I'm seeing a lot of crappy takes about Amazon's leadership principles (amazon.jobs/en/principles) today, and I want to break character for a minute to give my sincere thoughts on them.
Culture is hard. Maintaining that culture across a massively scaled company is virtually impossible. How do you avoid the problem of not having a corporate culture but rather 2000 different ones?
Amazon's answer to this comes in the form of the 16 Leadership Principles. They're easy to snark on, but in the almost five years I've been studying @awscloud I've gone from skeptic to believer.
They're endemic to Amazonians. They're brought up explicitly or implicitly in every work conversation. If you don't embody the LPs, you almost certainly won't last at Amazon.
"These are awfully gatekeepy" is one comment I've seen bandied around a bit. Yes! They are! Every company has a set of values that dictate who does and doesn't work there. If you don't think that they embody your philosophy, THAT'S OKAY! Work somewhere else.
The two additions from today aren't particularly "new" in that today Amazon cares about things it didn't yesterday. They're the distillation of a growing shift in consciousness among the people who work there.
Some of the best people I've ever met work at AWS. Note that I didn't say "workers" or "employees" or "leaders." I said "people."
No trillion dollar company gets to keep its soul; people will actively disagree with many of the things it takes to get there.
No trillion dollar company gets to keep its soul; people will actively disagree with many of the things it takes to get there.
But that criticism of the strategic decisions has to be divorced from criticism of the individual people who work there. I worry sometimes that my "AWS did something bad" commentary is misheard as "if you work at AWS you should be ashamed."
Those strategic decisions are informed by the LPs. And with today's two new ones, suddenly those people (and us noisy folk on the outside) are given additional tools and words to use to hold a mirror to the areas in which Amazon's actions disagree with the LPs.
This is a good thing, and snark aside I really like these two additional LPs. They've been a long time coming, and I don't see that they're misaligned in the slightest with the core beliefs AWS staff hold.
So good work and good luck to my @awscloud friends.
So good work and good luck to my @awscloud friends.
...but everyone still hates Frugality.
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