The Power of Principled Thinking

My biggest takeaway from Amazon's LPs has nothing to do with the principles themselves.

Everybody thinks they know the secret to Amazon's success. Most people point to the Leadership Principles (LPs). "Customer Obsession," "Bias for Action," "Dive Deep." They're famous, and countless companies have tried to copy them, hoping to bottle the magic.

But focusing on the specific principles is a mistake. Almost every company has a list of values hanging on a wall, and those words themselves aren't magic. The real secret is much harder to copy.

What matters most is whether people actually stick to the principles.

At Amazon, the LPs are the operating system. They show up in every document, every performance review, and every big decision. People actually use them.

This might lead you to ask a couple of natural questions. Does strictly following a set of principles only work for a giant company like Amazon? And do the principles themselves even matter, or could they be different?

When I worked in Prime Video, we were relentlessly customer-obsessed. We bent over backwards to support l…