Why Andy Jassy Believes Resilience is the Key to Leadership

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is often vocal about his leadership style and decision-making, but he has recently spoken to employees on a more personal level, discussing his own regrets.

He told them he hasn’t regretted a lot of decisions he’s made in his life, but that the regrets he does have are all based around things he didn’t see through.

Speaking about the start of Amazon Web Services, he said: “While we were excited about what we were building, I would not say that we were filled with unbridled confidence."

Andy added: “I haven’t regretted a lot of decisions I’ve made in my life. I feel like you make the best decisions you can with the information you have at the time, and you don’t have perfect information.

“But the ones I’ve looked back on and felt a little bit of remorse about have been the decisions where I left something where I felt like I didn’t see it through. Maybe it could have been successful, it could have worked out, it was really hard, and I left.”

Controlling what you can

Andy said that the prospect of regret does not mean you could stay in everything you do, add: “If you can hang in there, if you can just stay in the boat, you may find that you build something remarkable with a group of people.

“And so, I made the decision that I was going to see it through,” referring to AWS.

At this stage, the CEO said that people should focus on the things they can control, rather than things they cannot. 

He said: “When the [AWS] team and I got to the point where we starting thinking about how do we control what we can control, we can’t control whether people will use this new form of computing, we can’t control if it’s a successful business, but we can control what we define, and we can control what we build, and we can control who we hire.”

Andy went on to list the speed at which the firm can operate, who the target customer is and the pricing.

Hard-work leading to AWS success

“Almost always it takes a lot of hard work,” Andy told employees. “It takes time that we are uncertain, it takes decisions that you made that didn’t quite work out, that you had to adjust, it takes resilience and persistence, and everything that’s worth doing, I think, virtually everything that’s worth doing, takes that type of persistence and resilience, and so that was a great lesson for me.”

AWS was launched as a comprehensive suite of cloud computing services in March 2006, and has grown into a dominant global leader in the cloud market.

By 2015, Gartner estimated that the services’ customers were deploying 10 times more infrastructure on AWS than the combined adoption of its next 14 competitors.

In 2024, the firm generated over US$101bn in revenue, contributing nearly US$38bn in operating income which accounted for about 60% of Amazon’s total profit.

Andy shared: “I think the business has worked out reasonably well. We have a ton of work to do, obviously moving forward.”