Buy My Book: “How to Think Like an Amazonian”

Here’s the video of me giving this speech.

I had the privilege of working for one of the world’s biggest celebrities and now I’m writing a book about it. OK, that’s not exactly true but it’s close. I worked at Amazon as their head of cloud banking and I’m writing a book about how Amazon changed the way I think.

There are lots of great books and videos about Amazon, but this one is different. It’s about Amazonian, which is what Amazon employees call themselves. This isn’t just a book about Amazon. It’s about thinking like an Amazonian and how you can apply this thinking to your own life.

Most books about Amazon treat the reader as a tourist visiting a new land. It’s kind of like watching the movie Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.⁽¹⁾The UK paper The Register refers to one of the big tech firms as “The Chocolate Factory” because it’s as weird and wonderous as Willy Wonka’s candy factory. You get an of what it’s like but you’re still looking at it from the outside. But what if you could get the mind of Agustus Gloop, the glutton who fell into Mr. Wonka’s chocolate river, and find out how the experience changed him. That’s the feeling I want to give you in this book.

So what does it mean to be Amazonian? From the outside, Amazon looks like a holding company—a collection of businesses from a bookseller to a grocery store to a television production company. There’s even my old part of the business, the world’s largest cloud provider. But all of these pieces are held together by one thing—Amazon’s culture. It’s a culture that’s centered around 14 Leadership Principles. These Leadership Principles are the core of interviews, promotions, and making everyday decisions. In this book, I’m going to take you through the 14 principles and show you how to apply them.

Let’s start with the first principle: Customer Obsession.⁽²⁾In Jeff’s first letter to shareholders he even writes about this value “Obsess Over Our Customers.” This is before the Leadership Principles even existed. Amazon is obsessed with its customers. This means providing the best possible experience for each of them. When Amazon was just selling books, it meant providing the best book-buying experience in the world. But things have gotten much more complicated since then.

Now let’s look at how Customer Obsession applies to recruiting. At most places, the company is the customer and the interviewees are selling their services. The companies want to hire the best people and don’t care very much about the people they don’t hire. But Amazon knows that virtually everyone that interviews is an Amazon customer. So the company strives to give each interviewee a great experience. They don’t want to lose that retail customer and their friends because of a bad interview experience.

What does Customer Obsession mean for this book? Well, you as my reader are my customer and I want to give you an amazing experience reading this book. Here’s an example of how I turned a regular experience into an exceptional one.

I was working for Amazon at an event in Tokyo. I had an afternoon off and went to the Imperial Palace, the residence of the Emperor. I started off as a tourist–running around and seeing the giant gates and towers that protected the palace for centuries. I wandered through the Emperor’s garden–where he and his family still strolled around on Mondays and Fridays when the gardens are closed to the public. It was nice but it wasn’t earth-shattering. The garden was lovely but didn’t feel that different than strolling through Central Park.

Then I changed my point of view. Instead of looking at the garden as a tourist, I thought, “What would the Emperor do in these gardens?” He’d sit around and meditate next to one of the world’s most beautiful iris gardens.⁽³⁾When the East Gardens were built in 1966, irises were transplanted for the iris garden of Meiji-jijgu, a shrine dedicated to Emperor Meiji, the great-great-grandfather of the current Emperor. So that’s what I did. When I left the garden an hour later, I truly felt like an Emperor! I was able to take this experience and feeling with me when I went home.

I’m still in the process of writing this book but wanted to give you a preview. Amazon’s Leadership Principles gave me a new framework to view life. It’s not perfect but it has lots of instructive lessons. Stay tuned and make sure you pick up a copy once it’s finished.