Walking around downtown Seattle, it’s impossible to avoid the whiff of Amazon that permeates the city. For a newcomer, it’s hard to tell where Seattle ends and Amazon begins, as the skyscrapers of the corporate campus blend so seamlessly into the city centre.
Hundreds of US cities fell over themselves last year to compete for Amazon’s second headquarters. (A list of frontrunners was recently narrowed to 20 candidates.) But on a recent trip to Seattle, standing on a rainy sidewalk next to a dull Amazon skyscraper after an interview, I wondered if there was anything very different about this hugely successful company — or if it just happened to be in the right place at the right time, cashing in on the rise of online retail, much as Google did for online search. Some companies are lucky, others work hard, very few run on genius. Which was it?
To answer this question, I looked up Amazon’s corporate value statement when I got back to San Francisco. Along with Jeff Bezos’s annual letter to shareholders, the values are a mainstay of Amazonian culture. But a lot of these 14 “leadership principles” are just as dreary as you’d expect. One advises leaders to “be right, a lot” — as if anyone ever sets out to be wrong. Another says that talent is important, so hire the best — hardly rocket science.