Culture & Leadership: Lessons From 18 Years at Amazon

So these processes, as you’ve described them, are the subject of a huge amount of interest, from a lot of Amazon’s competitors, from businesses and markets that are almost completely unrelated. When interviewing and working with these people from other companies, on paper, there’s clearly a great appeal. In practice, as you get into bringing these cultural precepts to life, do you have a way to illustrate that for us, in how these, clearly very powerful but also demanding principles, are brought and embedded into day to day behavior?

That’s a great question. There are three things, usually, when I start work with any company or, after a while, when I have got used to working with the board of the company and the CEOs. What we discuss is exactly that. There are three things that I tried to get them used to, which is very difficult. It’s not copying Amazon, it’s just makes them think about, to make them think of their own way of doing it. They go back to some of the points that we discussed. The first thing is about the culture itself. I like to ask the company, what is your culture and for them to define it. Believe it or not, there are many companies which have no written culture. I’ve been discussing, with a large company, with a multi-billion euro turnover and when I asked them, what is your culture and your mission, they didn’t have that written. They haven’t thought that through, as a one or two sentence idea, which all the people in the company could stand behind and recognize themselves and think, yes, of course we are that. Or if they do have it, it’s very flat. “We’re here to deliver the product to the customer.” Of course, but what about the way you want to do it, to what extent and not qualifying that.

Sometimes it’s just making people think about, what is your culture? What do you want to achieve? How do you want your employees to be feeling, in your company and working towards? Amazon, with 14, has a lot. It’s one of the biggest that I’ve seen, both before and after. I often say, try to get four to six things and try to get your people thinking about them and try to organize your company behind them, in order for them to recognize themselves. That helps a lot, because if you get those, you could use them in hiring. You could use them to identify people to join your company and become talent, in your company. This is the reason why it’s so important. It could help the people within the company to make decisions. Ultimately, when you face a situation that has never been faced before, it is only those principles that are able to guide people to do something.

If you don’t have the process for doing something, then your guiding principles take over, to help people to frame the answer to a problem. If you don’t have that, it’s where, unfortunately, in those times of crisis, coming back to Covid, people don’t do the right thing, because they don’t have these principles behind which they can really refer and start thinking and form an answer. Therefore, the first thing I ask people is, try to define your culture. If it’s already done, try to reflect about your culture. Is it the culture that you want? Is it really things that are helping the people? If you talk about engagement and things like that, all companies have those. The small companies, I ask them to do it because, usually, the start-ups that I help are the ones don’t have it. But I ask them to do that, very quickly.

I’m not saying, go and see the Amazon ones and try to mirror them. I can give examples of those, as I did earlier, but that’s irrelevant, in my view. They could inspire you, if you’re a small company, a young CEO of a start-up, that has never been used to those ideas. But don’t mirror what Amazon has been doing. Understand what is behind it and define yours. Work with your team to define it. That is the first thing.

The second one is structure. Structure your data and structure the information in your company, in a way that it can be understood, very easily, by everyone. That could be in different ways. For example, one could be to have a very structured metrics and KPIs set up and broadcast that to your company. Make it something that everybody understands, done globally, where you can compare things and really see what the good and the bad are. You can see, over time, over the years, over the month, what you are doing. Structure your communication and put it in a way that everyone can understand. One of the extreme cases is an Amazon way, and it’s been difficult to go back from, for me. I don’t know if you’ve heard about the narrative way of presenting business and I encourage that, even if I was the last to be happy about it when Amazon moved towards that.

More than 10 or 15 years ago, Amazon decided to drop PowerPoint for business review and move to a narrative format of business review. This means, a single document, written like a book, like a narrative, with real sentences, which describe either a business review, such as the results of the last quarter, for example, or a project. Doing it like that was a very important way to put everything in a document, where someone could take the document, read it and understand the situation. Not look at slides where, unfortunately, if you don’t have the person speaking, then you can’t fully understand what is on the slides. This means that, ultimately, the slides without the person are a bit irrelevant and a lot of information is lost. It’s never captured fully, because you can never recall the whole presentation so all these very inciteful things that are being said by the presenter, are entirely lost, after the meeting, because it was only for the benefit of the meeting and there is no capture of it.

When you move to a narrative format, you have to put everything in the document. You write every single thing down. This document is going to be read, at the beginning of the meeting, by all stakeholders in the room, entirely, and only after, does the discussion start. It’s a very awkward situation and if you’ve never experienced it, I encourage you to do it once. But it’s a very awkward situation because, either the pre-read is before, which happened a little at Amazon, or the time of the reading is included in the meeting time. So you will have a meeting of one and a half hours, but the first 40 minutes is going to be spent silently, with everybody reading the document. Only the last 45 to 50 minutes are going to be spent in discussion. But when it happens, everybody knows everything about the business that they are going to be talking about.