Key takeaways
- Amazon launched Learn and Be Curious with Doug Herrington, a new podcast in which the Stores CEO discusses innovation, product development, and company culture with fellow Amazon employees.
- Amazon’s 16 Leadership Principles were created to teach and maintain our culture and ways of operating as the company grew.
- Though skeptical at first, Herrington came to understand how the Leadership Principles reduce friction by aligning teams around shared values.
Amazon launched a new podcast that pulls back the curtain on how the company develops ideas, tests products, and maintains its peculiar culture while operating at massive scale. Learn and Be Curious with Doug Herrington, hosted by Amazon's CEO of Worldwide Stores, goes inside the company's innovation process.
In each episode, Herrington sits down with a fellow Amazon employee to unpack how new products, inventions, and ideas are developed, tested, and scaled within Amazon's culture.
The debut episode, now available wherever you listen to podcasts, features a conversation with Hannah McClellan, an Amazon Pharmacy VP. The two discuss everything from the future of health care to Herrington's early days at Amazon, and the challenge of maintaining culture as teams grow.
When McClellan asked Herrington about preserving Amazon's culture—especially the intentionality Jeff Bezos brought to using culture "to get this whole company to row in one direction"—Herrington reflected on an important lesson he learned during his 20 years at the company.
“I get that question a lot from people like, ‘Oh, you worked with Jeff Bezos, greatest businessman of our generation, what did you learn from him?’” Herrington said. “The heartfelt answer I give them is, I learned the power of using culture to get everybody on the same page. It just reduces friction if you know where everybody's coming from. And we do it through these Leadership Principles.”
Amazon has 16 Leadership Principles that “define how we want our leaders to make decisions, and behave, and work with each other, and solve problems when they're at their best.”
When he first joined Amazon, Herrington didn’t understand why the leadership principles were so important. “I felt like I had joined a cult,” he said. “I told my wife, ‘I don't understand what's going on.’” But over time, he started to see the power in everyone thinking about the world in the same way.
“I don't think they even got written down until about 2002, so that was about seven years into our adventure,” he said. “So Jeff didn't come down from the mountaintop with these leadership principles carved in stone. We wrote them down primarily so that we could start teaching them to other people, and teaching them to all the new people at Amazon."
Today, Amazon uses the Leadership Principles when interviewing candidates, conducting annual reviews, and making promotion decisions. They also come up in everyday conversations and meetings to ensure everyone stays on the same page.
“Are we still living up to it? I think so. I think so. I've been here for 20 years. As my colleague Russ [Grandinetti] says, ‘There was never a Camelot where we were perfect. Our leadership principles were always the behaviors that we aspired to live by when we were at our best.’ But the way that we do that is we keep on communicating them and talking them and teaching them. And I try to do that every day.”
The first episode of Learn and Be Curious with Doug Herrington is now available wherever you listen to podcasts.
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