Here is an excerpt from an interview of Andy Jassy for Harvard Business Review (July/August 2025). To read the complete article, check out others, sign up for email alerts, and obtain subscription information, please click here.
Illustration Credit: 
Sebastian Kim/August Image
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You’ve said that you want Amazon to operate like a startup. How do you make that happen?
Jassy: Amazon moves very quickly. But as you get larger, all sorts of things can slow you down. When we talk about operating like the world’s largest startup, we mean that whatever we build or wherever we commit resources, we make sure that we’re solving a real customer problem. A lot of companies fall in love with their technology and build things they think are cool, but in the end they haven’t solved anything remarkable. Startups are missionary about trying to solve problems for customers.
How do you staff for that?
We need a lot of builders—people who like to invent, who like to dissect the customer experience and figure out what’s wrong with it, even if it’s pretty good, and then rebuild it. And we need owners—people who ask, “What would I do if it were my money? What would I do if I owned all the resources?” In other words, people who feel accountable.
How do you think about pace?
Speed disproportionately matters in every business at every time. I used to speak with a lot of CEOs who would say, “We’re big. We have security issues. We have compliance issues. We just can’t move fast.” I think speed is a leadership decision. You can decide you want to move fast, but you have to figure out what’s slowing you down and knock all those barriers out. Then you’ve got to get the whole organization aligned on moving really fast, even if you make mistakes along the way.
That’s a classic challenge: How do you move quickly in a big organization with so many layers of management?
You need to really try to root out bureaucracy. As you get bigger, you have a lot of managers—well-intended people—who keep layering in processes. And pretty soon you have process upon process upon process, which slows people down, so they can’t get the real work done. You have to be scrappy. You can’t put 50 or 100 people on every new project. We started our cloud-computing business, Amazon Web Services, with about 13 employees. With a small number of people, you can build something that resonates with customers and then keep iterating from there.
How do push your team to take chances and embrace failure?
As companies get bigger, they often get risk averse. If you hire achievement-oriented, type A people, they are not used to failing. When they want to pursue something new, they worry that if they get it wrong, they’ll be ostracized. So they play to not lose. We stress that the only way to build something unique is to do something different. You have to be willing to take risks and to fail.
Being customer-focused seems inconsistent with taking risks. If you know exactly what your customers want, you deliver that. It doesn’t sound risky. How do you square those two imperatives?
I think they’re pretty consistent. If you find the right feedback loops, customers will tell you what’s wrong with your product or with their experience. And if you ask the right “why” questions about the problem you’re trying to solve, customers will tell you what’s really constraining them. They can’t always tell you how to fix it, but if you’re listening and you understand the need, then you can invent on their behalf.
You seem to be reinventing Amazon’s management and culture: You’re rethinking the role of middle management. You’ve adjusted expectations about how teams work together. What’s the unifying idea behind these steps?
Most companies that are successful for any period of time have a culture that’s a key part of their success. We have a really strong culture, but it’s not our birthright. Things change. The size of the company changes. The scope of businesses you’re going after changes. The geographic distribution of your people changes. If you want to stay successful, you have to keep working on strengthening the parts of your culture that you see being stretched.
So what does that look like in practice?
It comes back to the notion of wanting to operate like the world’s largest startup. We looked at our culture and identified a few things. Historically, Amazon has hired smart, ambitious, motivated people. We let them make the lion’s share of what we call “two-way-door decisions”—if you walk through it and you’re wrong, you can always walk back, no harm done. (In a one-way-door decision, if you walk through the door and you’re wrong, it’s really hard to walk back.) But as you get larger, as we have, you end up logically with a lot of managers and a lot of layers of managers.
There’s a pre-meeting for the pre-meeting for the pre-meeting for the decision meeting. And owners who don’t feel like they own the decision to make a recommendation because they know the decision will be made three levels up. We want them to own the two-way-door decisions and be able to move quickly and autonomously. It’s part of our effort to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15%. We want to flatten the organization in order to move faster and to drive more ownership.
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Here is a direct link to the complete article.
Adi Ignatius is Editor-in-Chief of Harvard Business Review. During his 12 years with TIME, Ignatius had covered business and international issues, served as Editor of TIME Asia, and most recently managed TIME‘s special editions, including the Person of the Year and TIME 100 franchises.
Ignatius served as Executive Editor of TIME and was responsible for the magazine’s business and international coverage. Ignatius joined TIME as Deputy Editor of TIME Asia in 1996, based in Hong Kong, and was named Editor of that edition in 2000. Under his leadership, TIME Asia became an award-winning showcase for reporting, writing, photography and design. Throughout his career with TIME, Ignatius continued to write for the magazine; his most recent articles included a look inside Google Inc., and 2007’s Person of the Year profile of Russian leader Vladimir Putin.