The problem is that the leadership principles are sufficiently vague and contradictory, so like any good religious text, they can be used to justify anything by picking and choosing something that supports whatever it is you were going to do anyway.

Want to take action? "Bias for action". Want to sit on a decision? "Dive deep". Want to cut costs? "Frugality". Want to invest more? "Think big".

I agree, from my own time at Amazon, that leadership principles are baked into performance evaluations and promotion. The problem is that, rather than looking at the leadership principles to guide future actions, people take whatever it is they did over the past six months and stick leadership principle labels on those.

Which leadership principle leads to inventory comingling and listing hijacks? Actually typing that makes it sound snarky, but it's a real question. These are real problems and I'm interested in the reason they aren't top priorities to end, despite all the trouble they've caused. I assume there's some value behind the decisions that are made, and I'm curious to know what that is.

Which leadership principles are about having their warehouse employees urinate in bottles?

Don't Be Evil wasn't a new principle. It was a foundational one, on which the company grew.

That's why it was scrapped, and the following new principles were listed:

* Respect the opportunity (wtf?)

* Respect the user (lol)

* Respect each other (ahahaha)

Hope it makes sense now :)

Don't Be Evil was always on the cynical, "words over actions" side.