Degenerate Leadership Principles

I recently wrote about how the Amazon Leadership Principles (LPs) are often Weaponized. In this follow up I want to write about a parallel problem, where a degenerate or overly simplistic form of the principles are applied.

I consider the use of an LP to be Degenerate when it is applied without discernment in the easiest possible way, often due to lack of effort or even true laziness by the user. In this article I will cover examples I have seen and what to do about them.

First, I want to emphasize that I love the Amazon LPs. They help give the company a single consistent internal language. They also fit one description of a sustainable culture from the book Good to Great, which essentially states that a culture need not be perfect to work, it simply needs to be clear and consistent. People who fit the culture will stay and those who do not will leave. The end result is a coherent team. Their example was the RJR Nabisco cigarette company, which at the time of the book had a clear culture of smoking. The smokers stuck together, giving the company an us versus the world culture that served the company. Now, I would consider this a quite negative culture… the point is, it worked to give the company coherency towards their goals (selling cigarettes). I consider the Amazon LPs, while imperfectly used, to be much better.

Second, I do have some pride of ownership. I had the opportunity relatively early in my career to help advocate for and draft the Ownership LP. The words, “They never say ‘that’s not my job.’” are mine.

At Amazon, one of the most frequently degenerate LPs has it’s own unofficial name, Frupidity. This name comes when the principle of Frugality is applied without an eye towards value and in practice is implemented as “do not spend money.” It is easy (if lazy) to try to look frugal by saying no to most or all expenses.

The most extreme example of Frupidity I saw before Amazon was at Lycos. This Internet boom company had a controller who “saved” money by having three piles on his desk. A purchase request, when received, went into pile one, where it sat. If you came back, asking, yelling, or begging for whatever it was you needed, he moved it to pile two. If time went by and you repeated this process, it moved to pile three. Finally, if you came back a third time, predicting the end of the world without the resources, he would reluctantly take it from pile three and order it. Now, I want to be clear on the odd chance that this controller from the late 90s is still alive and on LinkedIn (I honestly have no idea of his name), that I rarely needed to buy things in my role and I only heard this from others who did. So maybe it is just his fearsome image. But it makes a good story of a process gone wrong, an attempt not to actually evaluate the merit of a request but merely to use friction as a filter.

At Amazon, I saw this in person in another way. A very good boss of mine, someone I respect immensely overall, was asked if our team, which had been together over two years and had shipped several products, could get team coffee mugs. At the time, part of the definition of Frugality at Amazon said that we didn’t spend money on T-shirts, which do not help customers. Rather than buck this trend, he bought the coffee mugs with his own money. Whether or not he was Frupid, he was coerced by the culture into an unnatural act. A tight knit, successful team wanted coffee mugs for crying out loud. This is a small, almost trivial cost. It would have been repaid literally 1,000 times if it helped retain or motivate one employee. Once can make the argument, of course, that the lack of corporate swag was a valuable symbol of true frugality. Perhaps you find this argument compelling; I do not.

In any case, what do you do when you run into a guiding principle, policy, or rule that is being applied without much thought or nuance at your job?

While I think the main driver behind weaponizing Leadership Principles is getting your way, the main driver behind degenerate applications is either laziness (intellectually oversimplifying to easy rules by not bothering to really think about what they mean) or wanting to avoid needing to do work yourself (if the LP is really soft and easy to meet simply, I do not have to do much).

In either case I believe that the best way to work through a conflict around this case is first to try to politely raise a more thorough or nuanced interpretation. Since often the motive is one type or another of effort avoidance, it can help to gently explain what is in it for the listener to spend the money, put in the effort, or consider another viewpoint.

More broadly, whenever someone is stuck on an oversimplified rule or model, the key is to get them to consider new evidence. Doing this often requires encouraging them to explore a new possibility. One phrase another good manager of mine taught me is “what would need to be true…?”

You use this phrase to ask, “what would need to be true for you to approve this expense?” or “what would need to be true for you to support Fred’s promotion?”

This question works because people are often able to answer a hypothetical — it’s not threatening to answer what it would take. Once you have a discussion going, it is a lot easier to make progress than if you get locked into a positional debate (“yes we should, no we shouldn’t, YES we should!”).

In the end all guidelines and principles are only as good as the thought being used to apply them. They can help prompt us, but like any other sort of pattern in life, we must usually do the final work to apply them to our specific circumstances.