Can we start by walking through your career trajectory?

Where to start? My first job coming out of university, where I studied finance and accountancy, was with a company called ICI. It was very much an accounts payable/ accounts receivable type role, so certainly very general. It was my first job training as an accountant. After a couple of years, I then had the pleasure of moving over to my first founder-lead company, Iceland stores in the UK. That really changed my career a lot because I got into a very, very strong commercial finance role and it was also where I started to learn how to code, mostly in SQL.

I worked for 4 years with those guys and then decided to leave the UK. I went to Germany with the British military and got my first experience of living outside of the UK. That then took me over to Munich, where I got into a beer company, Scottish and Newcastle, a really large organization working today in Germany and Austria. Then, on the back of that, I was very fortunate to land a job at Amazon. This would have been the end of 2007, early 2008. I joined the Munich business. At that point, Amazon was still relatively unknown within the German market. I spent pretty much the next 8 years working with Amazon, the first 4 years in Germany and the latter 4 years over in Luxembourg, working for the European business there. I had an absolutely great time and learned a bunch whilst I was Amazon. But, after 8 years and probably the hardest decision to go and move away from Amazon, I joined Groupon and spent six months running their EMEA Business on the finance side.

Then, I decided to go even smaller and earlier stage, so I joined a UK startup called Deliveroo, which turned out to be a fantastically successful business. I spent 2 years there as CFO. After that, I felt that what I wanted to do was give back and now I work with a number of early stage companies. I work very closely with about 8 different early-stage companies, in terms of helping the teams go on their own journey and try and scale those companies. I’m having an absolute blast.

To get into a little history, what was Amazon like when you joined?

I think if I take a huge step back, I don't think that the Amazon culture changed significantly from those early days, compared to where it is today. The things that really jumped out at me when I joined Amazon, which I would say were most different to other organizations, was that there was an incredible sense of teamwork and a real sense of ownership. Having worked in many organizations where you would have people who would turn up to a meeting but wouldn't take responsibility, Amazon had an incredibly strong culture of people taking ownership of things. I was reconciling why that would be the case in this company versus others. I think that the atmosphere at Amazon was: “If I try something and it doesn't work out, I'm supported by the organization, because I'm trying things.” It wasn't a culture where if you tried something and it didn't work out, you would lose your job.

People at Amazon had the incredible confidence to say, “This is my responsibility, I'm going to take this on,” in the knowledge that they would do their best and they would feel supported. I think that was quite unique, because very quickly you had people who were highly engaged and taking ownership of things, which of course is one of Amazon's leadership principles. For me, it was just surprising that things could be run this way, where people say, “That's my responsibility. That's my job,” as opposed to sitting back and waiting to be told they had to do things.

Beyond that, the other thing that really resonated with me was how close to the business the senior leaders still were and how hands-on they were. It wasn't a question of guys sitting in offices. The leadership team was still highly connected to the business, and truly understood the business in as much detail as anybody else, if not more. That was really encouraging, that the guys that had been there a really long time absolutely knew the business in incredible detail. So that was very, very rewarding.

Would that have been people like Allan Lyall?

Yes. Ralf Kleber was running the German business when I arrived. He actually still is. Even along those lines, you've got leaders who have been with the business for a very long time. When I joined, Ralf had already been with the business for 9 years. He's now been with the business about 20 years. So you've got senior leaders who stay with the organization for an incredibly long time. That gives you a sense that it is a great place to work, because if your people are staying with your company for so long, then clearly there’s something that they are connected to. What I found that it almost felt like the senior guys were friends with each other.  They'd worked together for so long; they knew each other and there was a huge respect of people's capabilities and how they worked together. Allan Lyall was one of the guys who I'd include in that group.

Amazon’s list of leadership principles is fairly long. Which principles stood out to you the most in your experience at the company?  Is there an essence you could distill?

During the Amazon recruitment process, your first engagement with the company is competency-based interviews targeted around the leadership principles. I was interviewing, and I was doing it a lot because of the rate at which we were scaling.

Initially, I felt like this was a huge straitjacket. I wondered how was I ever going to be able to do a competent interview based on only two of the leadership principles. But, when I think about that, the first thing it does is it forces you to have a good knowledge of the competencies and the company values. It also shows when you're interviewing that you're really part of a team. You have to trust that your colleagues are measuring on the competencies as well.

As you’re scaling and you're doing competency-based interviews, it’s a reminder of what those competencies are. Assessing the kind of examples you see that are outside of Amazon demonstrates the competencies that you could bring into the company from the people you're interviewing. It forces you to get very close to what the competencies actually are.

Beyond that, every single day, every single meeting is a reminder of the competencies and behaviors. So we would express things in language derived from the competencies, for example, “We need to do a deep dive on that.” ‘Deep dive’ being one of our core competencies. Another example is: “I'm just going to disagree and commit.” That was a great way of saying, “I don't agree with this, but I'm going to make my point and then I'm going to shut up and get on board and do what the organization thinks is the right decision. I'm not going to get stuck and disagree.”

I think when you take all of the leadership principles together there are some tensions between them. The key thing is really understanding how those behaviors and pieces of language really help people to say, “This is what it’s like to work here and these are the behaviors that I should demonstrate. And there are mechanisms that actually allow me to remind people that I am behaving in this particular way because I am aligned to this leadership principle.”

Could you describe in some more detail the mechanisms by which these principles are brought to life and cemented in people's minds on a day to day basis?

I'll probably go back to Ralf and a story that certainly has stuck with me. Like many, many retail businesses and Amazon being no different, every week you have a 100+ page metrics deck. Firstly, on the front of that metrics deck is the Amazon flywheel, as a reminder of why we do things and how things work. Then, you get into the hour-long weekly business review, affectionately known as the WBR. We would sit in that meeting and diligently go through the metrics. After my very first metrics review meeting, I leave that meeting and I'm standing in the lift with Ralf and he asks me, “What did you make of the WBR?” As a good diligent finance person, I gave my feedback around the metrics and who seemed to be on top of their numbers, who didn't, maybe how we could make the metrics better, which bits I didn't quite understand. So I gave this great elevator pitch on the stuff from the meeting and my assessment of it. What was brilliant is that I had completely missed the point of that metrics meeting.

Ralf then gave me immediate feedback, which, of course, is an Amazon principle, in terms of that directness and honest feedback. He turned to me and said, “There's really two reasons why we do this meeting every week. The first one is to audit the business and [the second is to] make sure that people are staying close to the details of the business. It's not really about the metrics, it's to make sure that people stay connected to the business and that they're on top of the metrics of the business.” This reinforces my other point of why the leaders are so close, because they invest time to continually audit, to make sure that everyone is still doing the right things, that everyone is still managing the right inputs. So that's diving into the details and staying connected every single week and that was a mechanism for doing that.

The second thing that he said is that it is to keep people reminded of the behaviors of the company: “We’re teaching them every single week about the behaviors, about the way of working.” That was it: it was an hour-long training session on culture and auditing a business. That's all it was. The reality is that from one week to the next week, you don’t significantly change your business. All you're doing is you're getting your most senior guys back and saying, “This is what it's like to behave here, this is how you should be thinking about things.” So it's a weekly training session and a reminder of culture. That's the best way of looking at it.

You also mentioned a few details on the hiring process, could you take us through that? And maybe after that we can move on to how Amazon nurtures talent, how they promote people and what kinds of behavior gets rewarded.

In the 8 years that I was with Amazon, the hiring process didn't change significantly. I think that there was a bit more structure and detail put around some of the leadership principles and how best to test those. We had a question book that helped the interviewers to ask the right questions. There's a huge amount of training that goes into people to be able to do interviews, interviewing in the Amazon way and making sure that you're a capable interviewer. Amazon has a bar raiser program; the bar raiser is the custodian to make sure the interview is conducted properly. Different to most other companies, interview feedback is documented, which was great.

When you get people to document the feedback from the interview and you go through that forcing function yourself, you really reflect on the conversation you've had during the interview and I certainly witnessed that myself. A number of times you come out of the interview and you say, “That was a really great interview,” and then when you actually start to write down the content of what's been said during the interview, you realize there was actually very little substance to it. I think what was great around that documentation process was that you would go through this recall and actually it gets away from people who are very, very charismatic but might not actually have a lot of substance.

Everyone documents their feedback and you read their feedback too. You vote on whether or not you want to hire someone based on your interview, but then you read everybody else's feedback and you have the opportunity to change your vote based on what you’ve seen. Because you’re then seeing everyone else’s interview, it can highlight a slight concern and have it proven by somebody else, or have that concern be removed by another interviewer.

This text-rich environment and documentation process allows you to actually make a much richer and better-informed decision. Then you decide, not just based on what you saw, but having seen everybody else’s feedback: “Yes, I would change my vote, I wasn’t inclined to hire this person and now I am, or I was inclined to hire them, but now I’m not, or actually I’m just sticking with my vote because I still stand true to what I said.”

The custodian and the facilitator is the bar raiser. It’s their job to make sure they facilitate that conversation. They probe particular areas to make sure that the feedback is accurate and is of a good quality. Even in the interview process, the people interviewing are part of a team and they’re being held accountable to make sure that the standard and the quality of each of those interviews is to a high standard. Again, the insistence on high standards is another leadership principle that Amazon uses in its interview process. I think that’s just a great example of how you get to good decision-making. I don’t believe that process has changed. At least not from the conversations that I’ve had with guys who have gone into the Amazon process more recently, it still seems to be operating that way. So it’s proven to be successful, at least for Amazon.

Once you get out of the interview process, and you talk about the promotion process, it’s very similar. You go through an annual review process - obviously, there’s constant feedback - where, very similarly, you’re getting 360-degree feedback, all focused around very specific examples where you’ve demonstrated certain behaviors.

It’s very similar when you’re going into a promotion cycle. You write a document around examples that evidence why this person is operating at a more senior level to justify that promotion. Those documents are reviewed collectively by the team. Again, it goes: “This person is out now, based on the feedback. Or there’s enough feedback in there, they’ve got enough support for the promotion from their peers, and so there’s enough organizational support to say that this person is behaving at this level.” You go through it and at the end of it you come up with a decision to say, yes, we now have evidence to support this promotion. What you get away from is the bias of, “I like this person on my team, therefore, I’m going to promote them,” which I’ve seen in many organizations. You actually say, “Where’s the evidence that supports it?” across multiple different people’s views. It’s a much fairer process. Again, it’s anchored on leadership principles and behaviors and complexity of job: Is the job complex enough to support actually having somebody of this level doing this job? Does the job justify this level of person? So there’s also that lens as well, the job justification. Is the job now at a complexity level that supports a more senior leader? So it’s a combination of those two factors.

The coaching at Amazon is not structured to get people promoted in a formal way. But, again, I gave the example of Ralf in the lift. There’s continuous feedback on pretty much everything that you do. You’ve always got people pushing you to achieve more in terms of getting the standard higher. And when I say pushing, it’s not like anybody is banging a table and shouting at you, but what they are doing is they’re challenging you, asking you, “Have you really thought this through enough?” “Have you gone deep enough in the details to really understand your proposal?” There’s this incredible push on the standards, and if you’re pushing yourself every day, then the reality is that you will get better. I guess the best comparison is, if you imagine somebody in a sports environment, where they’re training every day to improve and pushing themselves that little bit more, Amazon is that kind of organization. Just by being part of it and being around great people, you improve. They push themselves and they expect you to bring something to the table. But, as I say, it’s not an aggressive culture, it’s just a challenging culture.

Could you expand on what in your opinion makes a highly capable interviewer as part of the hiring process?

Firstly, it’s starting with an open mind. I think that’s really important. People have different experiences, have worked in different industries. I’ve worked in organizations where to be successful, you may have to demonstrate different behaviors. So what you can’t do is make judgements around what people are doing in their existing role. What you’re really looking for is that they can demonstrate behaviors that would allow them to be successful at Amazon or whichever company they’re working for. Starting with that open mind and saying, “I don’t know the company that you’re in but I can still make an assessment based on the way you behave.” So that’s the first point.

Your ability to listen is key. Your job there is to try and help that person get a job. So your requirement is to listen. What you’re looking for is to give them the chance to give evidence that says, “I can hire you,” probing to really understand. Probing questions are really where I think you get a much better result by going deeper to really understand the example that they’re giving you. It’s also important to avoid asking questions that are very generic. If you ask somebody, “Would you run in front of a car to save somebody?” The truth is you’d only find that out if it actually happened. So you always have to anchor your questions on examples of things that the person has actually done, then you can have a very rich conversation around it and understand the thought process that the individual is going through and the results. The conversation is much richer when you have a real-world example. Bearing in mind how you can apply that example to the behaviors that I would like to see within this company and the question: Is there a match? Those are the key things: an open mind, listening and the ability to probe.

Do you have an example of instances where the company was able to address mistakes, where the process either broke down or where there was a struggle? And how the company dealt with something like that?

I’ll give a personal example, they’re always helpful. I’ll base it on the first time I went to do MBA interviewing. We headed over to INSEAD as a group. It was the first year I had gone along to the interviewing and we had a number of candidates coming in for first round interviews and we were learning how to do it. Of course, I went along to represent the team. We had people coming in from France, I was there from Luxemburg, we had guys coming in from Germany. As an Amazon team, I think we probably had 10 or 12 people there. It may well have been more.

The way we had structured the process that year was that we had each country and all the departments within each country were interviewing candidates that had expressed an interest in maybe working in their team or in that part of the organization. I gave up two days of my calendar and I only ended up doing 3 interviews in that entire time. Because I was the finance guy, I was interviewing candidates who said, “Oh, finance could be interesting.” It was an incredibly inefficient process. I ended up sitting at INSEAD doing my emails and working in the hope that there might be a candidate interested.

My feedback to the group who were sitting down afterwards and reflecting on how it went was: “This is just ridiculous. We had enough resources on campus. We should have been able to complete an entire interview process for all of the candidates so that we could actually make them an offer at the end of the day.” That initially created some challenges: “We can’t hire for France because you don’t work in France” or “You can’t hire for this part of the business because you’re working in finance.” So there was some back and forth in terms of the challenges of doing this. Again, as a company, we have standard leadership principles and interview training. The pushback to that group was, “Look, if your teams don’t trust you to make a decision for them when you’re here, then you’re the wrong person to be here.” You have to send people who are capable of interviewing for the organization.

Unfortunately, because of the way we had structured that process the first year, we didn’t actually make one hire from INSEAD. We just didn’t get the right candidates; we didn’t make a hire. The following year when we went back to INSEAD, we changed the entire process based on that conversation I described. I did 17 interviews my first day. And we got to the point where we got candidates to do 4 interviews, or at least the most successful candidates got through 4 interviews. After two days on campus, we knew which people we were going to be making an offer for.

We completely streamlined the process and created a much better candidate experience. You got feedback within two days. We’ve got all the rich notes. We do all of the debriefing. It’s more productionized, but in terms of getting people interviewed, it’s significantly more efficient. So that’s one example where we had a bad process and we fixed it.

What does the business look for in MBAs and people that have undertaken these programs at elite universities? Is there a specific approach that’s distinctive to the way you might interview a candidate or specific attributes that you look for in that type of candidate?

It’s the same process you’re going through: the ability to demonstrate experiences that show the right behaviors. The only lens that comes on top of that is the question: are those experiences at a senior enough level for an MBA hire? It’s not just demonstrating the behaviors, but do they have experiences that are senior enough to warrant coming in as an MBA. So it’s also the depth of the experience. I would always talk to candidates before they gave me the examples, in the framing before the interviews. I would tell them, “All I can do is assess you based on the examples that you give me. Give me your best examples and your most senior examples, the ones that are the best fit with the competencies that I’m trying to test.” That’s how I would approach it to give the candidates the best chance to bring their biggest examples. That gives me the chance to see that this person has done something that is pretty exceptional. I always loved doing the MBA recruitment because you’ve got some incredible experiences in the guys that are doing their MBAs. It’s very humbling. There’s just some brilliant people out there who’ve done some amazing things. Even just from that perspective, it was very grounding to sit there and just be humbled by young people.

As an executive, what is most interesting and attractive to you about the culture of the business?

Amazon makes you better. If I were to come up with a tagline, I think it would be that working at Amazon makes you better. That comes back to the high standards that you expect of yourself and other people around you, because you are working with some exceptionally talented people. There's a great, great quote and I don't know who said it: “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” If I take that idea and I say, “Do you want to work in an organization where the average is significantly higher?” Because there's exceptional people there, by definition, you’ll either operate at the average or you will decide that this is too much and that you’ll go somewhere else. Being at Amazon forces you to raise your game. But, again, it's raising the game in a non-competitive way, because it really focuses on teamwork and collaboration. You feel incredibly well supported. In some ways, you can fail, in that you can make mistakes. Although, there's a lot of frameworks that try and avoid you making those mistakes. But you feel supported, in that you can take risks.

Could we talk about Amazon’s framework around risk-taking and making mistakes?

There's lots of well-documented instances where Amazon has tried things that haven't worked. Jeff has been quoted many times saying that as you get bigger, the number of experiments that you have to do has to increase, and the number of failures will also increase, because you're running more. If you're not doing that, then you're not growing with the company.  Inherently, there is an expectation that things will fail. That's not to say that you start out saying that failure is okay, because you're still trying to do the right things. The real judgement is not necessarily the outcome, it's the inputs that get you to that outcome that matter. You can hit a sales target, but you might have done nothing to get there. The target was too low and you didn't actually have to do anything. You can miss a sales target, but you just did everything right. That's why when you’re looking at focusing on those inputs that you're driving, you can measure people on the things they actually did and the contributions they made, as opposed to the actual result. Once you start looking at it that way, regardless of the result, of success or failure, you need to ask: did the person do everything right? It might just have been the wrong time; it might be that the market fit is not there. There's lots of things that are not a reflection of the individual, it’s a reflection of other conditions that haven’t allowed it to be successful.

Your best employees are the ones that are trying to do something interesting, that are trying to push the boundaries, that are taking you to places that you’ve not been before. You need to encourage your people to be willing to do that, which means that if they’re pushing into areas that the organization hasn’t been before, there’s a higher chance that it will fail, versus the person who’s just following the daily routine. They’re keeping the lights on, but they’re not necessarily taking you to somewhere new that’s going to be the next big thing, the next big part of the business. What you’re looking for is those guys who want to take the risk, which means that you have to get away from a blame culture of failure. What you’ve got to do is say, “Well, you’re trying something, so well done for trying.” And put a structure around them to help them try and be successful on that journey, by challenging them, by asking them questions.

A great one for Amazon, that’s well documented, is when you’re launching something new, start with the customer and work backwards. That’s an approach that says, “We’re going to do lots of things that are new as an organization, but at least if we start with the customer and work backwards, we’re giving ourselves the best chance of being right more often.” That doesn’t mean you’ll always be right, but you’ll be right more often, because you’ve been very thoughtful about why you’re doing something. You’re therefore much more intentional about the things that you’re doing and working backwards with a plan of getting there. It’s also that ability to be patient in your approach, which generally gets you to the end result faster, because you spend less time on iterations and running down the wrong alley. There’s lots of good structures in place to try and help you be successful, but also really encourage you to go and take risks and do new and interesting stuff.

Between when you arrived and when you left the business, the business grew explosively. Are there aspects of maintaining and driving this culture that became more difficult at scale? And what are the problems more broadly that come with scaling at the speed that the business has done?

Culture is something that you have to actively manage. I think that very few organizations actively manage culture. They talk about culture and they describe the culture but they don’t actively manage it. Amazon has always actively managed culture. It’s a part of everything. Everything is well lined up and it’s in everything that people do, how you hire, how you promote, how you give feedback, how you talk about the things that you’re going to do. It’s part of everyday language. It’s really at the core of everything Amazon does.

When you say it’s part of everyday language is this in specific reference to the leadership principles?

Absolutely. I’ll give an example: “Have backbone, disagree and commit.” The starting point is ‘have backbone’: if you want to hire smart people, then they should have an opinion and they should be willing to fight for their opinion. Disagree: if nobody’s disagreeing then nobody’s challenging anybody. And, ultimately, once you’ve made a decision, you’ve got to commit. Otherwise the organization gets stuck and doesn’t move anywhere. That’s just one example. You’ll hear people using that language very frequently. It’s great because you’re able to say, “Look, I am doing what the company is asking me to do by insisting on this, by disagreeing, and by pushing it.” But, ultimately, if we can’t get an agreement, then I’ll fall in line and say “Fair enough.” I’ve given you the information that says where I’m coming from.

That automatically makes the organization smarter, because you’ve got much more information when you make decisions. I’ve certainly seen instances where, by the end of a conversation, people flip the side that they’re arguing, so that they’re arguing with themselves and the position they started with. I’ve seen that happen because the other person convinces them that actually their thought process wasn’t right and they get convinced by them. It’s almost like this dance happening to get to a decision.

Coming back to the question, because Amazon actively manages culture, I didn’t see it becoming more difficult as there were more people in the organization, because everyone’s championing what the culture looks like and what the right behaviors are. Those mechanisms are very well established. That allowed the company to scale without having this challenge of losing culture.

Where it was generally more difficult was in launching new countries. If you look through most of the countries that Amazon have launched, I think what’s worked well is they take an existing leader to launch that new country. For the most part, that’s because that person does understand the culture and the ways of working in Amazon. Therefore, they’re very well versed in the right behaviors. You don’t get a part of the organization developing its own culture and not operating in the same way or not living the same values. Those people become an island then. How do they bring themselves back to the overall organization? They may no longer be a fit.

Launching new countries with existing leaders is a big help. For example, when we launched Italy, for the first year, actually longer, the Italian team was based in the Paris office and in the Luxembourg office. The Italian team was not in Italy. We recruited people in, but we’d give them a year of working alongside existing businesses so they could learn the culture.

Was there any controversy around that at the time? In most companies this would be somewhat unusual.

For the Italian team, many of them may well have missed the sunshine of Italy compared to being in Luxemburg, but I think what they really appreciated was that they got to sit next to really experienced people who knew the Amazon business, knew the way of doing it, versus being a very small part of the business that could easily be forgotten about and get way less support. They got so much more support by being based in the Paris or Luxembourg offices than they would have done by being remote. That brings us back to the organization trying to help people. Nobody was sitting there asking, “Why would I help the Italian team, I have my own objectives?” or “I’m not getting incentivized to do this.” The attitude is, “I work at the company and if I help these guys be successful, over time they will build a very successful business that helps the overall organization.” There weren’t any real challenges or internal challenges where people were saying that it wasn’t their job to help the Italian team. It was incredibly supportive. You actually got a lot of people who decided to join the Italian business because they wanted to be a part of something new, which would have been so much more difficult had the team been based out in Italy.

How would you describe the interplay between financial incentives for executives and the cultural values and leadership principles?

Firstly, not having bonuses was probably one of the best things that I’ve seen in the organization. Having people have equity in the company is one of the best incentive schemes I think you can have. When you’re trying to get people to think about the long term, to think about being collaborative and to think about the organization before themselves, if you put in a bonus scheme with personal objectives that are measured in short terms, a year or quarters, and you monetize the individual, it’s hard to say at the same time, “I want you to think long term, I want you to think collaboratively, but by the way your incentive scheme is a bunch of money for doing things that are short term and keeping you working in a silo.” Instead you say, “I’m going to give you a review at the end of the year based on how you’ve behaved” - they obviously also look at the metrics of other things that you’ve delivered. They’re the examples of what you’ve achieved over the year, but they’re anchored in the way you achieved them and how you behaved to get there.

Your incentives are tied to the overall performance of the company. You will get more equity depending on how well you perform, but, that equity vests over a number of years into the future. It may be that it vests in 2, 3, 4 years. To get the benefit of that, you still need to be working with the company in 3 years’ time. So you’re always incentivized to make the company better over the long term. To do that, you have to work in a collaborative way and not just stay within your own box and say, “This is my job. That’s not my job.” You can see but you can’t touch the equity that you’ve got. By the time it arrives and you can touch it, it’s much more valuable. I think that that has worked incredibly well for Amazon instead of short-term bonuses, which just take cash out of the company.

On the culture of the business, some criticisms have been made. I think there was a New York Times article in 2015, where former employees used terms like ‘gladiator culture,’ and ‘frequent combat’ to describe the culture?

Like any culture, it’s not for everybody. I think that’s the starting point. There are always going to be people who find that working in a certain way is just not for them. If I take the terms ‘gladiator’ and ‘combative,’ the way that I would respond to that is that Amazon is a direct culture. It’s an open, direct culture, because you’re trying to improve the organization. Now, some people find that incredibly difficult. There are people out there that find feedback very difficult. That honest feedback about behavior and that challenge to make things better is not always for everybody. You’ll always get a minority of people who say, “This is not for me.”

It’s not gladiatorial, it’s a challenging environment, but, it’s respectful. If somebody said, “I felt incredibly disrespected, it was very disrespectful,” that’s a different issue. If somebody is saying “gladiatorial,” it’s collaborative, but it is also combative, in the sense that you’ve got to have backbone, you’ve got to stand up for what you believe in. I don’t see that as a negative. I do see that there are some people that come into the company and it’s not for them and they don’t enjoy it and they don’t stay very long. But you’ve got a lot of people who have stayed a long time at Amazon, so the culture certainly works for them.

What are the most important aspects of your experience at Amazon that you take with you to this day?

The first one is: getting your processes right that will allow you to scale. I think that’s really important. Thinking about whether things will operate at scale is the first thing.

The second one is: don’t complain about things, fix them. It’s very easy to complain about something but that’s just a waste of energy. So, fix things that aren’t working. And if you can’t fix them, find the people that can fix them and work with them to fix those problems.

The third thing is: actively manage your culture. You absolutely have to actively manage your culture and get people aligned to that single vision so that everyone’s got clarity around where they’re going.

The next one is: put in structures that support your people. In the end what you want is to get the best out of your people and help them perform. You want to protect your people and that’s why you put in frameworks, and processes, and checks and balances. You don’t want to put them in situations where they can do something that, for instance, might be unethical. You’re trying to put frameworks in that protect people from themselves and from doing things that could damage them or the organization. So it’s really important to be thoughtful around that.

You mentioned that this element of actively managing the culture is embedded in Amazon in the annual review processes, in the weekly meetings, in the approach to continuous feedback. Is there anything else about managing a culture actively that you’d like to expand on?

The first thing is that you’ve got to decide what your culture is going to be. I know that at many companies that I’ve worked with if you asked certain people: “What are the values of the company and could you describe it?” you’d get different answers. That means that the company doesn’t really have a culture, maybe a department does, or a team does, or a certain leader has a certain way of doing things, but the organization fundamentally doesn’t have a culture or not one that’s active, been spoken about and discussed. So I think that’s got to be the starting point: decide what your culture is and how you want to build that company and behave. Once you’ve got that, you can put the mechanisms in place. Then you can ask, “If that’s what we want to be, how do we keep people on track?” People will always go off and veer away from what you want. That’s when you’ve got to be able to say, “That doesn’t fit with the company culture, so you’ve got to correct that very quickly.”

How do you look at the concept of balance in culture?

I’ve co-founded a business with two people and I talk a lot about the culture and the behaviors that we’re putting in place. We do a number of communications through a messaging app and one of my co-founders, on Sunday night, maybe at 11 o’clock, as something pops into his head, will send a message to a junior member of the team. For him, it’s just a matter of, “This is on my mind, I need to get it off my chest.” I’ve had a lot of conversation with him about thinking about the impact on that junior person. Now, they think this is a priority. Because it’s 11 o’clock at night on a Sunday, they think this is really important. He’s one of the founders of the business, so the impact he’s having on that individual is that he’s confusing them and disrupting their rest period. You shouldn’t be sending that message to them, unless it’s a real emergency. And you’re encouraging them that this kind of behavior is okay, this always on, never off kind of mentality.

There’s a lot of coaching around recognizing the impact on people from your behavior. We’re going through that as an early-stage company trying to define that culture. He could sit there and say, “I actually want everybody to be working this 9-9-6 culture,” and think that that’s exactly the organization that he wants to build. And I’d have a huge issue with that and say, “That’s not the company I want to build, so we probably shouldn’t build a company together.” I think that they’re the conversations you have to have. There are different ways to build a company, there are different things that you might want and you’ve got to get your mind around that. So it’s really important to have those conversations and coach people through it.

Amazon's Culture

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Amazon's Culture

Former CFO at Deliveroo & Finance Director, EMEA, Amazon

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Philip Green

Former CFO at Deliveroo & Finance Director, EMEA, Amazon

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Amazon's Culture(March 2, 2020)

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