The Amazon Way: 14 Leadership Principles Behind the World's Most Disruptive Company

What’s the thinking behind paying employees to quit? Pretty simple, really. It’s about testing for commitment. If you’re willing to take $2,000 to leave Zappos (which was the offer last time I checked), then you obviously haven’t bought into what the company is trying to do.

The enterprise bias for avoiding PowerPoint presentations in favor of written narratives (typically six pages long; sometimes as short as two pages) is a great example of a forcing function to create an organization that dives deep. As Bezos noted in a 2012 interview with Charlie Rose, “When you have to write your ideas out in complete sentences an

There’s a common assumption that it’s important to know the exact right action to take before doing anything. That’s not how things are viewed at Amazon. As Jeff once said, “If you never want to be criticized, for goodness’ sake, don’t do anything new.”

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, used for internal purposes only.

The bar raiser is an individual appointed to serve as the last line of defense to ensure Jeff’s standards of excellence. The bar raiser has veto power over any potential hire—regardless of the candidate’s pedigree or his popularity among the rest of the hiring group.

The backbone necessary to disagree with some of the smartest business minds in the world and commit to your own vision requires an immense amount of mental toughness.

Because the numbers provide crystal-clear, incontrovertible proof of which leaders are right a lot, Amazon.com operates to as close to a true meritocracy as possible. I cannot overstate how important this is for minimizing bureaucracy in the organization.

Without access to a consistent set of metrics, an Amazon.com leader would be flying blind, and such risky behavior is not acceptable at the company. Amazon.com relies on real-time metrics or instrumentation more than any other company I have ever been involved with. Real data and real insights from the customer experience are used continually to an

“Do you want to be a $200 million company with a twenty percent margin or a $10 billion company with a five percent

A vital corollary of learning, humility, and the beginner’s mind-set 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.