- Amazon recently announced a return-to-office push requiring staff to come in five days a week.
- John Rossman, an Amazon exec in the early 2000s, told BI that the move aligns with its leadership principles.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with John Rossman, an early Amazon executive, business strategist, and author of "The Amazon Way." Business Insider has verified his identity and employment. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
I was an early Amazon leader and had two primary roles from 2002 to late 2005. First, I was a director of merchant integration and a key leader in launching the marketplace business. Then, I was a director of enterprise services and ran all of Amazon's big relationships with large e-commerce retailers.
It was a very formative time at Amazon back then, as we were thinking through Amazon's business model and operating standpoint and hammering out the company's principles.
Even though it's been almost 20 years since I left Amazon, the way they think about things and operate is fundamentally the same at its core, even though it's much larger in size.
During my time there, there was no position on remote working. If you needed to collaborate, it was through conference calls; there was nothing like Zoom or video technology. Remote working wasn't in the lexicon of corporate America.
Andy Jassy is thinking long-term
The recent return-to-office mandate requiring employees to work from the office five days a week is tricky. I have a ton of empathy for people who moved away from the office with the understanding that they'd be able to work remotely, and now they might need to move back.
But there's a flip side to this, and that's Andy Jassy's job as CEO, which is to create a company that is still vibrant and growing.
I think Jassy is thinking long-term, which is one of the core features of Amazon's leadership principles: long-term thinking.
Like other corporate leaders, he seems to be thinking that he needs to reclaim his teams' energy and intensity and sees the need to be scrappier, more effective, and get more done with fewer resources.
Amazon shouldn't apologize for being a demanding workplace
One of the mistakes leaders make about culture is thinking that culture is about making a place the right place for everyone. I think Amazon has never apologized, and they shouldn't apologize for being a demanding place to work because it is a great place to work if you want to be a builder and get things done.
If you want to operate like an entrepreneur within a big company, Amazon is a great place, but it is not the right place for people who just want a steady or easier situation. So the return-to-office push is Jassy saying that this is what Amazon is, and it needed to be authentic to its mission and try to maintain an incredible brand and platform.
Jassy's decision to stop having "pre-meetings for the pre-meetings for the decision meetings" is more about effectiveness, urgency, ownership, and letting great people make direct decisions versus all these layers of meetings. It's allowing people to meet, make a decision, and move on, making Amazon a quick-moving organization.
Jeff Bezos disliked bureaucracy
Really good people hate working in a bureaucratic organization. I believe that Jeff Bezos always thought that bureaucracy was the real enemy of Amazon, and that's why it's important for the company to be lean.
In the past few years, Amazon's annual revenue growth rate has slowed. In 2022, it amounted to 9.4%, and 12% in 2023. I think they hate that growth percentage and believe growth is the outcome of creating an entrepreneurial and fast-moving organization, so Jassy is likely trying to jump-start growth again through all these different moves. He's focusing on culture and the operating model because that's essential to getting the outputs that you want.
I think a team that works together tends to get things done faster and can be more efficient. So Jassy probably recognizes that, and he is pulling all the levers to recreate a great place to be a builder and operator. That was what Amazon was like in the early days; you had the ability and accountability to get hard things done, which is at the core of its leadership principles.
These principles are not empty calorie mission statements that most companies have. The leadership principle of ownership is relevant to what's happening because owners think long-term and don't sacrifice long-term value for short-term results. They act on behalf of the entire company and not beyond just their own team. I think that is how Jassy is approaching this; he has to act like an owner and be brave enough to do something that he knows is going to be unpopular with a certain set of employees.
More people in the office will raise standards
The second principle related to this is insisting on the highest standards. Leaders have relentlessly high standards, and I think Jassy is getting back to having unreasonably high standards. I think the way he gets there is by having people be in the office more. Working together in person can help with problem-solving and mentoring, and it's hard to replicate that whiteboard experience when you're at home.
The third leadership principle I think Jassy is enforcing is frugality. It's about accomplishing more with less. Constraints breed resourcefulness, self-sufficiency, and innovation.
The last principle is to strive to be the Earth's best employer. Some say that the return-to-office policy doesn't align with this principle, but I say the contrary. The principle says that leaders work daily to create a safer, more productive, higher-performing, and diverse work environment. I think Jassy looks at this and says, "That is what I am doing." All these moves come from a core, long-held set of beliefs.
I think Amazon lost some control of its culture in the pandemic when it got big too quickly, so now Jassy and other corporate leaders are trying to evaluate how to reclaim a team that wants to win — and that's what a championship team is about.