The Amazon Way: Amazon's 14 Leadership Principles

by John Rossman

Frustrated, the customer care group took matters into their own hands, creating their own version of the Andon Cord. When customers began complaining about a problem with a product, customer care simply took that product down from the website and sent a message to the retail group that said, in effect, “Fix the defect, or you can’t sell this product.” Needless to say, in the world of retail, halting the sale of a product is a pretty disruptive step—the equivalent of shutting down an automotive assembly line. Yet Jeff was adamant in supporting the system. “If you retail guys can’t get it right, you deserve to be punished,” he declared.

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.”

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.

Process innovation can be enormously powerful, but when it is practiced without an emphasis on simplicity, the result is bureaucracy—the multiplication of processes for their own sake.

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.

If she was going to innovate, she had to be able to present options, choices, trade-offs, and opportunities. This required her to combine both her years of expertise and a “beginner’s mindset.” This beginner’s mindset is open, curious, and humble. “I had to completely shift my mental model, start fresh. I had to let go of the ego of being right and become curious again. I pushed myself to think of everything as possible in some way or fashion.” Kimberly embraced the Day 1 mindset. The Day 1 frame of mind prohibits preconceptions and expertise from becoming a hindrance to innovating and improving.