The fifth in a series of blogs covering each Amazon Leadership Principle. In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, the ability to continually learn and remain curious is vital for personal and organizational success. Among Amazon’s renowned 16 Leadership Principles, “Learn and Be Curious” stands out as a cornerstone of the company’s innovative culture. This principle emphasizes the importance of relentless curiosity and a commitment to lifelong learning, encouraging employees to seek out new knowledge, explore innovative ideas, and never settle for the status quo. As businesses strive to stay competitive, understanding and implementing this Amazon Leadership Principle can significantly impact their growth and adaptability.

At Amazon, “Learn and Be Curious” is more than just a catchphrase; it’s a deeply ingrained cultural norm that drives the company’s success. This principle compels Amazonians to step beyond their comfort zones, embrace new challenges, and acquire skills that push the boundaries of what’s possible. By fostering an environment where curiosity is celebrated and continuous learning is expected, Amazon ensures that its workforce remains agile, forward-thinking, and capable of pioneering groundbreaking solutions. This relentless pursuit of knowledge not only fuels individual development but also propels Amazon’s innovative edge in the market.

For leaders and organizations looking to emulate Amazon’s success, adopting the “Learn and Be Curious” principle can serve as a powerful catalyst for transformation. Encouraging a culture of curiosity within a team promotes a growth mindset, where employees feel empowered to experiment, take risks, and learn from failures. This approach not only enhances problem-solving capabilities but also drives employee engagement and satisfaction. By prioritizing learning and curiosity, businesses can cultivate a dynamic and resilient workforce poised to navigate the complexities of today’s business world and beyond. Embracing this Amazon Leadership Principle can be the key to unlocking sustained innovation and long-term success.

Let’s learn about this key Amazon Leadership Principle, “Learn and Be Curious”.

Amazon Leadership Principle – Learn and Be Curious

“Leaders are never done learning and always seek to improve themselves. They are curious about new possibilities and act to explore them.”https://www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-principles

Leaders at Amazon are not only expected to “be right, a lot,” but they are also expected to be experts in many diverse fields. The risk of “expertise,” however, is hubris and not seeing beyond conventional thinking. A closed mind cannot see new ideas or paths. To help avoid this, Amazon leaders are encouraged to learn, be curious, figure out a way to get to “yes,” and have a beginner’s mindset. 

It’s Still Day 1

Bezos has a consistent message to investors, employees, and the rest of the industry: “This is Day 1 for the Internet. We still have so much to learn.” As constant reminders of this fundamental belief, two of the larger buildings at Amazon’s Seattle campus are named Day 1 North and Day 1 South. 

While the “Day 1” motto serves as a reminder that the internet is still young and full of promise, the leadership principle “Learn and Be Curious” underlines a fundamental orientation that good leaders adhere to at Amazon—to stop learning is to stop innovating.

Which Dog Is Not Barking?

 A vital corollary of learning, humility, and the beginner’s mindset is the readiness to recognize potential threats wherever they may be. No business is so powerful and successful that it can afford to overlook emerging competitors—even those that may appear innocuous or beneficent.

In the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle story “Silver Blaze,” the legendary detective Sherlock Holmes must solve the mystery of a missing racehorse and the apparent midnight murder of its trainer. He eventually deduces that the crime was an inside job because the dog at the scene of the crime did not bark, indicating that the criminal was someone well known to the animal. Jeff likes to use this story of “the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime” as a departure point for a discussion about the urgent need for leaders to critically address Amazon’s blind spots as a company.

An Amazon leader told me about how, at a Merchant Services leadership offsite meeting, one of Amazon’s senior leaders recounted how the S-team had used the dog-not-barking exercise to recognize that one of the company’s most significant long-term threats was none other than Google. On the surface, Google didn’t seem like a direct competitor. In fact, they seemed like friends and potential allies. But as company leaders discussed Google’s capabilities and some of the innovative products and services they’d been developing, they realized that Google had a growing capacity to migrate into Amazon’s space. The exercise of looking for the “unbarking” dog helped reveal the possibility that a significant competitive threat was lurking right under their noses, invisible in plain sight.

In response, Amazon reduced its dependency on Google by improving its own search capabilities and creating places on the Web where customers could get to Amazon directly without Google.

The willingness to engage in constant self-examination—both as individual leaders and as an organization—is vital to maintaining success. And you can’t conduct such self-examination effectively without a large dose of humility and a willingness to look in the mirror and recognize honestly what you see there. In most organizations, the typical mentality is, “I have so many obvious needs and threats that I can’t possibly spend time looking for the non-obvious threats—much less doing something about them.” In 2018, Jeff Wilkie, CEO of World Wide Consumer at Amazon, gave his impressions on the newest of Amazon’s LPs:

“The most important driver of that addition was the notion that we were getting very good and successful, and the accompanying fear that we would become complacent.

“A key source of complacency is laziness about learning. We were just talking about how companies transition from Day 1 to Day 2 companies. One thing that happens at successful companies is that executives start to believe their own press. You might say that’s covered by the line in the Earns Trust principle that says ‘leaders don’t believe their body odor smells of perfume.’ But that’s a negative. It’s not instructive. It doesn’t address how to avoid complacency.

“The ‘how’ is to focus on constant learning and staying curious about all things. Curious about defects, curious about things in the world that aren’t right and you can improve, inventing for customers, the relationships among the people you lead. That’s why we added ‘Learn and Be Curious’—a ‘how’ among the leadership principles. I’m glad we did.”

Through these types of exercises—constant questioning, not looking at competitors but at the newest of concepts in academia and start-ups—leaders and experts stay open to new ideas and keep the beginner’s mindset. “Inventors have this paradoxical ability to have that 10,000 hours of practice and be a real domain expert and have that beginner’s mind, have that look at it freshly even though they know so much about the domain and that’s the key to inventing. You have to have both. I’m going to become an expert and I’m going to keep my beginner’s mind.” That’s Jeff Bezos giving the simple and devilishly hard habit to being a systematic innovator—be an expert, always be learning, and always be curious. Leaders typically need to put more effort into the learning and curious part, and being curious about emerging and perhaps seemingly unrelated technology advancements is the deliberate habit this leadership principle encourages. 

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.