Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Because we lost a good person, and he probably felt very bad about it. And we all feel bad when we make mistakes. That can't be prevented. But he felt undue responsibility I think, and that I really regret. This is actually a really good example of ownership. You mentioned this term ownership and that connects to... Amazon has these leadership principles. I think there's 14 of them. One of them is around ownership. And apparently you helped craft the actual language for that principle, which I think is a huge deal with Amazon. I imagine very few people have a say over how to define, and describe, and say these principles. Could you just talk about this principle that you contributed to, how it came to be that you helped actually write it? Amazon is now kind of on its fourth version in my mind, maybe there's more. But its fourth major revision of its leadership principles over its 25 plus year history. And when it was going from version one to version two, Jeff and his leadership team sat down together. And actually in version one, there were three different lists. They were leadership principles and core values, and something else I don't remember. And they were like, "Three lists is stupid. Let's make one list." Well ownership, the term had been a part of one of those lists, but when they merged everything, they took it out. And this guy Jeff Wilke I mentioned, the number two and the leader of retail, he brought a bunch of us a bunch of his directors. He brought the proposed list to us in a meeting and said, "Hey, this is the proposed new version, do you have any comment?" And we all sat around and talked and said, "Where's ownership? Ownership is missing." So we told him, he said, "Look, ownership is missing. We think it should be there." And he said, "Well, why don't you propose a draft?" And so about a half dozen of us sat around and roughed out a draft of how we felt ownership should be written. And I proposed these six words, which are, "An owner never says that's not my job." Maybe that's seven words. So I propose this specific language as a part of it and we sent off this draft. And months go by, we hear nothing. And then one day the leadership principles are announced and ownership is back in. It's been modified, but that, "An owner never says that's not my job," is a part of the leadership principle, and it's remained to this debt. And what I love about that is because Amazon has one and a half million employees who live by these leadership principles, it's probably the most impactful thing I've ever written.…

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