Amazon exec says the most important lessons from Jeff Bezos were the 16 leadership principles he once dismissed as cultlike

When Doug Herrington first arrived at Amazon more than two decades ago, he found not just a fast-moving e-commerce startup, but a culture wrapped in what felt like a corporate creed. “I felt like I had joined a cult,” Herrington said on a recent episode of Learn and Be Curious With Doug Herrington , Amazon’s new podcast .

He had joined Amazon in 2005 as vice president of consumables, according to his LinkedIn , working up the ranks to CEO of worldwide Amazon stores by 2022. “I told my wife, ‘I don’t understand what’s going on,” he recalled. Herrington isn’t the only Amazon employee to describe the company that way, especially in its early days.

A 2001 Wired feature titled “Inside the Cult of Amazon” quoted a former employee who described workers as being “brainwashed” into adoring Bezos and embracing 20-hour workdays. But Herrington ultimately saw his initial skepticism as a rite of passage—one that made him a better leader.

And he saw it as a way for Bezos to “get this whole company to row in one direction.” Still, the company’s now-famous 16 leadership principles aimed at defining “how we want our leaders to make decisions, and behave, and work with each other, and solve problems when they’re at their best” at first felt like too much, Herrington admitted.  Over time, Herrington saw the power in Bezos’s message and how that cultural playbook ultimately became Amazon’s identity.  “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,” Herrington said. “And we do it through these leadership principles.” Herrington also clarified that Bezos’s leadership principles weren’t like the 10 Commandments etched in stone.

In fact, Herrington said, many of the principles didn’t even get written down until 2002, about eight years after the company was founded.  “So Jeff didn’t come down from the mountaintop with these leadership principles carved in stone,” Herrington said.

“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.” Now Herrington sees the principles—from customer obsession and bias for action to dive deep and have backbone—as a unifying language that keeps Amazon’s roughly 1.5 million employees aligned.

How Bezos’s principles formed Amazon’s culture Bezos’s own writings—especially his letters to shareholders over the decades—emphasize many of the same themes as his 16 leadership principles: relentless customer focus, long-term thinking, an obsession with invention, and a readiness to “work backwards” from what customers actually need.  Steve Anderson, author of The Bezos Letters: 14 Principles to Grow Your Business Like Amazon, said Bezos’s leadership principles consistently underpinned Amazon’s strategy as it scaled from a garage-based startup to the world’s second-largest company .

“As I studied the letters, I realized Bezos had ‘hidden in plain sight’ how he had grown Amazon by taking intentional and calculated risks,” Anderson said.

“I discovered there were recurring themes (principles) that any business could use to grow like Amazon.” Beyond Herrington, current Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has prioritized teaching and explaining Bezos’s principles internally, even launching video explanations of each one to help employees interpret them. He admits that even after nearly three decades at the company he is still mastering them to this day.