A Culture of Innovation@Scale | Lessons from Amazon—a Series on Building Culture at Scale

Building culture@scale requires values that impact Behaviors, Processes, and Practices that support successful outcomes in Decision-making, Accountability, and Innovation.

Creating a Fertile Ground for Innovation

Innovation can be nurtured by creating fertile soil for ideas to bloom and grow. When a senior leader at Amazon complained that while our Regensburg, Germany team had a reputation for Insisting on the Highest Standards and delivered quality outcomes, they were less successful at Think Big.? A Think Big workshop proved to be one of my most successful.

For some in the workshop "Thinking Big" expanded their imagination about what was possible in their personal life, and others developed the courage and confidence to take their work ideas further. With coaching, one participant presented his Think Big idea to regional leadership, who adopted it, allowing us to recoup lost savings and provide a better customer experience.

Inspiration from Industry Giants

Facebooks has Be Bold as a value, Google allows employees 20% of time to pursue passion projects, even when they’re outside the core job or mission of the company, and Microsoft, who includes Innovation as one of their six values, hosts The Global Hackathon, a week-long event where employees collaborate to refine their idea and create new proofs of concepts.

While these practices make sense for employees working at laptops, they won’t foster a culture of innovation that includes front-line workers who build physical products or deliver services. What does it take to have every employee focused on innovation?

Behaviors

Amazon’s Leadership Principles focus on behaviors, with behavioral examples, and there are four key leadership principles for innovation.

Amazonians use these four leadership principles to inspire teams to do more than they thought possible. You would hear, “Let’s invent and simplify this process and get the costs down.” Or “Now that we have succeeded, how can we Think Big and scale the results?”

Why EARN TRUST is important?

When I moved to Europe from San Francisco and got involved with the startup community in Prague, I was curious about what made startups in Silicon Valley more successful that startups in Prague or Berlin. Access to smart people was not enough.

Trust is crucial for innovation but varies by culture. In Europe, historical factors like wars and political regimes impacted trust levels. For example, in Prague, the word "collaboration" did not evoke a positive response. Trust must be actively earned and maintained.

You cannot assume Trust as part of the culture. In 2015, when the leadership principles were being reviewed, Bezos questioned whether Earn Trust was implied as good citizenship. Leaders like Jeff Wilke had backbone and disagreed. They talked about the times when leaders had failed to earn trust and the damaging consequences.

Invent and Simplify: A Key to Scaling Culture

"Invent and Simplify" is a crucial leadership principle. Apple’s Tim Cook emphasized this by stating, “We believe in the simple, not the complex.” Simplifying processes is vital for scaling a company. Cultures that prioritize steady, incremental improvements alongside disruptive innovations are more successful. Consistent, small changes can lead to significant long-term growth and create a true culture of innovation.

Processes

Company processes are pivotal to the ability to scale and should embody and perpetuate the company values. Some useful examples from Amazon are:

• Annual Think Big Competition: Allows anyone to submit innovative ideas, like Microsoft Garage or Google 20% projects.
• Skip Level Meetings: Encourages direct communication with senior managers without stigma, fostering idea sharing and employee engagement. Senior managers could gain insights on what was happening with their teams, hear new ideas, and gain perspective on how employees were experiencing the work. Kiran Kumar Gajavada shares useful suggestions in Skip-Level Meetings: A Powerful Tool for Boosting Employee Engagement and Morale

Practices

• Long-term Thinking: Amazon prioritizes long-term shareholder value, allowing bold bets and sustained market leadership. Financial markets make it very difficult for companies to take bold bets that payoff in years and not quarters. Jeff Bezos gave the company this luxury from the beginning, in his first letter to shareholders.
• Day 1 Thinking: Day 1 Thinking is so simple and clever. Yesterday you had an enormous success. Cheers and applause. Tomorrow is Day 1, and you can go even higher. Or, yesterday was a disaster. It happens. Tomorrow is Day 1, and you can start over with what you’ve learned. Jeff Bezos gave an elegant response to the question, what would Day 2 and why it is always Day 1 at Amazon?
• Tolerance for Failure but not Tolerance for Incompetence: Creating a safe to fail culture isn’t easy. Learn and Be Curious is one mechanism that keeps Amazonians learning and evolving their ideas. According to HBR’s The Hard Truth About Innovative Cultures a good start is for senior leadership to articulate clearly the difference between productive and unproductive failures.

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The cliché “celebrating failure” misses the point—we should be celebrating learning, not failure.

Conclusion

A sustainable culture of innovation is essential for survival in a rapidly changing landscape. The rapid adoption of AI with ChatGPT showed us that change has shifted from years to months.

Not surprisingly, all the Culture 500 companies did well in Innovation, with Amazon as the leader.

While Amazon leads in innovation, Amazon revealed a weak spot in Collaboration, which is surprising with their high scores on Execution and Agility.

Alphabet and Apple did not do much better, despite it being one of Apple’s stated values. It seems to be a widespread weak spot. It was an acknowledged struggle at my last company. So, the story has yet to be written on a culture of collaboration@scale.

Series Conclusion

As Jim Jordan said in “Understanding the Importance of a Scale Up Culture

"achieving sustainable growth requires the development of a scale-up culture. It involves instilling a mindset of growth, innovation, and adaptability throughout the organization."

For companies that are growing fast and need to scale their culture, Amazon’s culture is worthy of exploration. It has stood the test of time.

What are the most important behaviors for your company’s success

ChatGPT was used to revise this article

#Culture@scale, #companyculture #leadershipdevelopment

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