Amazon Leadership Principles

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It Insists on the Highest Standards, Think Big, Bias for Action, Frugality, Learn and Be Curious, Earn Trust, Dive Deep, Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit, and Deliver Results. These leadership principles are a good overview of what the core of Amazon is really like. A few of the key principles listed above are Customer Obsession, Invent and Simplify, Insist on Highest Standards, and Deliver Results. Customer Obsession is Amazon’s first leadership principle and for a good reason. The company strives to focus on the end consumer and work backwards from there. Employees dig into what the customer’s wants and needs are, and from there come up with solutions or products to meet those needs. Bezos was quoted from an interview in 1999, just…show more content…
This revolving structure is accompanied with employees that maintain an “Explorer” mentality that they use to innovate new products. The “Explorer Mentality” is described as a mindset of employees that like to venture to new areas of business or new products and attempt to create an idea or product that would be beneficial to the customers. As employees know this, it allows them to harness the experimentation mentality and use it to the best of their ability. Knowing that they are willing to be misunderstood, the employees can develop their ideas into disruptive, innovative products or business segments. This structure that Bezos has used within Amazon has been a key factor in Amazon’s ability to innovate and remain at the top of successful companies. Because of the idea that Amazon is constantly experimenting and always coming up with some innovative product or service, the company never has to play “catch up”. Amazon and…show more content…
Allion created his own comparison graph to show the similarities of Amazon’s returns and Jeff Bezos to the returns of the eight Outsiders and those CEOs. In the graph on the right, Allion shows Amazon’s share price since the IPO in 1997 (roughly 20 years), compared to Apple and the Nasdaq. Allion explains that he chose to compare it to Apple because “many would say Apple (when asked what’s been the most dominant company over the past 20 years) and praise Steve Jobs in the process” (Allion). The two graphs are incredibly similar. The average return of the eight Outsiders’ companies and the Amazon share price lines are nearly identical. It is clear that Bezos has an enormous influence on the overall financial performance of Amazon. Even compared to a major competitor like Apple who has also seen “great CEOs”, Amazon has proved to outperform. The long- term oriented Bezos, whose primary focus has been the maximization of “dollar free cash flow per share”, is the reason for the overall success of company. Innovations by
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