The Amazon Way Quotes

“best customer service is no customer service—because the best experience happens when the customer never has to ask for help at all.”
― John Rossman, The Amazon Way: Amazon's Leadership Principles

“Adam Lashinsky explained how Amazon. com had gone on a “military hiring spree” because Jeff was impressed with veterans’ logistical know-how and bias for action.3 In fact, Amazon.com has a dedicated military recruiting website and a highly consistent hiring and retention record for ex-military personnel. This practice of hiring veterans isn’t about expressing gratitude for ex-soldiers’ service to our country. Veterans fit Jeff’s business model. As a result, Amazon.com has not bothered to launch a huge PR campaign about its military employment program. Jeff just realized it was good business.”
― John Rossman, The Amazon Way: Amazon's Leadership Principles

“Sometimes execution is poor, and that is a performance issue. Sometimes the idea is just not quite the right idea, and so you learn, adjust, and move forward.”
― John Rossman, The Amazon Way: Amazon's Leadership Principles

“Strong processes with measurable outcomes eliminate bureaucracy and expose underperformers.”
― John Rossman, The Amazon Way: Amazon's Leadership Principles

“To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment.”
― John Rossman, The Amazon Way: Amazon's 14 Leadership Principles

“That means having rock-solid contracts, service-level agreements, and penalties in place, as well as continual, active management of communications”
― John Rossman, The Amazon Way: Amazon's 14 Leadership Principles

“It(Amazon) is a company of control freaks run by control freaks and lorded over by the king of control freaks”
― John Rossman, The Amazon Way: Amazon's Leadership Principles

“Why the Definition of Self-Service Must Change”
― John Rossman, The Amazon Way: 14 Leadership Principles Behind the World's Most Disruptive Company

“customers,”
― John Rossman, The Amazon Way: 14 Leadership Principles Behind the World's Most Disruptive Company

“Leadership is the most consistent and attributable factor in solving business challenges. Leadership (or the lack thereof) is the most predictable factor in successful innovation.”
― John Rossman, The Amazon Way: Amazon's 14 Leadership Principles

“To make smart, fast decisions, stay nimble, innovate and invent and focus on delighting customers.”
― John Rossman, The Amazon Way: Amazon's 14 Leadership Principles

“The copycat often has a distinct advantage in this competition; the original innovator is typically emotionally bound to the original idea and hesitant to change it. The mimic has the benefit of an objective perspective and a willingness to course-correct as needed.”
― John Rossman, The Amazon Way: 14 Leadership Principles Behind the World's Most Disruptive Company

“One of Jeff’s favorite techniques is to create a forcing function—a set of guidelines, restrictions, or commitments that force a desirable outcome without having to manage all the details of making it happen. Forcing functions are a powerful technique used at Amazon.com to enforce a strategy or change.”
― John Rossman, The Amazon Way: 14 Leadership Principles Behind the World's Most Disruptive Company

“I am emphasizing the self-service nature of these platforms because it’s important for a reason I think is somewhat non-obvious: even well-meaning gatekeepers slow innovation. When a platform is self-service, even the improbable ideas can get tried, because there’s no expert gatekeeper ready to say, “that will never work!” And guess what—many of those improbable ideas do work, and society is the beneficiary of that diversity.2”
― John Rossman, The Amazon Way: 14 Leadership Principles Behind the World's Most Disruptive Company

“Accountability is not painless. But it’s the only sure path to achievement.”
― John Rossman, The Amazon Way: 14 Leadership Principles Behind the World's Most Disruptive Company

“Here’s what didn’t work, why it didn’t work, and how we’re going to change.”
― John Rossman, The Amazon Way: 14 Leadership Principles Behind the World's Most Disruptive Company

“Successful organizations with long-term strategic visions tend to have a very low turnover rate at the top.”
― John Rossman, The Amazon Way: 14 Leadership Principles Behind the World's Most Disruptive Company

“Amazon’s goal has always been to minimize the time and energy its talented people must spend on routine service interactions, freeing them to innovate new ways to delight the customer.)”
― John Rossman, The Amazon Way: 14 Leadership Principles Behind the World's Most Disruptive Company

“Jeff Bezos doesn’t worry about your feelings; he doesn’t give a damn whether or not you’re having a good day. He only cares about results—and they’d better be the right results.”
― John Rossman, The Amazon Way: 14 Leadership Principles Behind the World's Most Disruptive Company

“Create small, independent teams to avoid bureaucracy.”
― John Rossman, The Amazon Way: 14 Leadership Principles Behind the World's Most Disruptive Company

“One year, we ordered four thousand pink iPods from Apple for Christmas. In mid-November, an Apple rep contacted us to say, “Problem—we can’t make Christmas delivery. They’re transitioning from a disk drive to a hard-drive memory in the iPods, and they don’t want to make any more using the old technology. Once we get the new ones made, we’ll get you your four thousand. But it won’t be in time for the holiday.” Other retailers would have simply apologized to their customers for the failure to deliver a product on time. That wasn’t going to fly at Amazon.com. We were not the kind of company that ruined people’s Christmases because of a lack of availability—not under any circumstances. So we went out and bought four thousand pink iPods at retail and had them all shipped to our Union Street office. Then we hand-sorted them, repacked them, and shipped them to the warehouse to be packaged and sent to our customers. It killed our margins on those iPods, but it enabled us to keep our promise to our customers. During the next weekly business review, we had to explain to Jeff what we were doing and why. He just nodded approvingly and said, “I hope you’ll get in touch with Apple and try to get our money back from the bastards.” Ultimately, Apple did grudgingly split the cost difference with us. But even if they hadn’t, it still would have been the right thing for Amazon to do.”
― John Rossman, The Amazon Way: 14 Leadership Principles Behind the World's Most Disruptive Company

“The Amazon version of the Andon Cord started with a conversation about a customer care problem during a weekly business review. The issue centered on the way mistakes made by one set of employees—those working in the retail group—were creating headaches for a different set—those in the customer care department. “When the people in the retail group don’t provide the right data for the customer, or enter a product description that’s inaccurate,” the head of customer care explained, “the customer is disappointed with the purchase. And that means they call customer care, which lands us with the hassle of refunding the product.”
― John Rossman, The Amazon Way: 14 Leadership Principles Behind the World's Most Disruptive Company

“Every company has to be able to create continuous change and embrace continuous improvement. This is the Change IQ. Warren Buffet tells boards and CEOs to combat the “ABCs” (arrogance, bureaucracy, and complacency) into which successful businesses and teams fall.”
― John Rossman, The Amazon Way: 14 Leadership Principles Behind the World's Most Disruptive Company

“True collaboration is only possible in an atmosphere of trust. And that atmosphere is always set by a leader who has earned his team members’ trust and who trusts them in return.”
― Greg Shaw, The Amazon Way: 14 Leadership Principles Behind the World's Most Disruptive Company

“True collaboration is only possible in an atmosphere of trust. And that atmosphere is always set by a leader who has earned his team members’ trust and who trusts them in return.”
― John Rossman, The Amazon Way: Amazon's Leadership Principles

“Every department at Amazon, from the mailroom to the tech team responsible for the Kindle book delivery system, has a year-over-year improvement plan. How will we get better? What does the customer want from us? How can we use new technology to improve the customer experience?”
― John Rossman, The Amazon Way: Amazon's Leadership Principles

“Doing so is not cheap—but at Amazon.com, instrumentation is a non-negotiable launch requirement for any new program.”
― John Rossman, The Amazon Way: Amazon's Leadership Principles

“If I drive us over a cliff,” Jeff would say, “You’re as much at fault as I am.”
― John Rossman, The Amazon Way: Amazon's Leadership Principles

“In God We Trust, All Others Must Bring Data”
― John Rossman, The Amazon Way: Amazon's Leadership Principles

“PowerPoint is not a neutral tool — it is actively hostile to thoughtful decision-making. It has fundamentally changed our culture by altering the expectations of who makes decisions, what decisions they make and how they make them.”
― John rossman, The Amazon Way: Amazon's Leadership Principles