Insightful Amazon Leadership Principles

We can apply the following Leadership Principles in our work:

Disagree and commit: Argue for what you believe in, but at the end of the conversation, if you’re overruled, work wholeheartedly towards the decision that has been made. Don’t refuse, or do it half-heartedly.

Don’t sacrifice the long term for the short term: I see this often in startups that paint themselves into a corner technically where the only path forward is to rebuild everything. I also see this in people who’ve stagnated and are therefore on the path to becoming irrelevant some years from now.

Be curious: It’s the curious people who come up with novel solutions and have the motivation to build them. If you’re curious, don’t give it up thinking you should be all grown up or some such bullshit.

Bias for action. Many decisions are reversible: When running my startup Futurecam, I obsessed a lot about decisions that were trivial in hindsight, and easily reversible. Second-guessing yourself causes you to lose confidence in yourself, and slow down progress, and that’s a cure worse than the disease.

Don’t compromise for the sake of social cohesion: Some people agree for the sake of social cohesion, but this is immature: if you hold firm on your point of view, and the other person takes it personally, that’s an immature reaction on their part, and if we’re worried about that, that would be immaturity on our part.