Five Foundational Principles for Leading Transformation

Technology alone cannot drive transformation — it is the people behind the technology that make it possible. That’s why company culture is the make-or-break factor when trying to achieve sustainable transformation. But culture is more than values written on the wall. To drive impactful transformation and navigate disruption, leaders need to rethink how they fail, innovate, operate, and communicate. Consider these five principles so you can come out stronger:?

1. Embrace Continuous Innovation

In 2006, I took over the Global Payments Division at 亚马逊 . This was a big, newly formed position — and easily the worst job at the company. At the time, Amazon was pioneering third-party payments, which meant many changes and even more challenges. The main one was slow growth and slow expansion. The company was growing through acquisitions, but that meant disparate and duplicated systems, and that in turn led to unhappy employees and a high attrition rate. It was my responsibility to tackle these issues.

I made a six-pager to put in front of Jeff Bezos and two top business priorities came out of it: Unblock and get Amazon back to the growth rate we needed; and build a meaningful payments business along the way. These priorities were both strategic and long-term: they weren’t something we could accomplish overnight, and that was a good thing. Your goals have to be ambitious but achievable — they have to take you out of your comfort zone.?

2. Create a Living Culture

It’s not hard to define the culture you want. Many companies even have their values pasted across their website and offices. But are they embraced? Creating a genuine culture around your values is challenging. Embracing them in company language is a good first step, but even more important is embedding those principles and values into everyday practices so people actually live the culture.

Amazon, for example, has embedded its values in the mechanisms and rituals that employees participate in every day. They dive deep and think big to help solve engineering problems; they encourage ownership and curiosity in performance reviews; and they find cultural teaching opportunities in every interaction. Behaviors won’t change overnight, but the more people see and hear the values, the more they internalize them and the more they come to life.?

3. Foster Cross-Team Alignment

Transformation requires alignment between teams, stakeholders, and organizational goals. Every individual needs to understand their role in the broader vision, and it is up to leadership to design mechanisms for achieving and maintaining that alignment. Routine meetings, transparent reporting, and clear communication channels are foundational elements here, but it is how you use them that counts.

One of my mechanisms at Amazon was a monthly, “Does it serve you?” We came to every meeting prepared, we listened to pain points, and we established priorities — but it didn't stop there. Each meeting became an opportunity to reinforce our culture of ownership and accountability.?

These meetings were mandatory for team leaders because I expected them to dive deep into their metrics, especially when looking at unresolved issues. We always leveraged the five whys so we could discover the root cause of a problem, which not only got us to solutions faster but helped dissolve the “blame culture” that holds people back from innovating and experimenting.?

4. Embrace a Fast-Fail Culture

Failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent, you have to experiment but, if you know in advance that something’s going to work, it’s not an experiment. Failure is inevitable, so it is how your organization deals with it that will determine the speed and success of your pursuits. By embracing a fail-fast culture where experimentation is encouraged and learning is prioritized, you can accelerate growth and drive employee satisfaction in the process.?

The key is to reach the point of failure quickly and move on just as quickly, so you don’t waste resources or discourage people. At Amazon, we built a blameless culture by concentrating on quick wins. This approach informed our continuous feedback loops, and let us focus on what we were learning instead of getting discouraged when things didn’t go to plan. We would discuss these quick wins during a weekly operational review, and that led to blameless post-mortems that fed into our communication plan.?

5. Communicate Early and Often

A well-defined communication plan, tailored to the needs of different stakeholders, will help organizations navigate the complexities of change and foster a culture of openness and transparency. That means employees know what’s going on and are supportive of change, especially in high-growth companies.?

Mapping a communication plan means answering a long list of questions: What can be communicated? To what level of detail can it, or should it, be communicated? Who should produce it — teams or leaders? Who should receive it, internally and externally? How should it be delivered? When does it need to be delivered? And, most importantly, how will you even know what is working? With all those questions, you cannot forget to consider the brand voice and tone in the process.

At Amazon, we talked it out through all-hands meetings. We constantly reminded people of our goals, how we were progressing, what the problems were, and what we were doing about them. Then we would have a quarterly meeting where we aggregated further, and would build from there. The weeklies informed the monthly, the monthly informed the quarterly, and every once in a while, it was important enough to get in front of the board. Not only did this approach serve us well internally, but it was easy to repurpose all that data for external stakeholders, too.?

Allowing Innovation to Thrive

Leading transformation starts and ends with your company's culture. This means instilling a strong sense of ownership and accountability among teams, but also celebrating failure and quick wins to uphold a truly blameless environment where innovation can thrive. When you link these together with the right mix of mechanisms, processes, and policies, leaders can achieve lasting transformation and the agility to keep it going.?