The 2,000-Year-Old Philosophy Hidden Inside Amazon's Leadership Principles
What I learned from reading Working Backwards and Letters from a Stoic
Jeff Bezos built a $2.9 trillion company on principles that are almost two thousand years old. He just didn’t explicitly say so. Nobody reads Amazon’s Leadership Principles and thinks: this is a philosophy of how to live. But they should.
Bezos built Amazon because he understood The Lindy Effect: if something has been around for 2,000 years, it’s likely to be around for another 2,000. Unlike Western nations, where state and religion are separate—Bezos didn’t believe in severance. He built into Amazon a culture where business principles and personal principles weren’t two different worlds, but one.
Have backbone; disagree and commit is the courage to go against the grain. Before starting Amazon, Bezos had a well-paid job on Wall Street. When Bezos told his boss he was leaving, his boss gave him two weeks to think it over, but Bezos quit anyway. Deciding what to do in life—your purpose—is inherently hard, but perhaps Bezos listened to what Seneca had to say:
“Each time you want to know what to pursue or what to avoid, look to your highest good, the aim of your life as a whole. Everything we do ought to be in accordance with that aim. Only one who has the entirety of his life in view is in a position to arrange life’s particulars. Even with paints all at the ready, no one can render a likeness until he has decided what he wants to paint. That’s our mistake: everyone deliberates over the parts of life; no one over life as a whole.”
Bezos wasn’t looking at creating Amazon as a side project. He was looking to create his life’s work. If you align your work principles with your personal principles, you create consistency in everything you do.
Frugality is another example of that consistency—and perhaps the most counterintuitive one.
In the early days at Amazon, Bezos had employees use old doors as desks rather than buy new furniture, and reportedly still gives out a “Door Desk Award” to employees who find innovative ways to save money. This wasn’t about being cheap for accountancy reasons: it was to breed a culture of frugality into Amazon. Constraint breeds resourcefulness and self-sufficiency, and leads to invention: overconsumption leads to softness, bloat, and excess, which corrupt judgement.
“It is in times of security that the spirit should be preparing itself to deal with difficult times; while fortune is bestowing favours on it then is the time for it to be strengthened against her rebuffs.”
That’s the Stoic parallel.
It’s easy for companies to get fat when food is aplenty, but Bezos was distilling in the Amazon culture what Seneca prescribed in the individual: use the good times to prepare for the hard ones.
The same logic runs through Amazon’s approach to trust (justice).
Bezos was famously willing to forgo profits for years to earn customer trust at scale because he valued their loyalty more than his bottom line. By obsessively focusing on customers in the form of low prices and maximum choice, he earned their trust. This discharging your duty to others, even when it’s costly to you in the short term, reminds me of what Seneca said:
“All his thoughts should be as distant as possible from personal advantages.”
It’s easy to scowl now (with the benefit of hindsight) that Bezos is a billionaire, but he wasn’t when he wrote these principles. What Bezos had to do, to instil in the Amazon culture, was to be right—and be right a lot.
At first this leadership principle looks a bit self-promotional, but to have any chance at doing anything well in life you have to be more right than wrong. It sounds overly simplistic, but aside from helping one’s ego, being right also builds something else—judgement. Or as Seneca would say: wisdom.
Judgement isn’t something you can read your way to. It’s built through decisions made, mistakes owned, and patterns recognised over time. That’s what Bezos was encoding—not a principle about being clever, but about developing the kind of wisdom that only comes from being in the arena.
“Besides, what grounds could I possibly have for supposing that a person who has no acquaintance with books will never be a wise man? For wisdom does not lie in books. Wisdom publishes not words but truths—and I’m not sure that the memory isn’t more reliable when it has no external aids to fall back on.”
Amazon’s 14 leadership principles are corporate speak, but I knew there was more to it than that. They were a philosophy: a set of beliefs and guiding principles that worked just as well professionally as they did personally.
The reason Bezos, or anyone interested in building something lasting, reaches for 2,000-year-old principles is because time distinguishes principles that work—from those that don’t.
Are your professional principles different from your personal principles? If yes, asking yourself why might just be the best decision you’ll ever make.
If these are the kinds of questions you find yourself returning to—how the best builders think, what philosophy looks like applied to business—that’s what The School of Knowledge is for. You can find out more by clicking below:
Until next time, Karl (The School of Knowledge).