The Amazon Way has its midlife crisis

Jeff Bezos’s famed management rules are slowly unraveling inside Amazon. Can they survive the Andy Jassy era?

- Jason Del Rey

When Amazon ordered most workers back to the office three days a week in February 2023, Pamela Hayter was not happy about the end of a popular pandemic-era arrangement.

But Hayter, a program manager, was bothered on a deeper level: Because the policy effectively meant that only people living near an Amazon office would be able to continue working at the company, she believed Amazon was violating one of its sacred tenets to “hire and develop the best.”

What’s more, by announcing the mandate with little warning or buy-in, Hayter believed, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had betrayed his duty to “earn trust,” another important part of the Amazon code.

At Amazon these tenets, known as Leadership Principles, are much more than suggestions. They are a way of life that employees are judged on before they are even hired, steeped in from the moment they join, and scrupulously followed thereafter with the devotion of religious converts.

Hayter’s next move was a case in point: With the help of some of the 30,000 other employees who joined an internal Slack channel she’d created, she drafted a memo to lay out their concerns about the return-to-work mandate. The memo was exactly six pages long.

Like the Leadership Principles, six-page memos (“6-pagers,” in Amazon lingo) are part of a unique work culture forged within the giant internet company over the years and considered as much of a contributor to Amazon’s world-beating success as any blockbuster product or individual, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos himself.

In reality, these principles and the processes they produce are among Amazon’s grandest innovations.

The customs and practices are widely imitated: More than a dozen books promise to teach managers the secrets to the principles and processes; consultants do brisk business helping firms import Amazon’s methods into their organizations; CEOs load their emails with Amazonian axioms.