- My name is Chris Niederman.
I'm the general manager
for the global systems integrator business worldwide.
I've been with AWS for eight years.
I ask everybody when they join, what was different
than when you thought it would be than before you joined.
And usually it's people go,
"Wow, the leadership principles and the culture,
"you guys weren't kidding out that."
And that was probably the biggest epiphany
I had when I joined was leadership principles,
you run into 'em every single day.
And so the culture is what makes this a lot of fun.
(upbeat music)
When I travel around the world, what I love is
that everybody thinks about leadership principles.
So my first question isn't, what do you do for a living?
What do you do for a job here?
It's tell me
about your favorite leadership principle and why.
One of the things I've discovered is something
that I found is my favorite leadership principle
has changed over time.
So I could tell you with certainty in my first 90 days,
and it's generally with most people, earn trust.
We're not given trust, you actually have to earn it,
get to meet people and trust each other
in order to really get the buy-in you need,
help them, and they'll help you.
Customer obsession is absolutely
the number one leadership principle.
It always has been.
If you're not customer obsessed,
maybe it's not the right place for you,
But take customer obsession away,
and there's earn trust, over time frugality.
It was drilled into my head
what frugality meant in my third year here,
where I gotten a lot of investments to build my team
and my manager said, "Hey, we're not gonna give you
"the investments you think you need this year.
"Go figure out how to do it with what we've given you."
I'm like, oh man.
And what I found was it forced me to think
about how to invent and simplify and think differently
because doing more with less is the concept of frugality,
and had he not forced me to think critically
about how to do things differently,
we would not have optimized our team,
and we would not have had the success we did.
(upbeat music)
At this moment in time when we're kicking off the year,
we're diving super deep into our 2022 plans,
our three year vision and so forth,
and we're doing performance reviews,
insist on highest standards is top of mind for me right now.
That's my favorite leadership principle.
I read a ton of docs every day.
We're not just writing a doc and trying to do a decision,
or make a decision that hasn't been well thought out,
we all need to really think through these.
So insisting on high standards
that leads us to be right a lot
while inventing and simplifying.
So it's hard to answer the question what's my favorite,
'cause they all interweave and tie so well together,
but they also conflict like move fast by a fraction,
but take the time to dive deep.
Well, okay, well, which one is it?
It's both.
(upbeat music)
So there's two new leadership principles
which I am starting to think more critically about.
You look at scale and success brings broad responsibility,
and it's a really important one, and I love that one.
And then you think about the other one
which is striving to be Earth's best employer.
Striving to be Earth's best employer,
that's not just making life better for us here,
that's higher and develop the best,
but it's also making sure that people want to come here.
We wanna be a place that people come
and seek out and can have fun,
a place that they can build, make an impact and have fun.
I feel obligated
that we can do something far more than we have.
And somebody once said to me,
"Chris, think about technology
"when we were selling mainframes back 20, 30 years ago,"
which is one of my earlier jobs at IBM.
It was like, hey, come on, take off work.
Let's go get a beer.
It's not like we're curing cancer.
Somebody said to me when I first joined here, they said,
"You remember those days?"
"Yeah, I remember those days."
"Think about this, we actually could cure cancer."
Well, I said, "How do you mean?"
He said,
"We believe that a doctor may not be the one to cure cancer.
"It could be a data scientist using AWS technology
"to get more capacity as needed
"to do analytics and insights
"and maybe gene sequencing
"to develop new drugs that they couldn't do before
"because they didn't have access
"to the right technology or capacity.
"We can provide that."
And so think about that.
If we give the right technology
to the right people, the right data scientists,
we could cure cancer or Parkinson's,
or come up with new drugs.
The game has changed and given
who we are and what we have access to,
we have a broader responsibility to the world to help
in a manner that actually changes lives,
whether it's curing a disease or developing new drugs,
or feeding the world with new analytics
and how we do farming, and maybe automating that
for more improved crop productions
to double food production with less resources by 2050.
All of these things are super.
So this is where I begin thinking about more
about that one about broader responsibility,
success and scale.
So that at this moment is probably one
of my favorites that I'm giving a lot of thought to
and challenging my team to as well.
(upbeat music)