The Fire Phone arguably was Jeff's pet project. E.g. the four cameras facing forward were his idea if I remember well. Then it failed. What should have happened, based on leadership principles, would have been for Jeff to own it and admit it (vocally self critical and so on). That didn't happen, my impression was that blame was put on the lower echelons of the organization. For that was, in retrospect, the point when leadership principles started to be used as a political tool by some people. After that, at least for me, the culture changed as well. It took more than a year for that effect to trickle down, so. Amazon was still a good yet challenging place to work, but it felt much more like any other large corp out there.
Some people truly believe in the LPs. Some people truly believe they can be used to get ahead and justify whatever actions they want to do. I've never worked directly with Jeff, so I have no idea what his approach to them is.
The Fire Phone? That best analogy I've heard for it is that the Fire Phone is to Jeff as the "Homer" car is to Homer Simpson[0].
[0] https://imgur.com/a/o0Q6fw6 and https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/The_Homer
They can be the same people. There's an incoherence in any ethical system based on a set of values.
The false justification isn't necessarily intentional. Motivated reasoning[1] is a natural cognitive bias, so while you're cherry-picking values that support your desired ends, it doesn't feel like you're doing it.
A better way to approach the LPs is to recognize that they're smart business practices, but that they're subordinate to professional ethics, which in turn are subordinate to a moral code.
Oh, sorry, I meant that they are different people. Though I've heard of and met one or two people who might be crazy enough to be both.
EDIT: It's true that some people really believe and live the LPs on a daily basis. My first biss was one of them, Amazonian from basically day one in Germany. He retired earlier this year. Since I assume he never sold one single share he received (frugality anyone?) that really means retirement now. Pitty that he left, so. After I did, but still.
This form factor would be revolutionary for many people, and amazon could pull it off.
Are we starting to see that effect of culture change on results ? How ?
Or did they somehow managed to prevent that ?
One side effect of all that was managers being more risk averse. Some initiatives that could have been at least tried started to be blocked by red tape until the political environment was favorable. Did I mention that Amazon already was a pretty political place?
It might be just a bit of nostalgia, but I honestly miss my Fire Phone a lot. It did everything I needed it to, was fast, and actually fit in my pocket.
[1] Unlike generation-old iPhones that get slowed to a stop by software updates, the thing never got updated, and so it was still quite good [1.1]. Yay, I guess?
[1.1] I came from a really cheap BLU-branded phone, and so anything was better, really.
Even though Amazon failed with the Fire Phone, I wish they'd try again! I think Amazon is uniquely poised to do this. Have a half-smart phone that includes their back-end services (Alexa, shopping, movies, music, storage for your photos) and a selection of curated apps (Uber, Lyft, some popular games) and a decent browser, and you may have a good phone for older people, people who want a nice phone at, say, a $150 price point but don't want to deal with complexity