The List on the Wall
Every Amazon building has the Leadership Principles somewhere. On walls, in meeting rooms, and in the onboarding materials you receive your first week. There are sixteen of them, each a sentence or two, each sounding reasonable, each easy to nod at. New employees learn them. People write them on whiteboards. Interview loops are structured around them.
None of that is the point.
The principles are not values statements or aspirational posters. They are, in the company's language, mechanisms: tools for making decisions under pressure, for navigating complexity without a clear playbook, for knowing what to do when two things you care about are pulling in opposite directions. You do not understand a principle by reading it. You understand it by being in a situation where it is the only thing you have to hold onto.
I spent years at AWS doing exactly that. What follows is not a summary of all sixteen principles. It is an honest account of those who were tested, those who held, and what I found out about myself in the process.
Customer Obsession: Showing Up When It Costs You
Amazon Leadership Principle #1 -- Customer Obsession: Leaders start with the customer and work backward. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers.
I learned what this actually means at two in the morning.
The utility company I had supported for years was operating emergency communications systems during a Public Safety Power Shutoff event. Their systems crashed. The communications platform they used to reach 5.4 million customers went down, and they needed help in the middle of the night, in the middle of a crisis, with no playbook for what to do next. I mobilized more than sixty people in a matter of hours. We did not wait for morning. We did not wait for a meeting. We rebuilt what needed rebuilding, in real time, while the emergency was still unfolding.
The same company went through bankruptcy a few years later. Some accounts in that situation quietly get less attention. Resources flow toward safer bets. I stayed. Not because it was strategically convenient, but because they needed a partner who would not calibrate their commitment to the account's balance sheet.
Customer Obsession is not a fair-weather principle. It does not mean showing up for wins and going quiet during the hard parts. The relationships that matter most are the ones you maintain even when it is costly. That is what the principle means. The two-in-the-morning call is the proof.
The Foundation Is Trust
Amazon Leadership Principle #2 -- Earn Trust: Leaders listen attentively, speak candidly, and treat others respectfully. They are vocally self-critical, even when doing so is awkward or embarrassing. They benchmark themselves and their teams against the best.
I lost count of how many times I told a customer something like, "I do not know the answer to that." I am going to find out and get back to you.
The first time I said it about genomics, I was sitting with scientists who had spent their careers in life sciences. I had just transitioned into healthcare and life sciences with essentially zero domain expertise. I could have deflected, spoken in generalities, or let the conversation move past the question. I did not. I admitted, directly, that I did not understand what they were describing and that I wanted to learn.
The reaction surprised me. They taught me. And then they introduced me to colleagues. And then they trusted me with work that mattered.
I had spent years watching people perform expertise they did not have. It never worked as well as they hoped, and it always eventually unraveled. Earn Trust is built through consistent presence, honest communication, and following through on commitments. Grand gestures do not build it. Not pretending to know things you do not know builds it.
I maintained relationships through three CIO transitions at two different companies, including through the utility company's bankruptcy. Leadership changed. Organizational structures were reorganized. Budget authority moved. I stayed consistent, honored what I had committed to, and did not disappear when the people I knew most closely were no longer in the room. That is what Earn Trust asks for—consistency, not performance.
From "I Delivered" to "We Delivered"
Amazon Leadership Principles #3 and #8 -- Deliver Results and Hire and Develop the Best: Leaders focus on the key inputs for their business and deliver them with the right quality and on time. Leaders raise the performance bar with every hire and promotion. They develop leaders and take their role in coaching others seriously.
There is a shift when you move from an individual contributor to a leader, and it is harder than it sounds. For most of your career, your results are your results. You close the deal, you build the relationship, you figure out the solution. The measurement is clean. You either did it or you did not.
Leadership breaks that model entirely.
When I transitioned into a leadership role on the new business team, my job was not to be the best seller in the room. My job was to make the people in the room better. I started using what I called the 70% Rule: giving team members work they could do about 70 percent as well as I could, recognizing the gap as a learning opportunity rather than a performance risk. I had to resist the instinct to step in and do it myself, which is the instinct of every person who has spent years succeeding by doing things personally.
The shift is not natural. It requires trusting that development is the job, not performance. The mechanisms I built, the weekly rhythms, the psychological safety I tried to create on the team, the habit of celebrating learning from failure rather than treating mistakes as career-defining events, those were the actual deliverables of my leadership role. Not the numbers I personally generated. The numbers my team generated were because of the environment I built.
Deliver Results at the leadership level means team results, not individual heroics. Hire and Develop the Best means your team's growth is your leadership legacy. Those two principles stopped being separate ideas and became the same work.
Strategic Patience
Amazon Leadership Principle #13 -- Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit: Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions they disagree with, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting. Leaders have conviction and are tenacious. They do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a decision is made, they commit wholly.
The semiconductor negotiation took eighteen months.
Quarterly pressure is real at any large company. There are pipeline reviews, forecasting calls, close plans, and conversations about what is in your current quarter and what is not. Eighteen months is not in any current quarter. It is not in the next one either.
I had a conviction about the partnership we were building and what it needed to be sustainable. Not a transaction. A strategic collaboration that would outlast the deal and continue to generate value years past the signing. That kind of partnership cannot be rushed into existence. It requires patience, architecture, trust, and a willingness to say no to faster options that would have delivered a worse outcome.
I disagreed with the pressure to reach a faster closure. I said so, respectfully and directly, in the conversations where it came up. Then I committed to showing progress in ways that were compatible with the long timeline, finding ways to demonstrate momentum without compromising the integrity of what we were building.
Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit is an ungainly name for a precise idea. You are obligated to challenge decisions you disagree with. You are also obligated to commit fully once the decision is made. The balance between those two things is where mature leadership lives. Conviction without commitment is stubbornness. Commitment without conviction is compliance. Both are costly.
The semiconductor partnership held. The eighteen months were worth it.
Learning in Public
Amazon Leadership Principle #5 -- Learn and Be Curious: Leaders are never done learning and consistently seek to improve themselves. They are curious about new possibilities and act to explore them.
When I transitioned to Healthcare and Life Sciences, I knew almost nothing about the domain.
I took four courses on Udemy: Introduction to Biology, IT Life Science Consultant Essentials, AI for Life Sciences, and a fourth focused on healthcare infrastructure. I conducted interviews with AWS leaders in the space and documented my findings. I asked customers to teach me about their work, turning my knowledge gaps into the starting point for conversations rather than something to hide.
I could not pretend expertise I did not have. And I found, repeatedly, that not pretending built more connection than claiming knowledge would have. When you admit that you are learning, customers who are experts in their own field become teachers. Teachers feel valued. Teachers become advocates. Teachers make introductions.
Learn and Be Curious sounds, on the surface, like generic corporate encouragement to keep developing. What it actually means, in practice, is that vulnerability about what you do not know is a professional asset, not a liability. The willingness to say I am learning this alongside you, to conduct that learning openly and with genuine curiosity, does more for trust and relationship than any amount of performed expertise.
Domain knowledge matters. But the willingness to develop it in front of the people you serve matters more.
What the Principles Actually Are
I did not learn any of these principles in a classroom or from a poster. I learned them in situations where I had to choose, under pressure, between competing options, and the principle helped me know what to do.
The utility company's crisis at two in the morning was Customer Obsession made real. The genomics conversation was Earn Trust in practice. The eighteen-month semiconductor negotiation was Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit in action. The new business team was where Deliver Results and Hire and Develop the Best stopped being two separate principles and became the same work. Learning and being curious were what kept me standing during the healthcare transition when I had nothing else to offer.
Principles are only as useful as the situations that test them. The gap between reading a principle and living one is the distance between intellectual agreement and embodied practice. That journey takes time, requires failure, and builds slowly through repeated application.
The list on the wall is a starting point. What happens next is up to you.