Embracing the Amazon Leadership Principles in the public sector

Embracing the Amazon Leadership Principles fosters a culture of customer obsession, ownership, and experimentation. Doing so has supported my capabilities and success delivered on behalf of my public sector customers, who I’ve witnessed embracing the Leadership Principles. While they’re not always aware they’re doing so, it has been both inspiring and validating. Before diving into specifics, I’ll provide some context on my journey to Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Context and journey to AWS

January 2020 marked nearly three years in the San Francisco Bay Area for me, where I was focused on developing and leading the technical curriculum for an enterprise software company’s global pre-sales training program. The primary purpose of the program was to equip early-career talent with the skills needed to become highly valued cloud solution engineers (SEs). Upon completion of the six-month program, cloud SEs would re-join their home pre-sales teams to support public sector organizations, among others, on their cloud journey.

I always aspired to work in Silicon Valley, driven by the desire for innovation and connecting with like-minded professionals. Before my time there, I found myself immersed in meetups, social events, and conferences. I pursued side projects to challenge my creativity, which allowed me to acquire new skills along the way.

Despite my professional growth and living in Silicon Valley, I felt something was missing. This realization occurred during my first business trip to Seattle, where I visited Amazon headquarters as part of a trend safari organized by my previous employer. A trend safari is dedicated time to explore the mechanisms other companies have established to facilitate internal enablement.

Entering the Amazon Frontier office, I was in awe of the vibrant work environment and received a presentation on Amazon culture, which included the Leadership Principles. Inspired, I saw Amazon as where I wanted to continue my professional growth, envisioning a fusion of my work at the enterprise software company supporting the public sector with the challenges and innovations from my side projects.

Embracing the Leadership Principles

Fast forward to 2024. Four years into my tenure at AWS, I’ve held various roles, initially in Training and Certification, then transitioning to solutions architecture focusing on the public sector. I have had the opportunity to embody and observe the Leadership Principles in action. In this post, I highlight the six Leadership Principles most influential for the public sector. Each Leadership Principle is equally significant, and while they are difficult to shortlist, this selection is from my perspective. These are principles that are echoed through Jeff Bezos’s philosophies on prioritizing the customer and innovation.

Customer Obsession is ingrained in every decision-making process, driving teams to exceed expectations, putting the customer at the center of every decision, and working backwards from them to prioritize their success. In the context of public sector, that means prioritizing the success of students, patients, doctors, citizens, and more.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, education institutions were forced to close their physical doors to students, as required by public health authority mandates. By prioritizing the success of students, embodying Customer Obsession in tandem with innovative thinking, an education organization used AWS to deploy a remote access solution to deliver a virtual learning experience when it was most critical, enabling 30,000 full-time students to fulfill their learning outcomes.

In tandem with Customer Obsession, innovation is central at Amazon, promoting creativity and simplification, as seen through Invent and Simplify. Invent and Simplify inspired frugal ideas aimed at improving productivity and effectiveness. Being inventive yet frugal with time and resources, such as by using new or already-available mechanisms, to further impact and exceed public sector goals.

One community’s goal of improving traffic flow embodies this Leadership Principle. This commuter community was exploring a cost-effective way to analyze and resolve poor traffic movement at two busy intersections. Within four weeks, they were able to analyze, diagnose, and resolve these issues, seeing a 20 percent reduction in travel time, among other benefits, by launching an available AWS Partner solution hosted on AWS.

Similarly, Think Big fosters a culture of innovative thinking and transformative impact. This has shaped my approach to challenges, particularly within the public sector, where innovative solutions can have significant societal impact. Deliver Results, extends beyond the completion of tasks, and encourages ambitious goals and looking for ways of scale to achieve them. This has honed my ability to drive tangible impact and goes hand-in-hand with Bias for Action, where speed in our actions and decision making can drive greater impact.

One recent example that ties together Think Big, Deliver Results, and Bias for Action is with an AWS healthcare customer. They were able to find success by using artificial intelligence (AI) to improve their medical staff’s learning experience of an electronic medical record (EMR) system. This organization was looking for ways to augment training while equipping their users to ask questions and receive guidance to perform tasks in their EMR, freeing up resources and delivering an improved experience for clinicians by quickly locating essential information.

Finally, Ownership is fundamental to Amazon’s culture, promoting responsibility and pride in outcomes. Embracing this Leadership Principle has enhanced my problem-solving skills and sense of accountability. I always act on behalf of public sector customers to accomplish complex tasks with the resources available.

While all of the earlier examples demonstrate Ownership, I want to highlight an example of a health technology organization being all-in on AWS. Being all-in on AWS has provided them with more time to invent on behalf of their customers through faster and more scalable IT operations, with the goal of re-imaging in-home and virtual care.

Final thoughts

Joining Amazon brought a full-circle moment, with the culture of innovation becoming integral to my work and changing my perspective on how to approach public sector challenges. Embracing the Amazon Leadership Principles has not only provided fulfilling work but has also molded me into a leader who embodies these values and has the opportunity to impart them to our solutions architects supporting the public sector. Our solutions architects can, in turn, impart the leadership principles to public sector organizations.

By embracing the Amazon Leadership Principles, AWS and public sector organizations can work together to provide positive societal impact through the adoption of cloud technologies, observing challenges through an Amazonian lens and using already-available mechanisms to accelerate transformation. Mechanisms such as the AWS Partner Network (APN), AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP), AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF), and Landing Zone Accelerator on AWS can provide the right velocity in our decision-making process.

What’s next

While we have our own peculiar way of doing things at Amazon, I invite you to explore the possibility of hosting a Culture of Innovation session through your AWS point of contact. In this session, you can learn more about Amazon culture, including the Leadership Principles, in the context of your public sector organization and discuss practical ways to promote innovation and drive impact from within it. We’ve only scratched the surface in this post, so let’s Dive Deep together!