Compensation Rewards Long-Term Thinking. Finally, Amazon incentivizes ownership by designing compensation plans that reward it.

Experience creating self-service architecture in multiple environments has revealed ten best practices essential to an end result that truly serves customer objectives. Some are strategic in nature, while others are more technical and operational. They have been divided accordingly.

So useful is this technique that an Amazon product launch almost always begins with what we used to call a future press release—an announcement of the product written before its development even began, used for internal purposes only.

Great leaders (like Jeff Bezos) develop a strong, clear framework; then they constantly apply that framework and articulate it accurately to their team. Get this right from the outset, and you’ve got an excellent mechanism for scaling good decision making from top to bottom.

Feel sorry for yourself ▪Give away your power ▪Shy away from change

psychologist and author Angela Duckworth has done some remarkable research on the importance of what she calls “grit.”

Empire building by managers is virtually impossible, in part because there’s just no money for it.

It created a product image management tool that collected customer feedback, allowed customers to compare images, and enabled them to report offensive or irrelevant content.

The backbone necessary to disagree with some of the smartest business minds in the world and commit to your own vision requires an immense amount of mental toughness.