From the day he launched his new venture, Jeff Bezos has been obsessed with customers. Throughout the history of Amazon, this relentless focus has informed every decision and appeared in virtually every communication or action. In everything from the empty seat at early meetings (to represent the customer) to the recurring theme in every annual letter, customers are the guiding light for Amazon.
Do you know what else Bezos has been obsessed with? Organization. Whether at Amazon headquarter or fulfillment center, he always keeps an eye out for “flaws in the company’s systems or even its corporate culture1”.
So what kind of organization did Bezos want to build when he started this exciting adventure called Amazon?
If you read through all the shareholder letters that Bezos meticulously wrote over the past 22 years (1997-2018), the phrase “Day 1” appeared an amazing 22 times, with striking consistency. For the past 10 years, every shareholder letter has ended with the same line:
“As always, I attach a copy of our original 1997 letter. Our approach remains the same, and it’s still Day 1.” (2009-2015, with a one-word deviation in 20142)
“As always, I attach a copy of our original 1997 letter. It remains Day 1.” (2016-2018)
If you go to Amazon headquarters, you will find a building named “Day 1” where Bezos’ office is located. Actually when he moved buildings, he took the name with him. The plate reads:
“There’s so much stuff that has yet to be invented.
There’s so much new that’s going to happen.”
Why is Day 1 so important to Bezos? Why has he felt such a strong urge to constantly remind everyone that it’s still Day 1?
At the early stage of any start-up, the founder (or the small founding team) runs everything, from design to production, to sales, to delivery, and to book keeping. If luck is on their side, the business will soon outgrow the capacity of the founding team, and they will need to expand the team and build an organization.
Normally, in the beginning, the organization will still function with speed, nimbleness, and a risk-acceptance mentality, but as the business grows bigger, complexity starts increasing, and layers begin creeping in, the once-nimble start-ups inevitably fall into the trap of so called “large organizations” characterized by slowness, rigidity, and risk aversion.
Bezos graduated from Princeton University in 1986 with degrees in electrical engineering and computer science and initially intended to study physics. That’s why he borrowed the term “entropy,” an indicator of system’s disorder and an idea that is of critical importance to thermodynamics.
In thermodynamics, entropy is a measure of the unavailable energy in a closed thermodynamic system that is also usually considered to be a measure of the system’s disorder. This is a property of the system’s state, which varies directly with any reversible change in heat in the system and inversely with the temperature of the system. The second law of thermodynamics states that for a thermodynamically defined process to actually occur, the sum of the entropies of the participating bodies must increase.
In short, in the world of physics, the total entropy, or level of disorder, of the universe is continually increasing. In the world of business, the inevitable path of any organization, if left unattended, will lead to decrease in efficiency and vitality, and increase in complexity and rigidity. This is the law of “entropy increase.” In a way, it is a depressing law because it states that, no matter how great a company is now, without deliberate vigilance and institutional determination to fight entropy, it will fall into mediocrity.
Bezos’ goal is to defy the law of entropy increase at Amazon, the company he builds. He declared that “We want to fight entropy. The bar has to continuously go up.”3
Entropy may make a lot of sense to a physics or science major, but how to explain this abstract concept in layman’s terms so that everyone at Amazon could understand it and embrace it?
Bezos’ evocative and sticky model of “Day 1 vs. Day 2” has proved to be an immediate and useful way. This simple phrase captured Bezos’ aspiration for Amazon to grow aggressively in scale and scope while preserving the entrepreneurial vitality of a startup, and building on the numerous advantages of a large company at the same time.
To defy the law of entropy increase is, by default, never easy. Bezos was fully aware of the challenge. As he noted, “There are some subtle traps that even high-performing large organizations can fall into as a matter of course, and we’ll have to learn as an institution how to guard against them.”4
So what does Day 2 look like in Bezos’ mind? “Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.”5
To Bezos, someone who wanted to win so badly during childhood that he would cry publicly over the loss of a football game, Day 2 is never an option.
As elaborated in “Building Block 4: Ground-Breaking Invention Machine,” one of the many reasons why Bezos loves customers is their divine discontent. Their expectation always goes up.
Famous for his unreasonably high standards, Bezos is never satisfied with just meeting customers’ expectations. What he always wants is to constantly delight them, to invent on their behalf, and to “wow” them. What he so adamantly wants to build is not just an invention machine, but one that continuously accelerates, because this is the only way to always stay ahead of customers’ ever-rising expectations.
Customer obsession and Day 1 thinking are inextricably linked twin drivers of the Amazon management system. Amazon has to improve continuously in everything it does, in everyone it has, and with accelerating speed and agility.
In short, it’s always Day 1, no matter how big Amazon gets in size.
There is no simple answer to this age-old problem that has been a source of trouble for almost every organization on the planet. There are many culprits and many traps that can lead to Day 2; some obvious, but some much more subtle and deeply imbedded in human nature. So, where to start?
Bezos identified this challenge early on, and has put a great deal of thinking into finding a solution. In his 2016 Shareholder Letter, he offered a starter pack of essentials for Day 1 defense. It includes:
• True customer obsession
• Resist proxies
• Embrace external trends
• High-velocity decision making
For Amazon, customer obsession is the first principle. For Bezos, it is essential to the Day 1 vitality. Why? It crystalizes the core purpose of the enterprise into something that drives behavior and decisions forever. People who are committed to delighting divinely discontent customers, beautifully so and wonderfully so, will be driven to continuously improve, innovate and invent on their behalf, and to make sure that organizational capability will rise faster than the ever-rising customer expectations.
They will become relentless in personal growth, in organizational capacity-building and in the continual endeavor to “experiment patiently, accept failures, plant seeds, protect saplings, and double down when you see customer delight. A customer-obsessed culture best creates the conditions where all of that can happen.”6
Bezos said, “As companies get larger and more complex, there’s a tendency to manage to proxies. This comes in many shapes and sizes, and it’s dangerous, subtle, and very Day 2. A common example is process as proxy.”7
Processes are a means to an end, initially designed to make business operation more scalable. However, as a company grows bigger, processes actually can become an end by themselves, so complicated that most people don’t know how to navigate through them and in some cases, customer service is compromised to serve requirements of the internal processes, and focus on inputs, outputs and their linkage gets lost.
Most Day 2 companies lack the necessary vigilance to respond to key external changes. They are slow in detecting the early warning signals, slow in assessing the possible impact on existing business and new opportunities, and slow in making decisions to adjust resource allocation or team assignment to confront these new realities.
Actually, many behave as if the world is still spinning based on the existing order and they can still prolong the past glories. Consciously or not, they resist the new trends rather than embrace them.
When faced with new digital technologies, such as big data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, Day 2 companies question how realistic it is to apply new technologies to existing business: how much real impact the enormous investments required could indeed have on the business and what would be the return on investment.
Since the innate uncertainty of technology and future business development limits the possibility of nailing down a specific number of expected returns with bullet-proof accuracy, such discussions usually end nowhere.
This provides those Day 2 leaders clinging to the past with an opportunity to avoid such thinking about the future; they continue their happy life within a cocoon of static illusion.
As we have fully explored in the previous chapter, Amazon challenges the common trap of applying a “one-size-fits-all” heavy-weight approach to most decisions, including those changeable, reversible Type 2 decisions.
Indeed not every decision needs to go all the way to the top, to wait for all the information, and to require lengthy approvals and the agreement of all.
The cumulative effect of these practices is to engrain a daily culture of setting ambitious, aspirational yet well-thought-through goals combined with a clearly defined set of metrics to monitor and learn from these experiments in order to continuously improve.
So other than factors mentioned in Bezos’ starter pack, what else could drag an organization into Day 2? There is no rocket science here. The usual suspects are complacency, bureaucracy, and interdependency that blurs the lines of accountability.
The fact that Bezos loves customers for their “divine discontent” reveals something both subtle and crucial about him. Bezos is a man of divine discontent himself and his insights about customers also perfectly apply to himself. He constantly sets the bar higher than the most discontent of his customer.
In everything he chooses to do, Jeff Bezos aims for something bigger, better (not slightly better, but significantly better by magnitude), differentiated or totally new. His goal is not merely to match the best offering in the market, but to become the standard setter. He needs to win in a big way, and also in a way that makes him proud.
As a person, Bezos’ relentless drive for continuous improvement is hardwired in his DNA; as Amazon founder and CEO, he needs to inject this quality throughout the company as an explicitly stated value and operating principle.
What could be his archenemy in this mission? Complacency. “More than anything else, he (Bezos) fears and loathes complacency,” says former Amazon executive John Rossman.
Bezos was truly concerned that as Amazon grew bigger and became more successful, complacency would replace “our spirit and our desire to take risks . . . . we would cease to insist on the highest standards and gradually entangle ourselves in a giant ball of red tape.”8 He explicitly told his executive team that if Amazon fell into this trap, the company would die.
There is no easy way to fight complacency, which usually creeps into any organization. Amazon tackles this organizational evil by relentlessly raising the bar. This remedy may seem too simple. Almost everyone knows it. But the real challenge here is the unyielding determination to enforce it throughout the entire organization.
At Amazon, people must think about how to improve continuously. They must tackle challenges such as: for the same thing, how to get it done with less; for continuing to delight and wow customers, what new things are to be done.
As explained in “Building Block 2: Continuous Bar-Raising Talent Pool,” Bezos hates bureaucracy. For him, this is personal and probably inherited from his grandpa, a real builder.
Bezos is not alone in this front. This is a common disgust shared by A-players. For any organization entrenched in bureaucracy, the A-players will quit, just as Bezos’ grandpa did.
Then there are lovers of bureaucracy, the C- and D-players. They can hide behind the bullet-proof shield of bureaucracy, and protect themselves from transparency, accountability, or measurability. Without extreme caution and continuous nipping in the bud, bureaucracy can quickly encroach upon your entire organization, drive away top performers and, before you know it, get you onboard the one-way express to Day 2.
How to kill bureaucracy? Bezos has poured enormous thought into this aspect. Three practices for your consideration.
Amazon is probably the least desirable place to go for anyone interested in empire-building, because there is simply no money for it. Amazon has become notoriously famous for its low-cost operation, which is designed to squeeze out bureaucracy.
Amazon regards those who are directly involved in the creation of new skills or better customer experiences as direct headcounts. All others are indirect headcounts. The company has always maintained stringent control over indirect headcounts. Bezos is particularly vigilant in eschewing middle management, as he believes bureaucracy-loving C- and D-players usually reside there. This is probably one of the key contributors for Amazon’s impressively low G&A expenses: only 1.5% as of total revenue.
Bezos fully recognizes the value of good process. Without defined process, business can’t scale. Then how to distinguish bureaucracy from good process? Here is a checklist of warnings9 by former Amazon executive John Rossman:
• When the rules can’t be explained;
• When they don’t favor the customer;
• When you can’t get redress from a higher authority
• When you can’t get an answer to a reasonable question
• When there is no service-level agreement or guaranteed response time built into the process
• When the rules simply don’t make sense
If any of the above-described situations occur, you need to re-examine and simplify the processes. Good processes must deliver right outputs, display right inputs at each step, and must be designed for fewer handoffs, better transparency, and more integration of decision-making and clear end-to-end accountability.
There is a particular pain that every founder or business leader has to endure at some point: when people or teams fail to achieve a certain goal, fingers will be pointed and accusations made.
How to cut through this seemingly inevitable internal dependency and, once and for all, put an end to this endless war of finger-pointing?
Most companies would follow traditional practices, such as KPI, group-based incentives, and other mechanisms to encourage cross-division collaboration.
Bezos, always seeking better or unconventional ideas, will not settle for these commonly-adopted but proven-ineffective approaches. He finally cracked this especially hard-to-solve problem in 2003 with a three-step methodology:
Such an ambitious approach requires an operational discipline for consistent, successful execution. Making sure every dependency functions well and can deliver on time, on budget and up to the specific and challenging standards required, is a daunting challenge. It takes an ultimate sense of true ownership of everyone to pull it off. Without the right people and the right data and metrics system, it won’t happen.
Incidentally, Bezos’ seemingly unorthodox approach to manage internal dependency put Amazon onto the journey to discover AWS.
To build a Forever-Day-1 organization, you need a corresponding corporate culture that reinforces the continued growth of this quality. Once established, like it or not, culture tends to become so rooted in the organization psyche, or so hardwired in the organization DNA, that it will be long, lasting and very hard to change. No one will deny the importance of the right culture. The real problem is how to define it and how to build it.
How to define a company’s culture? As Bezos explained, “You can write down your corporate culture, but when you do so, you’re discovering it, uncovering it – not creating it.”11
Culture is normally created during the entire life span of an organization, with the strongest foundation laid in the beginning by its founding members. Their day-to-day behavior, their decision-making principles, their choices on people selection, promotion and hire and fire, their enforcement of key principles, and their past success and failure are the essential shaping forces.
Amazon’s mission is “We strive to offer our customers the lowest possible prices, the best available selection, and the utmost convenience.” Amazon’s vision is “To be Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online.”
Amazon’s Leadership Principles have evolved over the years. Back in 1998, Amazon only had five values: “customer obsession, frugality, bias for action, ownership and high bar for talent,”12 very different from most traditional companies. It later added innovation. Today, Amazon uses a set of 14 Leadership Principles to define its corporate culture. This is defined by the Amazon leadership team, not by Bezos alone.
1. Customer Obsession
2. Ownership
3. Invent and Simplify
4. Are Right, A Lot
5. Learn and Be Curious
6. Hire and Develop the Best
7. Insist on the Highest Standards
8. Think Big
9. Bias for Action
10. Frugality
11. Earn Trust
12. Dive Deep
13. Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit
14. Deliver Results
With slight variations (Invent and Simplify instead of innovation, and Hire and Develop the Best instead of high bar for talent), the original values have been inherited and enriched.
What makes Amazon unique is that it didn’t stop at crafting abstract concepts, as many companies do. That’s one of the key reasons why cultures in most organizations have been reduced to lofty slogans and inspirational wall hangings.
For each leadership principle, Amazon specifies the expected behavior. For example, what does “Customer Obsession” really mean?
Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers.13
And what does “Insist on the Highest Standards” really mean?
Leaders have relentlessly high standards – many people may think these standards are unreasonably high. Leaders are continually raising the bar and driving their teams to deliver high-quality products, services, and processes. Leaders ensure that defects do not get sent down the line and that problems are fixed so that they stay fixed.14
These 2-3 sentences are of pivotal importance in what sets Amazon apart from others.
Why? Because without this kind of detailed description, principles are abstract terms way up in the sky, lofty but impractical. Once you bring them down to clear and specific behaviors on the ground, they become operational, and everyone and anyone can start practicing them accordingly.
More subtly, clear and specific descriptions transform abstract ideals such as culture, value and principles, into guidelines that are observable, verifiable, and measurable.
While it’s difficult to judge whether someone is truly customer obsessed or not; we can always tell whether this person actually starts with the customer and works backwards, or whether he constantly fixates on the competitor or he habitually starts from existing competency. When there is a conflict, does he work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust, or prioritize short-term money-making or his personal and department performance?
It’s also difficult to judge whether someone insists on the highest standards or not. How to measure “high” and “highest”? The three-sentence explanations offer clear guidance. Are this person’s standards regarded as unreasonably high by many? Is he continually raising the bar, or fairly satisfied with the status quo? When defects pop up, can he get to the root causes and eradicate the bugs for good, or does he just put on a Band-Aid as a temporary patch, and the same or similar problems will emerge later?
By now, you probably start to appreciate the beauty of the clear and specific behavioral descriptions after each leadership principle. This is what we call operationalizing the culture.
We strongly recommend that you read the complete set of Amazon 14 Leadership Principles in the appendix of this book. It will be well worth your time. While reading, you may think which ones could work for you, and which ones could enhance your business and organization.
So how can you ensure that your leadership principles will be consistently executed as your enterprise grows? One effective approach used at Amazon is the forcing mechanisms.
Start by making a list of the core values, cultures or principles you would like to reinforce in the organization and operationalize each item by providing clear and specific behavioral description. Many companies have probably done this part already, and found that the frustrating aspect of values, cultures or principles is that they are easier to state than to live. How to enforce them is the real challenge.
Amazon has created a system of simple but effective forcing mechanisms to ensure that everyone in the organization really lives and breathes the stated values and principles. Let’s take Amazon’s favorite and perennial number one principle, Customer Obsession, as an example.
Every week, Bezos asks his executives the same question: what can we do better for the customers. He asks this every week. No exception.
In the early days of Amazon, Bezos would keep an empty chair in the room to constantly remind everyone that even if customers could not personally attend meetings, their interests should always be considered and fully represented.
As mentioned in “Building Block 4: Ground-Breaking Invention Machine,” at Amazon, every project team responsible for new product or service development is required to create a press release, defining the target customers and describing the perceived benefits and highlights from the customers’ perspective.
Each year, some managers are required to participate in a two-day training session at a call-center. This direct interaction with customers is designed to help them gain a first-hand understanding of customers’ frustrations and pain points, and also to provide them with the precious humility to recognize that despite its widely applauded success, Amazon still needs to continuously improve.
Given that in the digital age, a seemingly random post can go viral in no time, and if not handled properly in time, the damage from a negative post could be disastrous, Amazon has invested millions to build a system to systematically track customer feedback in real time.
At Amazon, if the customer care team constantly receives similar customer complaints about one product, they are fully authorized to pull the Andon Cord: to temporarily remove the product from the website.
This practice, adopted from the Toyota Production System, is to empower frontline people (in this case the service agents) to immediately remove from the website any product reported to have defects. The product page can only be restored after the source of the defect had been identified and corrected.
Of course the removal will hurt the retail team’s performance in the short-term, but Bezos whole-heartedly supports this mechanism. “If you retail guys can’t get it right, you deserve to be punished,”15 he said.
If a service or product provided is discovered to be subpar, instead of waiting for customer complaints posted online or communicated via the call center, Amazon can detect the glitch and take the initiative to refund customers via its automated systems.
“We build automated systems that look for occasions when we’ve provided a customer experience that isn’t up to our standards, and those systems then proactively refund customers. One industry observer recently received an automated email from us that said, ‘We noticed that you experienced poor video playback while watching the following rental on Amazon Video On Demand: Casablanca. We’re sorry for the inconvenience and have issued you a refund for the following amount: $2.99. We hope to see you again soon.’ Surprised by the proactive refund, he ended up writing about the experience: Amazon ‘noticed that I experienced poor video playback . . . .’ And they decided to give me a refund because of that? Wow . . . . Talk about putting customers first.” 16
In addition to the designs mentioned above to guide the organization daily, the most powerful forcing mechanism has to do with personally modelling the behavior expected from everyone.
On this front, Bezos is really a man of his word. His personal and persistence passion for prioritizing customers’ interests to meet and exceed his own unreasonably high standards has tremendously shaped Amazon DNA and elevated Amazon’s “customer obsession” to a whole new level.
There are numerous anecdotes about how adamant Bezos could become on issues that affect customers. Here are two examples.
As we all know, Everyday Low Price is one of Walmart’s secret weapons. Bezos not only learned it from Walmart, but also upgraded it in the digital context. At Amazon, it is the pricing bots that crawl websites, collect competitors’ prices, and automatically adjust Amazon’s pricing, enabling Amazon to always match the lowest prices.
An Amazon executive once asked Bezos whether Amazon should continue to enforce the matching price policy when the retailer with the lowest-price offering was actually out of stock. The logic is persuasive: why cut your margin when there is no real need to do so?
Bezos immediately rejected the suggestion. He said that doing so would force customers to grudgingly accept the higher price this time, but the bad feeling associated with Amazon for doing so would last a lot longer. His devotion to what customers would think and feel about this issue speaks volumes about his values.
What Bezos did is a great example of how a leader at Amazon should behave: work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust, as specified in the Leadership Principles.
This is the same underlying reason why AWS launched “AWS Trusted Advisor” in 2012, a service that monitors customer usage, and offers advise on how to improve performance, enhance security, and save money. Indeed, Amazon would proactively inform customers of possible savings.
Bezos said it best, “Our pricing objective is to earn customer trust, not to optimize short-term profit dollars.”17 (Our emphasis).
Amazon has an official system to rank the severity of an internal emergency. It goes from a low of Sev-5 to a high of Sev-1. However, there is a severity level that trumps everything: an email directly from Bezos with his famous “question mark.”
Bezos published his email address and welcomed customers to write directly to him regarding any issues they encountered along the way. Whenever a certain issue caught his attention, he would add a question mark on the message and forward it to the relevant person(s) at Amazon.
Whenever anyone receives a question mark message from Bezos, he or she is expected to drop everything, immediately get to the bottom of the issue and come up with a solution that would permanently solve this issue. A thorough analysis of why the issue happened in the first place and how to fix it so that such problem would stay fixed (never to recur) had to be presented to Bezos himself.
This is “Bezos’ way to ensure that potential problems are addressed and that the customer’s voice is always heard inside Amazon.”18
One year Amazon ordered 4,000 pink iPods from Apple for Christmas. However, in mid-November Apple informed Amazon to expect a delay in delivery.
If you were the person in charge, how would you react to this bad news? The common practice would be to notify customers of the expected delay in their order, and apologize, while specifying that this disappointment was not our fault and there was nothing we could do about it. Polite and professional. What a perfect solution.
This is indeed the default solution for many companies around the globe. But at Amazon, for those who are truly obsessed with customers and who are truly committed to doing whatever humanly possible to delight customers, this was not the answer.
Instead, the Amazon team in charge went out and bought 4,000 pink iPods on the market, hand-sorted them, and ensured in-time shipment to customers.
From a financial perspective, it made no sense, but Bezos gave the team full support and total approval without any question or any hesitation. This was the right thing to do according to the Amazon Leadership Principles, and this is exactly the right kind of behavior that Bezos would like to see at Amazon.
How to make values, cultures and principles memorable? How to reward people who demonstrate full embodiment of the core elements? Again Amazon has flared his relentless drive to invent in shaping an organization.
Bezos personally invested in the building a 10,000 Year Clock of “monumental scale” inside the mountains of West Texas. As he put it:
“It’s a special Clock, designed to be a symbol, an icon for long-term thinking . . . . a Clock that ticks once a year, where the century hand advances once every 100 years, and the cuckoo comes out on the millennium. As I see it, humans are now technologically advanced enough that we can create not only extraordinary wonders but also civilization-scale problems. We’re likely to need more long-term thinking.19”
To reinforce the leadership values called Bias for Action, Bezos instituted the “Just Do It Award”. What’s unique about this award is the prize. Given his constant reinforcement of frugality, Bezos came up with the totally unorthodox idea of having old sneakers, worn and torn, mounted and bronzed. Interestingly enough, this prize is highly coveted. Winners usually visibly and proudly display their prize in their offices.
At Amazon, the door desk is a symbol of enduring frugality. It reminds every one of the early days when Bezos used doors for desktops. The Door Desk Award rewards people who have “a well-built idea that helps us to deliver lower prices to customers” and the prize is a door desk ornament. 20
As with everything that Bezos is committed to, his search for powerful symbols is also relentless. In Amazon’s 2009 annual shareholder meeting, Bezos made “light bulbs” his new symbol for ultimate frugality. He said, “Every vending machine has light bulbs in it to make the advertisement more attractive . . . . so they went around to all of our fulfillment centers and took all the light bulbs out.”
The estimated savings on electricity costs was merely tens of thousands of dollars. Not a big thing by itself. But the message was so loud and clear that everyone, employees and shareholders, got a very specific sense of what frugality means and, more importantly, what the standards of frugality are at Amazon.
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By now, you should have a holistic view about all the six building blocks of the Amazon management system. It may occur to you that the Forever-Day-1 culture is both a result and an enabler of what Amazon has achieved for the past 25 years.
It has been the North Star from Day 1 that constantly keeps Amazon in conceiving a Customer-Obsessed Business Model (Building Block 1), cultivating a Continuous Bar-Raising Talent Pool (Building Block 2), constructing an AI-Powered Data and Metrics System (Building Block 3), creating a Ground-Breaking Invention Machine (Building Block 4) and constituting a mechanism for High-Velocity and High-Quality Decision-Making (Building Block 5).
It encourages, or in many ways, urges people at Amazon to continuously challenge the status quo for better and more, to ceaselessly seek new ideas, big and unique, to relentlessly invent, experiment, start over, rinse and repeat again and again. No matter how small the initial seed is, such undying Day-1 spirit will make it big. All these endeavors will in turn reinforce the conviction in the Forever-Day-1 culture.
As with everything else deliberately designed by Bezos, the Amazon Management System is also a self-reinforcing flywheel.