- At Amazon, we live our principles.
The leadership principles guide how we make decisions,
calibrate ourselves, and operate as builders
and as part of a team.
When I graduated from university in the mid-1990s,
I joined the US Peace Corps.
Working as a forestry volunteer in Sub-Saharan West Africa
introduced me to living your principles,
something that I continue to do
every day that I come into work at Amazon Web Services.
Now, I lived in the Mopti Region of Mali, West Africa,
and the Mopti Region is bordered on the north
by the Tombouctou Region,
which many of you might know by the name of Timbuktu,
the Seguo Region to the southwest,
and the nation of Burkina Faso to the southeast.
The tribes in my area,
they ranged from the Bozo, who lived along the Niger River,
the Songhai, who were of the great Songhai Empire,
which dominated the Western Sahel
in the 15th and 16th century,
the Dogon, who lived primarily in the Bandiagara cliffs,
the Fulani, who have historically been a nomadic tribe,
and, of course, the Bambara,
which is a tribe that is prevalent across Mali.
As with other rural Peace Corps volunteers,
I lived in the village without running water,
plumbing, or electricity,
and I depended on community wells for water.
I took showers by bucket, I used a latrine pit,
and then I depended on kerosene lanterns at night for light.
Now, at Amazon, we talk about how we focus on the customer
for everything we build.
In Peace Corps, my customers were the families
that I lived and worked with
for environmental preservation and to build schools.
When I lived in Mali,
I worked every day with people who had no formal schooling
yet ran economies that spanned multiple families
and many villages.
One of my neighbors was a tall and quiet man
who organized work parties,
and he often very deliberately picked other teenagers,
young adults in the neighborhood,
to help lead the work party with him
so he could continue growing others
into a leadership role in the community.
Now, I also spent a lot of time
with three wives of a village elder.
These women, who ranged in age from 40-plus to 20-something,
they ran a textile production for Malian bogolan.
Now, Malian bogolan is a mud textile art,
and their economy that they put together
recruited dozens of women from surrounding villages
to sew the cloth,
they had other women producing the mud-based dye
and doing the designs,
and then they managed distribution of how these textiles
would be taken to the weekly markets
of different villages and sold.
Now, I consider these women
and the men who were the leaders in my village
to be my first mentors.
They managed entire systems of commerce and industry
with humor, a sharp eye for quality,
and compassion for everybody in their network.
It brought home to me
that human potential is everywhere,
no matter what somebody's background is
or what their schooling had been.
Now, when you live in a village,
you have got to be self-sufficient.
You're on your own.
It's there that I realized, if not me, then who?
The answer was often nobody,
so I would step into the role of whatever needed to be done,
whether it was writing applications for different nonprofits
for micro loans to fund our projects
or prepare the chicken for a neighborhood gathering.
Now, that concept of personal accountability
is very similar to the Amazon principle of ownership,
where owners never say, "That's not my job."
But my time in Mali also made me realize
that sometimes it is better that someone else is the who
in that if not me, then who?
For example, the community well in my neighborhood
was a mile away,
and we had to haul water early in the morning
every day for the day's use.
Now, there was a woman
that I was close friends with in my neighborhood
who pointed out to me that if I had paid in cash
for one of the neighborhood kids to haul the water,
I would be bringing that family money
in a subsistence-oriented farming economy
where not a lot of people had cash.
In this case, if it wasn't me,
it was one of the kids in neighboring families,
and that was a better answer.
As a leader of organizations,
I still ask myself that question.
If not me, then who?
Sometimes it is me taking ownership,
'cause that's the right thing to do,
and sometimes asking another emerging leader to step in
to benefit from the experience is the right thing to do too.
Now, in Mali, I worked with a nearby village
to build a school and hire a school teacher.
To fund the construction and get a school teacher,
I raised sheep,
which we also used to demonstrate how to herd
without defoliating the trees.
We sold the sheep during the Ramadan holiday
to fund stages of construction for the school,
and we kept some of the sheep to keep going with our flock.
Now, every day, I tried to learn whatever I could
to be more effective
in contributing to my community, my customers.
I suspected that some of the time
I was probably a little bit more in the way
than actually helpful at times.
Sheep, to be honest, were quite new to me, but I kept at it
and I always pushed myself to learn more and be better.
That principle of constant learning
is one that I took forward with me after working in Mali.
At Amazon, part of our leadership principles
say we must disconfirm our beliefs
and we must be learning and curious all the time.
As I did when I was in Mali,
I now take the time to write down my reflections
and keep that process of learning so I can continue to grow.
It is so important to learn from your world,
the people around you,
what has come before, what is happening right now.
I have found that to be true
whether you're raising sheep to build a school
or you're running large-scale cloud services
like Amazon S3 and Kinesis Streaming.
Now, there are amazing trees in northern Mali,
acacia, baobab, karite, just to name a few.
The seeds of these trees initially spend their energy
growing down to tap into water
deep below a very dry surface.
When they grow up as saplings,
there's this dangerous time
where they're vulnerable to livestock grazing.
But if they make it,
they become truly amazing landmarks in the landscape,
and they can survive almost anything.
I would come across these trees
when I was traveling between villages,
and I would just marvel at their adaptability and endurance
in the face of drought, browsing, termites, you name it.
At Amazon, we also talk about planting seeds
and nurturing saplings,
only instead of actual trees,
we're talking about how important it is
to generate and nurture new ideas.
Now, we know that we are here
to build a long-term business that outlasts all of us,
and that means seeding different ideas
and nurturing them through difficult periods
where they might be misunderstood.
Plant the seeds and nurture saplings.
Both are necessary to build the landscape that you want.
Now, the Great Mosque of Djenne
is the largest mud structure in the world.
And once a year, the whole town of Djenne,
along with people from surrounding villages, work together
to replaster the surface of the mosque, the Crepissage.
It is a huge task.
Hundreds of people work together.
They go grab water from the Bani floodplain,
they mix the mud plaster,
and people apply it over every inch of the mosque.
The work gets accomplished at an amazing rate
given the size of the structure,
and there is a deep community sense in the shared work.
I worked side-by-side with my neighbors
to haul water to help with the Crepissage,
and it really brought home to me
that anything is possible,
no matter how large the task, with teamwork.
I apply that same thinking to how I live and work today.
You can take on any task, no matter what the size,
with help from others.
At Amazon Web Services,
we think big about the services that we build,
and then we put in place the execution,
with teamwork and mechanisms to make it happen.
Anything is possible with teamwork,
whether you are plastering the largest mud mosque
in the world
or you're building the best cloud services on the planet.