless and trustworthy as buying from Amazon, the retailer, it felt like we impacted every technical team at Amazon.
Today, the Marketplace business is well over 50 percent of all units shipped and sold at Amazon and is a major contributor to Amazon revenue and profits. But it didn’t come easy; it wasn’t obvious that it would ever be this size of a business, and most importantly, the combination of capabilities and experiences that would be needed to flourish were not understood.
The Marketplace was Amazon’s third attempt at a third-party selling platform. In the 2014 shareholder letter, Bezos gives the quick history:
Marketplace’s early days were not easy. First, we launched Amazon Auctions. I think seven people came, if you count my parents and siblings. Auctions transformed into zShops, which was basically a fixed-price version of Auctions. Again, no customers. But then we morphed zShops into Marketplace. Internally, Marketplace was known as SDP for Single Detail Page. The idea was to take our most valuable retail real estate – our product detail pages – and let third-party sellers compete against our own retail category managers. It was more convenient for customers, and within a year, it accounted for 5% of units. Today, more than 40% of our units are sold by more than two million third-party sellers worldwide.”[1] An organization without commitment doesn’t give it a third try.
But even when we launched in the fall of 2002, it wasn’t clear that the business would become what it is. It took time for the different categories like apparel, sporting goods, gourmet, home and appliance, to really build the selection required to be “the everything store.” It also took customers time to learn and adopt that Amazon was more than just books, music, and videos (yes, CDs and VHS tapes). But it was really the combination of two more innovations that created the combination, the updraft of forces creating exponential impact, that Marketplace became the force it is today.
In 2005, Amazon Prime launched. This “shipping program” quickly developed into a “loyalty program,” offering more than just second-day shipping on Amazon retail items. In 2006, with the launch of “Fulfillment by Amazon,” Marketplace sellers could leverage Amazon fulfillment and delivery capabilities for their inventory. Soon, Amazon decided to allow FBA items, Marketplace items, to be “Prime Eligible,” making Amazon’s most loyal customers highly vested in finding everything at Amazon. This combination—not even a concept when we launched Marketplace in 2002—created the vortex. Boom.
For innovation to work, many factors have to align. It has to fulfill a real customer need; the experience has to be great; the operations have to scale; the unit economics have to be in line; and market adoption has to be primed. It is rare that all of these factors (and more) are in alignment and ready to go from the start. How do you compensate? Patience.
The Hidden Superpower of Innovators
“One area where I think we are especially distinctive,” Bezos wrote in Amazon’s 2015 letter to shareholders, “is failure. I believe we are the best place in the world to fail (we have plenty of practice!), and failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment. Most large organizations embrace the idea of invention but are not willing to suffer the string of failed experiments necessary to get there.”[2]
Amazon’s highest-profile failure was the Fire Phone. “What the hell happened with the Fire Phone?”[3] asked stock analyst Henry Blodget in a Business Insider discussion with Bezos. “The Fire Phone, like all of Amazon’s projects, was an experiment,” Bezos coolly replied. In his mind, its failure was a learning experience—another chance to iterate or pivot. “What really matters is, companies that don’t continue to experiment, companies that don’t embrace failure, they eventually get in a desperate position where the only thing they can do is a Hail Mary bet at the very end of their corporate existence. Whereas companies that are making bets all along, even big bets, but not bet-the-company bets, prevail. I don’t believe in bet-the-company bets. That’s when you’re desperate. That’s the last thing you can do.”
But only the company board, the CEO, and perhaps a couple of select executives can create this heat-deflection shield around the teams and ideas you are trying to nourish. The average company executive, let alone middle management, just can’t be brazen enough, and is not in the position to lead others down this perilous trip. “Sometimes companies embark on new projects and if it doesn’t work out after a year or two, and they are losing a lot of money, they abandon it. Jeff is quite willing to take 10 years to make money on a new area that we go into. But if it looks like we are making progress, we’re going to stick with it.”[4] Long-term thinking and willingness to pioneer into new areas are a powerful force for breakthrough innovation.
The Amazon Leadership Principles set the baseline for all leaders and employees in how they work together, what is prioritized, how decisions are made and what is important. Regardless of how you feel about Amazon the company, teams and companies can learn from the Amazon Leadership Principles to create high-performance teams and organizations.
Onward!
John
John Rossman is a writer, advisor, and keynote speaker. Have him inspire and teach your team.
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John Rossman — leadership keynote speaker
