This is part four of an ongoing series covering each Amazon Leadership Principle. Each Amazon Leadership Principle is a powerful lever for building a high-performance team. When combined with well-intentioned use and mechanisms to make them real, the Amazon Leadership Principles can be the basis for a consistent championship organization and advantaged business model. Do you want some of that in your business?
I would not suggest literally adopting an Amazon Leadership Principle without careful consideration. I suggest using them as a baseline, an input to developing your leadership principles. Amazon’s leadership principles hold almost universal applicability, and it is difficult to argue with almost any of them or their entirety. The combination and tension created by using the right Amazon leadership principles at the right time and in the right way helps create high-performance teams and organizations poised to perform and deliver today and for the long term.
Amazon is a unique company, but one where the best parts can be studied and thoughtfully used to take any company, team or career to the next level. Although “failure” is accepted, failure is oriented to executing tests that succeed or fail. Leaders need to have great instincts and judgment and be sound decision-makers. This Amazon Leadership Principle is about this … being right, a lot.
Amazon Leadership Principle #4: Are Right, a Lot
Amazon Leadership Principle #4: Leaders are Right, a Lot.
Make no mistake; there is a high degree of tolerance for failure at Amazon. A successful culture of innovation cannot exist without it. But what Jeff Bezos cannot tolerate is someone making the same mistake over and over or failing for the wrong reasons.
Therefore, leaders at Amazon are expected to be right far more often than they are wrong. And when they are wrong—which of course will happen when a company continually pushes the envelope, as Amazon does—they are expected to learn from their mistakes, develop specific insights into the reasons for those mistakes, and share those insights with the rest of the company.
The resulting culture of learning, growth, and accountability would be impossible without a high premium on clarity—clarity in the setting of goals, the communication of those goals throughout the organization, the establishment of metrics, and the use of those metrics in gauging the success or failure of any initiative. Practices like “fudging the numbers,” “guesstimating,” “approximating,” and “bending the rules,” as well as deadlines that aren’t real deadlines and targets that are purely aspirational rather than firm objectives—all of these are anathema at Amazon.
As I’ve mentioned, one of the reasons I’m able to write out a description of Amazon’s fourteen leadership secrets long after I left the company is the exceptionally clear way that we articulated our goals and processes as a team and as an organization. Great leaders (like Jeff Bezos) develop a strong, clear framework; then, they constantly apply that framework and articulate it accurately to their team. Get this right from the outset, and you’ve got an excellent mechanism for scaling good decision-making from top to bottom.
Interestingly enough, as leaders at Amazon, we were required to write our ideas in a long, narrative form, which may seem contrary to the value of clarity. After all, don’t most business presentations involve a series of bullet-point PowerPoint slides that are supposed to boil down complex concepts into a handful of brief, vivid phrases?
But at Amazon, PowerPoint slides were not allowed. If you needed to explain a new feature or investment to the S-Team or Jeff himself, you began by writing what is called a “six pager” or narrative at Amazon. I can’t tell you how many of my weekends were consumed by this writing and editing process. Then, at the beginning of the meeting, you would pass out this narrative and sit quietly for ten minutes while everyone read it.
The narrative was a useful tool for sharing a set of ideas with your colleagues. But even more important was the process of working on the plan or proposal, describing it in a narrative so that important nuances, principles, and features were clear is a critical goal. As Dwight D. Eisenhower said, “Plans are nothing; planning is everything.” Jeff believes that reliance on PowerPoint presentations dumbs down the conversation and does not push teams to think all the way through their topic. As he explained in a 2013 Charlie Rose interview, “When you have to write your ideas out in complete sentences and complete paragraphs, it forces a deeper clarity of thinking.” By contrast, in the typical PowerPoint show, “You get very little information; you get bullet points. This is easy for the presenter but difficult for the audience.”1Written documents share more information without the need of additional explanation. When you have to be super specific, it further drives a culture of clarity, commitment, and accountability. With my clients and teams, I work in the narrative approach. It’s rough. It doesn’t go well at first. It takes practice not only in the development of the narrative but also in the use and discussion leading from a narrative. But it can be learned.
Jeff also believes that successful leaders, when presented with new evidence and data, are able to adapt their perspective. Accordingly, he looks for people who are constantly revising their understanding and circling back on problems they thought they’d already solved. He also looks for leaders who can maintain a remarkably granular understanding of their businesses through metrics, intensity, and great program execution. He believes that his system of corporate communication via written-out narratives will develop ideas much more effectively, deeply, and quickly than oversimplified bullet points and pie charts.
Amazon Future Press Release
The style and format of Amazon project vision statements offer another excellent example of the narrative as a forcing function. Written as a short, simple, clear, digestible narrative, the Amazon “future press release” creates very little wiggle room and holds the highlighted team’s feet to the fire by introducing specific parameters and deadlines that are expected to be met. So useful is this technique that an Amazon product launch almost always begins with what we used to call a future press release—an announcement of the product written before its development even began and used for internal purposes only. Crafting the future press release forced us to articulate for ourselves what would be newsworthy about the product at the very end of the development process.
This is a great way to define clear and lofty goals, requirements, and objectives and to build broad understanding from the start of a program or enterprise change. Any time your organization is beginning to undertake a critical enterprise or competitive endeavor—launching a new product, undergoing a transformation, or entering a new market—writing a future press release is a great technique. Follow these rules to make them effective:
- Write the release as if you are writing at some future point in time where success has been achieved and realized. For example, when looking forward to the introduction of a new product, writing a press release on the day of product launch is good, but even better is a date sometime after launch, where true success can be discussed.
- Discuss why the initiative is important to customers or other key stakeholders. How did the customer experience improve? What benefits have customers received? Then discuss other reasons why it was important.
- Set audacious, clear, and measurable goals, including financial results, operating objectives, and market share.
- Outline the principles used that led to success. This is the trickiest and most important step. Describe the hard things accomplished, the important decisions along the way, and the design principles that led to success.
The future press release is a type of forcing function. It paints a clear vision to galvanize understanding and commitment. Once it has been reviewed and approved, teams have a difficult time backing out of the promises it implies. As the project continues, a leader can refer to the press release and use it to remind and hold teams accountable.
Here is the future press release we might have written in 2002 when launching the third-party selling business:
Amazon Announces Huge Growth in Third-Party Selling,
Delighting Customers and Sellers
Seattle, WA: Amazon announced results for the third-party selling business today. Using the third-party selling platform, Amazon customers can now shop across many categories of products today, including apparel, sporting goods, home decor, jewelry, and electronics, with incredible selection, price, and an experience equaling orders fulfilled by Amazon.
“The Amazon customer now thinks about Amazon for any retail need, thanks to the third-party selling business. Over 30% of all orders at Amazon are now third-party sold and fulfilled orders, across ten new and expanded product categories,” explained Director of Merchant Integration, John Rossman. “We tackled several difficult hurdles to make this successful. First, we had to ensure that customers trusted buying from a third-party seller as much as they trusted buying from Amazon the retailer. The second was enabling complete self-service from sign-up to operations for sellers. Sellers can now register, list products to sell, take orders, and fulfill in the middle of the night, without ever having to talk to someone at Amazon.”
In 2017, Andy Jassy, then-CEO of AWS, recalled the document for what has become AWS, which was written around 2003. It said, “If you read the document, the stated mental model was that an individual in his or her dorm room or garage would have access to the same cost structure and scalability of infrastructure as the largest companies in the world.”[1] The clarity in defining the superpower that would be given to a customer in both are very similar.
If you want to increase your chances of achieving your goals when launching any important initiative, make sure you define and explain those goals with utter clarity from the very beginning. The future press release is a useful tool for making that happen. This is a key part of the Amazon Leadership Principle #4: Are Right, a Lot.
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.
John Rossman — leadership keynote speaker
