I have principles-fatigue after going through a number of companies that promise to abide by certain good sounding principles only to backtrack at the slightest pushback. I would actually trust a company more if it had no defined principles. Perhaps just honesty and transparency.

Possibly a better alternative than, say, Bridgewater when Ray Dalio was in charge. Adherence to principles was part of a high percentage of decision making conversations, but since is book is so big, they might be best compared to theological arguments in the middle ages, with different specialists arguing with different quotes from different parts of the book.

All in all, once an organization gets big enough, power does what power wants, and power wants what is good for them in the short term, regardless of what is good for the organization. That's how most large companies end up spending very large amounts of money on things that wouldn't actually pass muster to anyone aiming for the organization's best interest and with actual knowledge of what is being accomplished.

You see new, wide eyed PMs approaching budgeting processes as if the goal really was profitability, or customer satisfaction, or something reasonable. But if they are going to stay as PMs for long, they better realize quick that the vast majority of project proposals have only a passing interest in what will be accomplished, and are mainly about making sure every sub-organization gets fed sufficient money to not lose people, or possibly even grow if the manager is well liked. All the efforts in documentation and justification are just theater.

The Leadership Principles are less "principles" and more "operational guidelines". Aside from maybe "Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer" (which is a recent addition) they're not saying what Amazon wants to achieve; they're recommendations for effective ways to get things done.

Values statements are usually somewhere between a wish list and propaganda.

My cynical take is that a company's stated values are exactly the opposite of the behavior you'll find most common in the company.

We're witnessing in real time, in the USA, that what matters is the coherent mesh of individual principles, and not some words on a page somewhere.

Principles are just nice words, and that's it.

It's, IMO, the action/reward loop that matters most (i.e. incentives).

Most, if not all big tech companies do not align incentives with principles - quite the opposite. Most folks in a position of leadership utilize principles and other "nice sounding arguments" for their own personal benefit, i.e. block internal competitors with principles (works great against employees with integrity and quality ethics) while claiming to follow these.. without actually following any.

I'm sure everyone here has had some taste of it, or even discussions on how this sucks but "they gotta play the game". Not playing the game is extremely hard when it comes to promos, salary, or getting a large project to go with your name on it (I'd know..).

So, until this rant become common sense, principles will just be that - nice words.

I can’t help but think of Google’s “Don’t be evil” mantra……….

Before their heavy handed censorship machine ramped up

Principles are what you do when things are hard.

I know from painful experience that it's easier to forgive someone who has never promised you they have them than someone who has and then backpedals.

Even allowing for the fact that most such statements are aspirational more than descriptive, there are degrees where it transitions from not reaching your goals to straight up betrayal.

Quickly approaching 50y, I have learnt that company principles are marketing material put out by HR, where we spend useless time on yearly trainings, and like you mention, no one really abides by them.

Not a single company I worked on, did they ever mattered beyond company's marketing material.

Stock price is usually a principle. I've never heard of a company being completely nihilistic, but maybe there are some out there.

They all have one principle: make money. Everything else is negotiable.

I wish all companies would just state the obvious and list the first principle as "Make Money".

Perhaps it should go without saying, but sometime around the 90s or so, many companies tried to pretend that they had these lofty, societal goals, and they tried to pretend that making money was almost secondary.

The reason I think it's important to list "make money" as the first, primary goal is that it makes it clear that all other goals are subservient to that one. The thing that makes my eyes roll about principles and mission statements is I've seen them all promptly thrown out the window when a company's money making machine is threatened. Essentially, they're principles when they're aligned with making money, but if circumstances change in the slightest, the principles will be jettisoned if they make it harder to make money (which kind of makes it hard to call them "principles" in the first place - maybe "guidelines" would be a better term?)

Amazon DOES follow them very closely, it's quite unlike any other company in that aspect.