Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1
Inside Jeff Bezos’s Culture of Invention
Amazon’s Seattle headquarters bear little resemblance to Silicon Valley’s sprawling campuses. Rather than tuck itself away in the comfort and anonymity of the suburbs, the company operates in the heart of the still-developing South Lake Union neighborhood. Its buildings—named after project code names like Doppler (Echo) and Fiona (Kindle)—line the streets there, holding more than fifty thousand employees, with ongoing construction making room for more. Swarms of Amazonians move through the neighborhood’s streets on weekdays, and if you fight your way through them, you can walk right into one of the company’s most promising experiments.
A few stories beneath Jeff Bezos’s office, on the ground floor of his Day One office tower, Amazon is piloting a new form of grocery store, called Go, that does away with checkout. To buy something from Go, you scan in with an app, take whatever you want, and just . . . leave. Moments later, Amazon pushes a receipt to your phone, accounting for the items you took. Go has no lines, no waiting, and no cashiers. It feels like the future, and it very well might be.
Go is powered by some impressive technology, much of which you can see by looking up. Cameras and sensors line its ceilings, pointing every which way to capture your body and its movements as you walk its aisles. Using computer vision (a subset of machine learning), Go figures out who you are, what you’ve taken, and what you’ve put back. Then it charges you. The store is almost always accurate, as I’ve found in my various attempts to trick it. No matter the method, be it concealing products or running in and out at my top speed (sixteen seconds total visit time), Go has never missed an item.
The story behind Go extends beyond hardware and code, though. It is, more than anything, a product of Amazon’s distinct culture, the stuff you can’t see. Inside Amazon, Bezos has turned invention into a habit, making the creation of new experiences like Go core to his company’s business, just as critical as keeping up its famous website. Everyone at Amazon invents, from the top rungs to the bottom, and Bezos automates everything he can so they can invent more. The Amazon founder and CEO does more than encourage inventions; he’s created a system meant to churn them out, giving them the best chance to succeed when they debut. Go, for instance, was initially proposed as a giant vending machine. But after going through Bezos’s process, it turned into something with the capacity to change the way we shop.
Bezos’s invention culture is responsible for getting us to talk to speakers, microwaves, and clocks, all with Alexa embedded inside. And to read books on screens, build companies on the cloud, shop on the internet with abandon, and, perhaps shortly, walk out of stores without stopping at a register.
“Invention is fuel for him; it’s fuel for his intellect. It’s part of the being, the fabric of the company,” Jeff Wilke, Amazon’s CEO of Worldwide Consumer and Bezos’s second-in-command, told me. “The times when I’ve seen him most joyful are the times when he runs across an invention, an insight, an innovation, a pioneering thought.”
Bezos drives Amazon’s inventive culture through fourteen leadership principles, adhered to by most Amazonians more closely than their own religions, which can sometimes make Amazon feel like a cult. These principles guide decision making within the company, they’re hammered home during its interview process, and they come up casually in conversation between Amazonians when they’re off the clock. When you work at Amazon, the leadership principles become part of your being. They make it difficult to work at any other company, which is why so many ex-Amazonians “boomerang,” or come back after they’ve left. One ex-employee told me he’s teaching these principles to his kids.
The more you study Bezos’s leadership principles, the more it becomes clear that they’re a manual for invention. Taken together, they inspire new ideas, strip out the corporate muck that so often holds the best ideas back, and ensure anything with a chance to succeed gets out the door.
Think Big, for instance, encourages Amazonians to dream up the company’s next great product, process, or service. And critically, it gives them permission to do it too, a departure from stay-in-your-lane management. “Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy,” the leadership principle says. “Leaders create and communicate a bold direction that inspires results. They think differently and look around corners for ways to serve customers.”
Invent and Simplify, another example, makes invention core to people’s jobs at Amazon, not peripheral. “Leaders expect and require innovation and invention,” it instructs. “They are externally aware, look for new ideas from everywhere, and are not limited by ‘not invented here.’ ”
(A more honest reading of this principle would be: Your entire purpose at Amazon is to invent. If you’re not inventing, your job will get simplified and then automated. At Amazon, you invent or hit the road.)
Bias for Action tells Amazonians to get the damn thing out the door, discouraging long, drawn-out development processes in favor of producing new things. “Many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study,” it says. “We value calculated risk taking.”
(One Amazonian, looking for extra room in his work space, brought a saw into work and took off a chunk of his desk. When management spoke with him, he cited Bias for Action.)
Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit discourages bottlenecks by telling Amazonians to state their objection and then get out of the way. “Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting,” it says. “Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly.”
(Bezos hated the idea of putting customer questions and answers on product pages, one ex-employee recalled, but he told the team to go ahead. Now these questions and answers are an Amazon staple.)
Finally, Customer Obsession puts customers before everything. “Leaders start with the customer and work backwards,” it says. “Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers.”
(Amazon’s customer obsession has factored into the company’s pursuit of sweetheart economic deals, its anticompetitive behavior, and its mistreatment of its employees. These activities help reduce prices and improve service, both of which often come with an unseen cost.)
If an invention isn’t good enough for Amazon’s customers, it gets sent back to the drawing board. “The magic of the Go store comes from the fact that once you’re in, you can just walk out,” one person who worked on Go told me. “[The vending machine idea] didn’t eliminate the problem of checkout; it simply kicked the problem down the line.” And so it was rejected.
Bezos is onto something. Inventing in today’s technology-driven economy is a must, not simply nice to have. In a world driven by code, where the cost to create is lower than ever, competitors can copy what you’re already doing with relative ease. To survive, you need to be creating the next big thing constantly. And so Bezos has enlisted everyone at Amazon in this pursuit. “There’s invention in finance, and legal, and human resources, and fulfillment, and customer service, and every aspect of the company,” Wilke said. “It becomes part of the way everybody in the company works.”
Inside Amazon, Bezos has developed a culture that empowers employees to invent and lets them run the thing they’ve created (another leadership principle: Ownership). The deeper you dig in, the more apparent it becomes that this culture, bolstered by Wall Street investors who don’t demand Amazon turn a profit, is what’s behind the company’s array of beloved products and services: Echo, Kindle, Prime, Amazon Web Services, and Amazon.com. It is, in no uncertain terms, Amazon’s competitive advantage.
