Famously, IBM used to have their priorities:
1) Customers first
2) Employees second
3) Stock holders third
All that said, this particular list of principles looks like so much pablum. It's too long and unfocused to be really useful, and I can't see it having much affect. My guess is that Amazon is having trouble finding people to hire lately, and that's why they keep coming up with experiments like this (another example is their foray into 4-day work weeks)
They are deeply engrained in Amazon culture. They are brought up frequently. They are used as the basis for both hiring and promotion decisions.
Regardless of whether or not you (or employees) agree with them. I think what's interesting is that you call them out as too long to be useful. But my guess is +90% of salaried employees at Amazon could recite all of them and give examples of what they intend to convey. I suppose this is a testament to Amazon HR?
I credit HR to sharing them and making sure people hear about them on the way in, but I think a lot of their success has to do with the fact that they're easy to relate to and understand. They're not meaningless platitudes. Lots of companies have "values" like "integrity" and "commitment". But what does that mean? In what context? It's vague.
Customer Obsession is pretty obvious. Earn Trust. These are simple. And while the descriptions of them can get pretty wordy, everyone can tell you what they mean because they're easy to identify with.
I also thing that what they do is give people a lot of empowerment to make decisions, and that makes them attractive. 14 principles that are easy to understand and appeal to people's good will. If you're acting with the principles in mind, you cannot go wrong.
(Disclaimer: I work for AWS.)
I now work for a relatively new division at another company, one staffed with a lot of ex-AWS staff. One of the earliest things they did there is work with employees from a few different previous companies to figure out our own values, and we've proceeded to apply them to the business in similar fashion. First and foremost among them being one focusing on the customer.
Happy customers come back, and are also likely to talk about it to their friends. You might take a hit to your bottom line now, but you'll make it back in the long run with repeat business from the customer.
The only one I ever had an issue with there was frugality. I get why it's there, and the intention, but it leads to something we'd internally refer to as "Frupidity". Frupidity is where in the interests of frugality, the company would do something really stupid, or that would ultimately end up costing them more money.
It also became the last recourse of the bad manager. "we're not going to do this, because frugality" and you then won't be able to get them to budge an inch regardless of what data you bring. It especially will end up being a local to their team only frugality.
They are contradictory enough that you can get dinged on one for following another at review time.
Frugality means putting up with lousy hardware and cramming people into working environments to the point where people start bringing up OHSA w.r.t. number of toilets.
Customer obsession means getting an email about a feature used by a couple percent of users and having to spend a week scrambling because the strategic decision you made (to drop the feature in a major release because you need to get it out) has now been declared wrong. Sev-S was a popular term (S-team being Jeff and his directs).
Bias for action means break extremely important OS features that support multiple products because of pure incompetence. Note that this should really conflict with customer obsession and are right a lot, but oh well.
One thing I found odd was that are right a lot/disagree and commit don't seem to matter if the opposing argument is your manager wanting to do other stuff.
My less snarky response would be that they do spread this stuff around. It has some positive impacts around things like customer obsession, which Amazon is great at. Bias for action can be a good motivator for the right type of person, see something wrong and you go fix it. That said it's not problem free. Frugality is made fun of a lot, because it often goes from sensibly frugal to just cheap.
> are right a lot/disagree and commit don't seem to matter if the opposing argument is your manager wanting to do other stuff
"Disagree and commit" means that when you don't agree with the decision being made, you make that clear, you state why, but then you commit to the decision that was made and work with your team to achieve the goals. It means you don't whine throughout the project that it wasn't done the right way, and you don't bullshit with "I told you so" later if you turn out to be correct.
If your manager makes the call that it's going to be done in way X, you disagree with him politely, then you commit to doing it way X.
What I find far more interesting about the leadership principles is that they recently dropped one: "Vocally self-critical". Oh, that's really just part of 'Earn Trust', apparently, but I'll bet in two more years that phrase isn't even part of the Earn Trust description anymore.