The Amazon leadership principles.
I am currently reading a book called “The Power of Habit” by Charles Duhig. It’s a nice book on behavior psychology, where the author shares how the old habits should be replaced with newer and healthier habits in individuals, organizations and societies.
He sort of explains a concept and provides examples of how these concepts were applied in real-life. One such example was of the AlCOA (Aluminum Company of America) CEO, Paul O’Neill. When Paul took charge of ALCOA, he stressed that the single most important thing that the company should focus on is “safety”. The shareholders were shocked with the fact that a hippie from Washington (DC) is talking about safety and not profits. All the employees were instructed to follow safety precautions and all managers were instructed to provide weekly safety reports. This in-turn created a line of communication where the ground workers would talk to their managers and these managers would talk to their managers, and this reporting would go all the way upto the CEO. Slowly people started discussing other business problems with this communication channel, and what started as a safety precaution doubled the company’s profits in the next year itself.
This habit creation model brings me back to the emerald city to conceptualize how Amazon actually works. Amazon has these sets of 14 leadership principles, where employees are asked to follow them to such an extent that your manager can fire you for violating a trivial principle such as “frugality”. The most important leadership principle is customer obsession. According to it, whatever you do, you should always make the customer happy. So Engineers are told to develop a robust, scalable system because customers should have the best possible experience while browsing the website. Customer-care representatives have to be polite, because that is what the customer wants. Even dependent teams are treated as customers, and they have to solve each others problems as customer is always their priority.
Does anyone else see the irony here? Engineers are not told to develop a great product, Customer care are not told to be polite, they are just told to be customer obsessive. This rigorous chanting of leadership principles, creates a habit loop for employees where whatever they do would be right, as long as the principles are followed!
