Amazon Leadership Principles: Bezos Wrote Seven of the 16 in 1997, and a Small Company Should Copy Four First

You run a company of 40 people, and someone has just sent you the Amazon leadership principles as the model for your culture. There are 16. Seven were already in Jeff Bezos’s 1997 shareholder letter, from the year Amazon’s staff grew to 614. Those are the ones built for your size, and four of them are worth copying first.

Our newsroom copied each principle from Amazon’s careers page and read it against five of Bezos’s shareholder letters, for 1997, 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2020, fetched from Amazon’s SEC filings on 8 November 2026. Every row in the table links to the pages we read.

What We Found

Of Amazon’s 16 leadership principles, seven are already stated in Jeff Bezos’s 1997 shareholder letter, from the year Amazon’s staff grew to 614; seven, including Disagree and Commit and Insist on the Highest Standards, are absent from it.

The other two, Earn Trust and Dive Deep, are there in part. The 1997 letter promises to share “our strategic thought processes” with shareholders and to measure its programs “analytically”, which is candour and auditing aimed at investors rather than at colleagues.

Five of the seven missing principles turn up in later letters as Amazon grew. Invention appears in the 2015 letter, Disagree and Commit in 2016, high standards in 2017, and both 2021 additions in Bezos’s last letter, for 2020, when Amazon directly employed 1.3 million people. We found no direct statement of Are Right, A Lot or Deliver Results in the five letters we read.

The first half of the list is what a founder writes for a few hundred people. The rest is what a company adds once it has layers of managers who need telling how to argue, how good is good enough, and what they owe the towns around their buildings.

What Are the Amazon Leadership Principles?

The Amazon leadership principles are 16 short statements Amazon publishes on its careers site about how its people should decide and behave, from Customer Obsession and Ownership to Frugality and Disagree and Commit. Each has a name and a paragraph, and each paragraph opens with a one-line claim about what leaders do.

Amazon’s leadership principles page says: “We use our Leadership Principles every day, whether we’re discussing ideas for new projects or deciding on the best way to solve a problem.” It adds: “It’s just one of the things that makes Amazon peculiar.”

How Many Amazon Leadership Principles Are There?

There are 16 Amazon leadership principles. Amazon had 14 until 1 July 2021, when it added Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer and Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility, four days before Jeff Bezos handed the chief executive job to Andy Jassy. The addition before that, Learn and Be Curious, came in 2015.

CNBC reported the “two new entries to its set of 14 leadership principles”. GeekWire called it “the first time Amazon has added to the list since 2015” and said both new principles were “in line with the themes sounded by Bezos in his final shareholder letter as Amazon CEO”. We tested that idea on all 16.

All 16 Amazon Leadership Principles, Traced to Bezos’s Letters

The third column is our coding against the 1997 letter: stated means the same instruction in the letter’s own words. The fourth is the line in a later letter where Bezos writes the idea down.

Principle	Amazon’s opening line	In the 1997 letter?	Where Bezos wrote it	Sources
Customer Obsession	“Leaders start with the customer and work backwards.”	Stated: “We will continue to focus relentlessly on our customers.” (section title: Obsess Over Customers)	1997	Amazon, 1997 letter
Ownership	“Leaders are owners.”	Stated: staff “each of whom must think like, and therefore must actually be, an owner.” (section title: It’s All About the Long Term)	1997	Amazon, 1997 letter
Invent and Simplify	“Leaders expect and require innovation and invention from their teams and always find ways to simplify.”	Not stated	2015: “We want to be a large company that’s also an invention machine.”	Amazon, 2015 letter
Are Right, A Lot	“Leaders are right a lot.”	Not stated	Not found. Closest, 2016: “If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think”	Amazon, 2016 letter
Learn and Be Curious	“Leaders are never done learning and always seek to improve themselves.”	Stated: “We will continue to learn from both our successes and our failures.”	1997	Amazon, 1997 letter
Hire and Develop the Best	“Leaders raise the performance bar with every hire and promotion.”	Stated: “Setting the bar high in our approach to hiring has been, and will continue to be, the single most important element of Amazon.com’s success.”	1997	Amazon, 1997 letter
Insist on the Highest Standards	“Leaders are continually raising the bar and drive their teams to deliver high quality products, services, and processes.” (second sentence)	Not stated	2017: a section titled “Insist on the Highest Standards”, and “I believe high standards are teachable.”	Amazon, 2017 letter
Think Big	“Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy.”	Stated: “We will make bold rather than timid investment decisions where we see a sufficient probability of gaining market leadership advantages.”	1997	Amazon, 1997 letter
Bias for Action	“Speed matters in business.”	Stated: “Our goal is to move quickly to solidify and extend our current position while we begin to pursue the online commerce opportunities in other areas.”	1997	Amazon, 1997 letter
Frugality	“Accomplish more with less.”	Stated: “We will work hard to spend wisely and maintain our lean culture.”	1997	Amazon, 1997 letter
Earn Trust	“Leaders listen attentively, speak candidly, and treat others respectfully.”	Partly: “We will share our strategic thought processes with you when we make bold choices…” (to shareholders)	Our reading, 2020: “I think we need to do a better job for our employees.” (after the Bessemer union vote)	Amazon, 1997 letter, 2020 letter
Dive Deep	“Leaders operate at all levels, stay connected to the details, audit frequently, and are skeptical when metrics and anecdote differ.”	Partly: “We will continue to measure our programs and the effectiveness of our investments analytically…” (to shareholders)	2016: “They study and understand many anecdotes rather than only the averages you’ll find on surveys.”	Amazon, 1997 letter, 2016 letter
Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit	“Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting.”	Not stated	2016: “Third, use the phrase ‘disagree and commit.’ This phrase will save a lot of time.”	Amazon, 2016 letter
Deliver Results	“Leaders focus on the key inputs for their business and deliver them with the right quality and in a timely fashion.”	Not stated. The letter measures outputs instead: “We first measure ourselves in terms of the metrics most indicative of our market leadership”	Not found in the five letters	Amazon, 1997 letter
Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer (added 2021)	“Leaders work every day to create a safer, more productive, higher performing, more diverse, and more just work environment.”	Not stated	2020: “We are going to be Earth’s Best Employer and Earth’s Safest Place to Work.”	Amazon, 2020 letter
Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility (added 2021)	“We started in a garage, but we’re not there anymore.”	Not stated	2020: “If you want to be successful in business (in life, actually), you have to create more than you consume.”	Amazon, 2020 letter

The two partly rows are judgment calls: the 1997 letter is candid and analytical toward its owners, while the principles ask the same toward colleagues. The 2017 letter credits its section title to the list itself.

What Bezos Wrote When Amazon Had 614 People

The 1997 letter has five sections: It’s All About the Long Term, Obsess Over Customers, Infrastructure, Our Employees, and Goals for 1998. Two of those titles are leadership principles in all but name.

That year, the letter says, “Amazon.com’s employee base grew from 158 to 614.” In the 2020 letter, Bezos wrote: “Last year, we hired 500,000 employees and now directly employ 1.3 million people around the world.” A company of 614 is far closer to yours.

Read the seven stated principles as one list and they make a survival kit for a young company: know the customer, think like an owner, hire above your average, make bold bets, move fast, spend carefully and learn from mistakes. A founder can watch all seven happen from one desk.

The principles missing from 1997 need a management layer. “We want to be a large company that’s also an invention machine,” Bezos wrote in the 2015 letter, and the word that matters there is large. A company of 20 invents because it has to; a company of hundreds of thousands needs a principle to stop it from settling.

Bezos’s later habits belong to that larger company too. The Jeff Bezos morning routine, no meeting before 10 a.m., assumes staff for everything else. Like the Mark Wahlberg morning routine, which our count found rests on an early-evening bedtime, it travels less well than the 1997 list.

Which Amazon Leadership Principles Should a Small Company Copy First?

Copy Ownership, Hire and Develop the Best, Bias for Action and Frugality first. All four were already in Bezos’s 1997 letter, all four cost nothing to state, and all four change daily decisions in a company of 10 to 100 people. Customer Obsession matters as much, but nearly every company already claims it.

In our study of published leadership behaviors, 14 of 19 large companies named the customer, while only 5 named frugality and 8 named speed. Keep Amazon’s working method, “start with the customer and work backwards”, and spend your list on the four below.

Ownership. Amazon’s paragraph opens “Leaders are owners.” and adds: “They think long term and don’t sacrifice long-term value for short-term results.” The 1997 letter went further and wanted a staff “each of whom must think like, and therefore must actually be, an owner.” The second half is the part small companies skip. If you ask people to act like owners, decide what stake they hold, whether shares, a profit share or a bonus tied to the year, and say so in the same breath.

Long term includes the founder’s health, since in a company of 30 the founder is much of the asset. Our guide to zone 2 training found that eight of the nine plans giving a schedule start below the 150-minute weekly US guideline.

Hire and Develop the Best. “Setting the bar high in our approach to hiring has been, and will continue to be, the single most important element of Amazon.com’s success,” Bezos wrote in 1997. The principle now opens: “Leaders raise the performance bar with every hire and promotion.” In a company of 20, each hire is five percent of the staff, so one weak hire moves the average far more than it could at Amazon. Our guide to hiring your first employee covers the cost; the principle covers the bar.

Founders forget the develop half: “Leaders develop leaders and take seriously their role in coaching others.” Teach a new hire one part of the job each week in plain words, as the Feynman technique asks, and you find out which parts nobody has written down.

Bias for Action. “Speed matters in business. Many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study.” The 2015 letter supplies the test: some decisions are “one-way doors”, while “most decisions aren’t like that”. Our piece on the Jeff Bezos regret minimization framework covers the one-way kind. Decide the reversible ones the same day and give the one-way ones a protected block, the habit our piece on Cal Newport’s time blocking prices out.

Frugality. “Accomplish more with less,” the principle opens, and later: “There are no extra points for growing headcount, budget size, or fixed expense.” The 1997 version was “We will work hard to spend wisely and maintain our lean culture.” Amazon still tells how Bezos, shopping for desks, bought a door and put legs on it, because “the doors were a lot cheaper”. As the company grew it kept door desks “as a symbol of one of the company’s core values, frugality.”

In a small company, frugality is mostly about fixed costs, the ones you cannot undo in a bad quarter. The household version runs through our Rich Dad Poor Dad summary, which checks 15 of the book’s money claims against public data: nine hold, and the tax slogan does not.

What Does Disagree and Commit Mean?

Disagree and commit means you argue against a decision while it is open, then back it fully once it is made, even if you lost. Amazon’s principle says leaders are “obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree” and adds: “Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly.” Bezos wrote that it binds the boss too.

Of the five letters we read, it appears in the 2016 letter: “Third, use the phrase ‘disagree and commit.’ This phrase will save a lot of time.” His example was an Amazon Studios original he doubted, where he wrote back: “I disagree and commit and hope it becomes the most watched thing we’ve ever made.” Then the line founders tend to skip: “This isn’t one way. If you’re the boss, you should do this too.”

This is the one later principle worth taking early. It costs a sentence, and in a company of 30 the founder most needs to say it, because nobody can overrule the founder. Our guide to Jocko Willink books reaches the same point through The Dichotomy of Leadership, which says a good leader must also be a good follower.

The Let Them Theory, first on six of 10 rankings in our guide to Mel Robbins books, makes a looser case for letting go of what others decide. Amazon’s version applies only after you have argued.

The Principles to Leave Until You Are Bigger

Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility opens: “We started in a garage, but we’re not there anymore.” If you are still in the garage, the principle describes a problem you do not have yet. The sentence behind it in Bezos’s last letter, “you have to create more than you consume”, works at any size. The principle is for a company whose side effects reach whole towns.

Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer comes from the same letter. A company of 30 should care about the same things, and the founder can see them across the room.

Are Right, A Lot describes an outcome. “They have strong judgment and good instincts” can only be tested in hindsight, and the 2016 letter’s line on course correcting is more use to a founder.

Insist on the Highest Standards sits in between. In the 2017 letter Bezos argued that high standards can be taught, and quoted a handstand coach on how people misjudge the effort: most people, the coach said, “think that if they work hard, they should be able to master a handstand in about two weeks.” Pick the one area where your standard matters most and write down what good looks like there.

Invent and Simplify comes free at 20 people, because a small company that stops inventing usually stops existing. Peter Thiel’s Zero to One, the first book in our guide to Peter Thiel books, is written for that stage.

How to Write Your Own Version

Start with four and write each one the way the Amazon leadership principles are written: a name, then a first sentence a new hire could repeat. “Accomplish more with less” is four words. Our test of the Simon Sinek golden circle found that none of 20 big-company About pages opened with how they work. Principles are that how, written down.

Then tie each one to a weekly moment: the hiring decision, the purchase over a set amount. Our Atomic Habits summary covers the cue that turns an intention into a habit; for a principle, the cue is the decision.

Add a principle only when you can point to a decision it would have changed. Amazon went six years without adding one, and both 2021 additions answered problems of size. If your list is longer than your leadership team, it was probably written for someone else’s company.

How We Did This

On 8 November 2026 our newsroom copied the name and opening lines of all 16 principles from amazon.jobs and fetched five of Jeff Bezos’s shareholder letters from SEC filings: 1997 from the annual report, and 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2020 from 8-K exhibits. We coded each principle against the 1997 letter as stated, partly (a close idea aimed at another audience) or not stated, ignoring the 1997 reprint behind later letters, and recorded the later line that expresses each missing one. We did not read the letters for 1998 to 2014, 2018 or 2019, so “not found” means not found in those five. The count history comes from CNBC and GeekWire reports from July 2021, because archived copies of Amazon’s careers page would not load. The full dataset, with the quote and source for every row, is available on request.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the 16 Amazon leadership principles?

Customer Obsession; Ownership; Invent and Simplify; Are Right, A Lot; Learn and Be Curious; Hire and Develop the Best; Insist on the Highest Standards; Think Big; Bias for Action; Frugality; Earn Trust; Dive Deep; Have Backbone, Disagree and Commit; Deliver Results; Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer; and Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility. The last two were added on 1 July 2021.

When were the Amazon leadership principles created?

Amazon does not publish a founding date for the list. CNBC reported in 2021 that “Many of Amazon’s leadership principles have existed since the company’s earliest days,” and seven of the 16 are stated in Bezos’s 1997 shareholder letter. Learn and Be Curious was added in 2015 and the two newest in July 2021.

Do Amazon leadership principles work for a small business?

Some do. The seven Bezos wrote down in 1997 were written for a company of a few hundred people and transfer well; start with Ownership, Hire and Develop the Best, Bias for Action and Frugality, and borrow the phrase disagree and commit early. The 2021 additions and Are Right, A Lot fit a company of Amazon’s size.

Amazon’s list grew from what 614 people needed to what 1.3 million need. A founder with 40 people should borrow from the 1997 version, and add the rest once the company has the problems they were written for.