One of the things that’s happening inside technology companies is that there are groups of employees who, for example, think that technology companies should not work with the Department of Defense. In my view, if big tech is going to turn its back on the Department of Defense, this country is in trouble. That just can’t happen. And so the senior leadership team needs to say to people, “Look, I understand these are emotional issues. That’s okay, and we don’t have to agree on everything, but this is how we’re going to do it. We are going to support the Department of Defense. This country is important. It is still.”

  I do know that people are very emotional about this issue and have different opinions, but there is truth in the world. We are the good guys. I really believe that. And I know it’s complicated. But the question is: Do you want a strong national defense, or don’t you? I think you do. And so we have to support that.

  We all want to be on the side of civilization. It’s not exclusively only in the United States. What kind of civilization do you want? Do you want freedom? Do you want democracy? These are big principles that supersede the other kinds of questions. And so that’s where you should go back to.

  Work-Life Harmony

  I TEACH LEADERSHIP CLASSES at Amazon for our most senior executives. I also speak to interns. Across the spectrum I get the question about work-life balance all the time. I don’t even like the phrase “work-life balance.” I think it’s misleading. I like the phrase “work-life harmony.” I know if I am energized at work, happy at work, feeling like I’m adding value, part of a team, whatever energizes you, that makes me better at home. It makes me a better husband, a better father. Likewise, if I’m happy at home, it makes me a better employee, a better boss. There may be crunch periods when it’s about the number of hours in a week. But that’s not the real thing. Usually it’s about whether you have energy. Is your work depriving you of energy, or is your work generating energy for you?

  Everybody knows people who fall into one of two camps. You’re in a meeting, and the person comes in the room. Some people come into the meeting and add energy to the meeting. Other people come into the meeting, and the whole meeting just deflates. Those people drain energy from the meeting. And you have to decide which of those kinds of people you are going to be. It’s the same thing at home.

  It’s a flywheel, a circle, not a balance. That’s why that metaphor is so dangerous, because it implies there’s a strict trade-off. You could be out of work, have all the time in the world for your family, but be really depressed and demoralized about your work situation, and your family wouldn’t want to be anywhere near you. They would wish you would take a vacation from them. It’s not about the number of hours, not primarily. I suppose if you went crazy with one hundred hours a week or something, maybe there are limits, but I’ve never had a problem, and I suppose it’s because both sides of my life give me energy. That’s what I recommend to both interns and executives.

  Recruiting Talent

  Do You Want Mercenaries or Missionaries?

  WE PAY VERY competitive compensation at Amazon, but we have not created that kind of country club culture where you get free massages and whatever the perks of the moment are. And I have always had a bit of skepticism about those kinds of perks because I always worry that people will stay with a company for the wrong reasons. You want people to stay for the mission. You don’t want mercenaries at your company. You want missionaries.

  Missionaries care about the mission. It’s actually not very complicated. And you can confuse people with free massages. Like, “Oh, I don’t really like the mission here, but I love the free massages.”

  How do you hire great people and keep them from leaving? By giving them, first of all, a great mission—something that has real purpose, that has meaning. People want meaning in their lives. And this is a giant advantage that the US military has because its people have a real mission. They have meaning. And that is huge. And so that’s a big recruiting advantage.

  But you can drive great people away—for example, by making the speed of decision making really slow. Why would great people stay in an organization where they can’t get things done? They look around after a while, and they’re, like, “Look, I love the mission, but I can’t get my job done because our speed of decision making is too slow.” So large companies like Amazon need to worry about that.

  Decisions

  THERE ARE WAYS to increase the speed of decision making, and it’s super important. If I were to be so bold as to advise other senior leaders, I would say one of the things to watch out for—I see it at Amazon—is junior executives modeling senior executives in their decision making. And that’s normal. But you’re always looking up at the senior people and modeling. And a lot of it is even subconscious. The problem with that modeling is that it may not take into account the fact that there are different types of decisions.

  There are two types of decisions. There are decisions that are irreversible and highly consequential; we call them one-way doors, or Type 2 decisions. They need to be made slowly and carefully. I often find myself at Amazon acting as the chief slowdown officer: “Whoa, I want to see that decision analyzed seventeen more ways because it’s highly consequential and irreversible.” The problem is that most decisions aren’t like that. Most decisions are two-way doors.

  You can make the decision, and you step through. It turns out to have been the wrong decision; you can back up. And what happens in large organizations—not in start-up companies but in large organizations—is that all decisions end up using the heavyweight process that is really intended only for irreversible, highly consequential decisions. And that’s a disaster. When there’s a decision that needs to be made, you need to ask, “Is it a one-way door or a two-way door?” If it’s a two-way door, make the decision with a small team or even one high-judgment individual. Make the decision. If it’s wrong, it’s wrong. You’ll change it. But if it’s a one-way door, analyze it five different ways. Be careful, because that is where slow is smooth and smooth is fast.

  You do not want to make one-way-door decisions quickly. You want to get consensus or at least drive a lot of thought and debate.

  What can also really speed up decision making, in addition to asking whether a decision involves a one-way or two-way door, is teaching the principle of disagreeing and committing. So you’ve got passionate missionaries, which you need to have. Everybody cares, and if you’re not careful, the decision process can basically become a war of attrition. Whoever has the most stamina will win; eventually the other party, with the opposite opinion, will just capitulate: “Okay, I’m exhausted. We’ll do it your way.”

  That is the worst decision-making process in the world. It leaves everybody demoralized, and you also get a kind of random result. A much better approach is for the more senior person to escalate to even more senior leaders. Controversial decisions need to be escalated quickly. You can’t let two junior people argue for a year and exhaust themselves. You have to teach those junior people.

  When your team is really at loggerheads, escalate—and escalate fast. And then you, as the more senior person, hear the various points of view, and you say, “Look, none of us knows what the right decision is here, but I want you to gamble with me. I want you to disagree and commit. We’re going to do it this way. But I really want you to disagree and commit.”

  And here’s the important part: Sometimes this disagreement happens between the more senior person and a subordinate. The subordinate really wants to do it one way, and the senior person really thinks it should be done a different way. And it’s often the case that the more senior person should disagree and commit. I disagree and commit all the time. I’ll debate something for an hour or a day or a week. And I’ll say, “You know what? I really disagree with this, but you have more ground truth than I do. We’re going to do it your way. And I promise I will never tell you I told you so.”

  It’s actually very calming really because it’s acknowledging the reality that the senior person has a lot of judgment. That judgment is super valuable, and that’s why sometimes you should overrule subordinates even when they have better ground truth. But that’s your judgment. And sometimes you’re, like, “I know this person, or I’ve worked with them for years. They have great judgment. They really disagree with me, and they have way better ground truth. I’m going to disagree and commit.”

  Competition

  ZERO-SUM GAMES ARE unbelievably rare. Sporting events are zero-sum games. Two teams enter an arena. One’s going to win; one’s going to lose. Elections are zero-sum games. One candidate is going to win; one candidate is going to lose. In business, however, several competitors can do well. That’s very normal. The most important thing for doing well against competition—in business and also, I think, with military adversaries—is to be both robust and nimble. And it is scale. So it’s great to be in the US military because you’re big. Scale is a gigantic advantage because it gives you robustness. You can take a punch. But it’s also good if you can dodge a punch. And that’s the nimbleness. And as you get bigger, you grow more robust.

  The most important factor for nimbleness is decision-making speed. The second-most important factor is being willing to be experimental. You have to be willing to take risks. You have to be willing to fail, and people don’t like failure.

  I always point out that there are two different kinds of failure. There’s experimental failure—that’s the kind of failure you should be happy with. And there’s operational failure. We’ve built hundreds of fulfillment centers at Amazon over the years, and we know how to do that. If we build a new fulfillment center and it’s a disaster, that’s just bad execution. That’s not good failure. But when we are developing a new product or service or experimenting in some way, and it doesn’t work, that’s okay. That’s great failure. And you need to distinguish between those two types of failure and really be seeking invention and innovation.

  To sustain it you need the right people; you need innovative people. Innovative people will flee an organization if they can’t make decisions and take risks. You might recruit them initially, but they won’t stay long. Builders like to build. A lot of this stuff is very simple, really. It’s just hard to do. And the other thing about competition is that you do not want to play on a level playing field. This is why you need innovation, especially in domains like space and cyber.

  A level playing field is great for Monday night football. We have for decades enjoyed an unlevel playing field in areas like space and technology. I’m very nervous that this is changing rapidly. The only way to stay ahead and to keep that unlevel playing field, which is what you certainly want, is to innovate.

  In the space domain we are facing adversaries who are going to innovate. So that’s the real issue. If you’re facing adversaries who are not good at innovating, then you don’t have to be that good at innovating.

  When it comes to competition, being one of the best is not good enough. Do you really want to plan for a future in which you might have to fight with somebody who is just as good as you are? I wouldn’t.

  Government Scrutiny and Big Companies

  ALL BIG INSTITUTIONS of any kind will and should be examined, scrutinized, and inspected. Governments should be inspected. Government institutions, big educational institutions, big nonprofits, big companies—they’re going to get scrutiny. It’s not personal. It’s what we as a society want to have happen, and I remind people internally not to take scrutiny of Amazon personally. That will lead to a lot of wasted energy. This scrutiny is just normal. It’s actually healthy and good. We want to live in a society where people are worried about big institutions.

  I think we are so inventive that—whatever regulations are promulgated or however they work—they won’t stop us from serving customers. Under all kinds of regulatory frameworks that I can imagine, customers are still going to want low prices. They’re still going to want fast delivery. They’re still going to want big selection. These are so fundamental and what we do. I would also say that it’s really important that politicians and others understand the value big companies bring in and not demonize or vilify business in general or especially big companies, and for the simple reason that there are certain things that only big companies can do. I’ve seen this throughout Amazon’s journey. I know what Amazon could do when we were ten people, and I know what we could do when we were one thousand people, and I know what we could do when we were ten thousand, and I know what we can do today when we’re over half a million.

  Let me give you a more vivid example. I love garage entrepreneurs and invest in a lot of their companies. I know many of them. But nobody in their garage is going to build an all-carbon-fiber, fuel-efficient Boeing 787. It’s not going to happen. You need Boeing to do that. If you like your smartphone, you need Apple to do that; you need Samsung to do that. These are things that well-functioning entrepreneurial capitalism does very well. And there are market failures that no one takes care of, and you look to philanthropy and government to take care of them. So you need different models for different things. But definitely, this world would be worse off without, for example, Boeing, Apple, and Samsung.

  The Climate Pledge

  In September 2019, Amazon announced—and was the first signatory of—the Climate Pledge, which has the objective of meeting the goals of the Paris agreement ten years early. The remarks below were taken from the Climate Pledge’s launch press conference. They include comments from Dara O’Rourke, who leads the sustainability science team at Amazon.

  THOSE WHO SIGN the Climate Pledge agree to, number one, measure and report their emissions on a regular basis and, number two, to implement decarbonization strategies in line with the Paris agreement, which basically means that these are real things they are doing in their business, things they’re changing in their actual business activities to eliminate carbon.

  And then, third, with any remaining emissions they cannot eliminate with real change, they agree to do offsets that are credible. And what do we mean by credible offsets? We mean nature-based solutions.

  The Climate Pledge really can only be done in collaboration with other large companies, because we’re all part of each other’s supply chains. So we need to work together to meet these goals. It has to be done that way. Amazon signed up to use our scale and our scope to lead the way and become a role model. It is, however, a difficult challenge for us because of our deep, large physical infrastructure. We’re not only moving information around. We’re also moving packages around. We deliver more than ten billion items a year, and that is physical infrastructure at real scale. So we can make the argument—and we plan to do so passionately—that if we can do this, anyone can. It’s going to be challenging, but we know we can do it, and we know we have to do it.

  It can only be done if there is real scientific integrity behind Amazon’s every action. Dara O’Rourke explained Amazon’s approach:

  Teams across all of Amazon have been working since 2016 to map and measure the company’s overall environmental impacts. They have been laying the foundational layer of scientific models and data systems to build sustainability in a very Amazonian way. That is, science connected to technology connected to customer obsession to approach the scale of the sustainability challenges we all face.

  Over the last few years, the core of that work has been collecting data, building models, and building tools. Not just for teams to track their environmental emissions—their carbon—but to enable them to radically reduce carbon across the company and down supply chains.

  Amazon is a very large and complex company, and that forced us to build one of the most sophisticated carbon-accounting systems in the world. We had to build a system that could get to granular data, but at Amazon scale to give teams innovation optionality and to see the overall company view. Actionability requires this finer level of resolution of data. Our system is both comprehensive in covering the entire company and precise enough to get down to system-level optimizations.

  We can go all the way down to individual products, processes, and services. With Echo, for example, we need to understand the impact of the manufacturing step back up to the data centers powering Alexa and then across to the planes, the trucks, and the packages that deliver that Echo to a customer’s house.

  So far, we’ve built five models based on an academic technique called environmental life-cycle assessment. Four are process models in transportation, in packaging, in electricity for both our fulfillment centers and data centers, and in devices. We combined internal operational data—physical data processed with financial data—with external scientific data to stitch it all together into our carbon footprint.

  We’re also using this data in our climate risk analysis. We have partnered with Amazon Web Services to host over 55 foundational weather, climate and sustainability datasets, leveraging the infrastructure of AWS, with cutting-edge machine-learning tools that are already being used by NGOs, academics, and governments around the world to actually solve climate problems.

  We take business-specific activity data. We connect it to emissions models. We run it through an orchestration layer that stitches it all together into decision-support tools—dashboards, metrics, mechanisms that teams can use across the company to drive carbon out. Each of these models has a detailed logic and fine-grained data underneath it.