“Are Right, a Lot”: The Most Misunderstood Amazon Leadership Principle

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Amazon's "Are Right, a Lot" leadership principle sounds like the most obvious of the principles. Why would they even bother writing it down? It's like a company saying, "Our plan is to make money." Well, yeah duh.

Are Right, A Lot - Leaders are right a lot. They have strong judgment and good instincts. They seek diverse perspectives and work to disconfirm their beliefs.

Of course we all expect leaders to be right a lot. Why would Jeff and his leadership team waste one of their precious principles on something obvious?

Because many (most?) people miss what the principle is fundamentally asserting.

Storytime!

Years ago, a principal engineer on one of my teams proposed a new project to improve recommendations for customers. I looked at the schedule, which included a significant amount of time up front to instrument the feature with metrics and use a test audience to validate the hypothesis before fully rolling out the new feature.

"We trust that your intuition is good. This is almost certainly the right thing to do." I said to Courtney, our principal engineer. "You could save a ton of time and roll out your improvement now. I would back you up skipping those steps if you'd like to move forward quicker."

Side note - this type of recommendation is partially to pressure test her interest in her expensive validation steps, and partially because my primary weakness is my impatience. I mean, it’s also my primary strength, because these things go hand in hand.

Courtney shook her head vigorously, "I have a hypothesis instead of a conclusion, because we don't have enough data to prove my proposal will work. We need more data first. Plus, this won't be the last improvement we'll want to roll out to recommendations. We need to have metrics and mechanisms to verify we're making the right changes."

I happily agreed. Because I might be a bit impatient, but I’m thrilled when my team has opinions about how to do things the right way.

Being right a lot as a leader is not simply about having a high percentage chance of having the correct judgment. Because Courtney proved that there’s more to being right than being fairly sure a solution will work.

Instead, what we value is the entire leadership principle, which includes the second half of the clarifying text:

"They seek diverse perspectives and work to disconfirm their beliefs."...