During Jeff Bezos's last week as Amazon CEO, the company he founded is adding two new items to its list of leadership principles, a list that is now 16 items long and includes everything from "Customer Obsession" to "Are Right A Lot" to "Frugality." Here are the two new ones:
- Strive to be Earth's Best Employer. "Leaders work every day to create a safer, more productive, higher performing, more diverse, and more just work environment. They lead with empathy, have fun at work, and make it easy for others to have fun. Leaders ask themselves: Are my fellow employees growing? Are they empowered? Are they ready for what's next? Leaders have a vision for and commitment to their employees' personal success, whether that be at Amazon or elsewhere."
- Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility. "We started in a garage, but we're not there anymore. We are big, we impact the world, and we are far from perfect. We must be humble and thoughtful about even the secondary effects of our actions. Our local communities, planet, and future generations need us to be better every day. We must begin each day with a determination to make better, do better, and be better for our customers, our employees, our partners, and the world at large. And we must end every day knowing we can do even more tomorrow. Leaders create more than they consume and always leave things better than how they found them."
These leadership principles are a crucial part of Amazon's culture, the kinds of phrases you'll hear executives drop casually in meetings and use as rationale in all sorts of decisions. Bezos in particular has been talking more recently about Amazon's responsibility to its employees and to the world as a whole, so it's not surprising that these are the two the company chose to add. But it says something about how Bezos views his legacy at Amazon, and how he wants the company to operate even after he steps down.
Climate TRACE's data show emissions at the facility-level.Image: Climate TRACE