Do You Want Mercenaries or Missionaries?

WE PAY VERY competitive compensation at Amazon, but we have not created that kind of country club culture where you get free massages and whatever the perks of the moment are. And I have always had a bit of skepticism about those kinds of perks because I always worry that people will stay with a company for the wrong reasons. You want people to stay for the mission. You don’t want mercenaries at your company. You want missionaries.

Missionaries care about the mission. It’s actually not very complicated. And you can confuse people with free massages. Like, “Oh, I don’t really like the mission here, but I love the free massages.”

How do you hire great people and keep them from leaving? By giving them, first of all, a great mission—something that has real purpose, that has meaning. People want meaning in their lives. And this is a giant advantage that the US military has because its people have a real mission. They have meaning. And that is huge. And so that’s a big recruiting advantage.

But you can drive great people away—for example, by making the speed of decision making really slow. Why would great people stay in an organization where they can’t get things done? They look around after a while, and they’re, like, “Look, I love the mission, but I can’t get my job done because our speed of decision making is too slow.” So large companies like Amazon need to worry about that.