Amazon's Leadership Principles

Tuesday December 16, 2025

  1. Customer Obsession (initial core principle, 1998)
  2. Ownership (initial core principle, 1998)
  3. Invent and Simplify (early 2000s)
  4. Are Right, A Lot (early 2000s)
  5. Learn and Be Curious (added 2015)
  6. Hire and Develop the Best (initial core principle, as "high bar for talent", 1998)
  7. Insist on the Highest Standards (early 2000s)
  8. Think Big (early 2000s)
  9. Bias for Action (initial core principle, 1998)
  10. Frugality (initial core principle, 1998)
  11. Earn Trust (early 2000s)
  12. Dive Deep (early 2000s)
  13. Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit (early 2000s)
  14. Deliver Results (early 2000s)
  15. Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer (added 2021)
  16. Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility (added 2021)

Lots more detail on Amazon's page.

Former:

I don't know any company that's as into a set of principles as Amazon is. See Working Backwards, for example, on how they're deeply integrated into hiring and performance review processes.

The Leadership Principles started as company core principles in 1998, part of spreading Amazon culture across newly acquired companies. ("Customer Obsession" might be considered to precede even this list, as it was sort of a founding ethos of Amazon.)

Amazon’s purchase of Telebuch in Germany and BookPages in the UK in 1998 gave Bezos an opportunity to articulate the company’s core principles. Alison Algore, a D. E. Shaw transplant who worked in human resources, pondered Amazon’s values with Bezos as he prepared for an introductory conference call with the Telebuch founders. They agreed on five core values and wrote them down on a whiteboard in a conference room: customer obsession, frugality, bias for action, ownership, and high bar for talent. Later Amazon would add a sixth value, innovation. (from The Everything Store)

The Leadership Principles appeared with that name at some point in the early 2000s, though I haven't been able to lock down precise details on this. It seems they were fairly stable as a list of 13 principles from the early 2000s until 2015.

Leadership Principle 5 was added in 2015.

In 2021, Amazon added Leadership Principles 15 and 16 as Andy Jassy was becoming CEO.

It sounds like teams at Amazon also often have around five or six "tenets," which are about what the team aims to be and do. This article includes Amazon HR's tenets, for example.

Amazon often accompanies tenets with the phrase "unless you know better ones," which is a neat way of trying to keep them evolving.

That same article has a list of ways that Amazon is peculiar, in their parlance. (There's a mascot named Peccy!)