Lots of people ask me, “Why is Amazon so successful?” A few years ago, the CEO of a large European insurance company who was attending Bill Gates’s annual CEO summit contacted me through a friend on his board and wanted to meet with me. When we met, he asked, “What are Amazon’s secrets of success?” I told him, as I tell others, “Amazon has no secret management principles.” Jeff talks about them all the time at “all-hands” meetings. He explains them in press interviews that can be viewed on the internet, and they are listed at the bottom of every press release. But, I explained, you have to live by them all of the time, and most businesses are unwilling or unable to do so.

The most important is customer obsession. In his words, too many companies focus on their competitors and not on their customers. As Jeff explained most recently to a Congressional Committee, “Customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied. A constant desire to delight customers drives us to constantly invent on their behalf.”

I have seen Jeff many times make decisions that harm Amazon’s bottom line but benefit the customer. As he says, tell me a customer who wants higher prices or slower delivery. Of course, in the long term, these decisions mean a bigger bottom line. A related principle is to think long-term.

The second principle is constant invention and innovation. As noted above, invention is closely linked to customer satisfaction. Constantly invent and apply technologies to solve problems and build new businesses. Customer satisfaction and innovation are powerful touchstones when making decisions. Decisions are far easier when you ask, “What is the best decision for the customer” and “Is there a way to invent our way to a solution?”

The third principle is operational excellence. Examples of innovations in operations include two-pizza teams, one-click shopping, single-threaded leaders, working backward, and up-level hiring (where an employee outside the workgroup also interviews every applicant and has the power to veto their hiring).

Working backward is Amazon’s internal process of beginning a project by writing the press release that would be used to announce a new service or product to the world. At most companies, the press release is the last step in launching a product, written by PR people, after the product and technology teams have created the new product. By starting with the press release, Amazon forces the team to focus on the benefits of the new product to the customer. Then the team must build the product or service to achieve those benefits. The draft press release is accompanied by FAQs answering questions that customers and the press might ask, such as the price, as well as describing technical challenges that need to be overcome.

Think long-term is the fourth touchstone, whether in launching new businesses or investing in new technologies. When businesses were just beginning to recognize the possibilities of machine learning and AI, Jeff told the board that he intended to use AI in every part of the business, and then he proceeded to hire AI experts and to train his existing engineers to use AI. Amazon created and made available to customers AI tools on AWS that they could use in their businesses—even to compete against Amazon.

Amazon also has fourteen leadership principles, some of which surprise people. For example, “leaders are right, a lot” has more than a hint of hubris but is nuanced by commentary that leaders listen a lot and are quick to change their minds (“disconfirm their beliefs”) based on differing evidence. “Have backbone, disagree and commit” is another compelling principle.

I have always thought it difficult to single out any one principle or process that is most important to Amazon’s operations but forced to choose, I suggest the importance of a single-threaded leader, particularly in launching new initiatives but also applicable to solving engineering and other problems.

An example of a single-threaded leader was Jeff’s designation of Steve Kessel in 2004 to head up Amazon’s effort to build a digital media business in books, music, and video, which ultimately involved building equipment like the Kindle, Amazon Fire, Fire TV, and creating content in video and books. Jeff could have asked the existing organization responsible for Amazon’s physical books, music CDs, and videos—which amounted to 80 percent of their business at the time—to expand into virtual goods. However, Jeff recognized that giving authority to a single leader focused exclusively on digital media would more quickly create such a business without the distractions and compromises that might have occurred if the leadership was also running the physical business. This process was replicated with Andy Jassy’s appointment to launch AWS.

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Tom Aberg is a leader in Seattle’s tech and civic communities, helping build Seattle into one of the top two tech economies in the world while also contributing his energies and resources in support of making Seattle a livable city. He was an early investor in 1995 in Amazon.com, serving on its board for 23 years. His latest book, Flywheels: How Cities Are Creating Their Own Futures, was published by Columbia Business School Publishing (November 2021).