# The Amazon Way by John Rossman: 4 Rules I Stole for My Business

> Source: [https://icharles.com/articles/the-amazon-way-by-john-rossman-4-rules-i-stole-for-my-business](https://icharles.com/articles/the-amazon-way-by-john-rossman-4-rules-i-stole-for-my-business) (canonical)
> Author: Chuck — iCharles, https://icharles.com
> Published: 2018-11-27 · Updated: 2026-07-07

## Why I picked this one up

I've been buried in Amazon books lately, and it's not an accident. Bezos doesn't put out content the way Elon Musk or Gary Vaynerchuk or Tony Robbins do. He gave one real interview recently, and outside of that you're mostly guessing at how the guy actually thinks. So I go to the books instead.

The Everything Store is the biography — great read, but it's history. The Amazon Way is different. It was written by someone who actually sat on the management team, only stayed two or three years, but got close enough to write down the operating principles. Amazon runs on 14 of them. I pulled out the six that actually changed how I think about my business, and I want to walk through four of them here.

## Obsession over the customer

Amazon will burn a vendor relationship before it burns a customer relationship. The clearest example in the book: Amazon had a pricing dispute with Toys R Us and ended up paying them something like $55 million because Amazon refused to mark up prices the way the agreement wanted. They took the hit. Toys R Us eventually went under, in part because their whole model depended on a holiday-season bulk-buying game that Amazon simply didn't need to play the same way.

Bezos has said it plainly: there's never going to be a day when the customer wants to pay more, and there's never going to be a day when the customer is fine waiting longer. That's why Prime exists, that's why two-day and same-day shipping exist, and that's why they have 65 to 70 million Prime members in the U.S. alone.

I think about this every time a vendor or a policy gets in the way of what's actually good for the client. In real estate, it's tempting to protect a relationship with a broker or a management company over what's best for the buyer. Amazon's answer is simple: don't.

## Take ownership, even when it's not your fault

This is the one I use daily. Bezos runs on numbers, not feelings — if a target gets missed, the question isn't "how do you feel about it," it's "what were the numbers, why didn't we hit them, how do we adjust." No excuses, just the metric and the reverse-engineering.

But the bigger idea is ownership of outcomes you don't fully control. In real estate, the attorney does their job, the bank does their job, the management company does their job, other brokers do their job — and none of that is on me directly. But as the agent, I still have to see the whole deal through. If the attorney is slow, that's my problem to push on. If the bank stalls, that's my problem to chase down. Amazon expects the same thing of a project owner: you don't get to point at someone else's department when something breaks. You own the outcome.

His point on mistakes stuck with me too — making one is fine, that's how you learn. Making the same one twice isn't.

## Think big, longer than feels comfortable

I run a few different Instagram accounts for my company — one for celebrity real estate, one for general real estate news, one for our magazine, BPI Lifestyle. Most of them have a few hundred followers right now. But I'm not building them for 500 followers. I'm building them for the account they'll be at 50,000 or a million followers, ten or twelve years out.

Bezos was doing the same thing at scale — spending money Amazon didn't obviously have, absorbing losses, getting criticized for having no cash reserves, because he was building for a future that hadn't happened yet. Paired with that is "bias for action": don't wait until you know everything, do something now and learn as you go. That's a principle I'm putting directly into how we operate — stop waiting for the perfect plan, make the call, take the next step.

## Dive deep and have a backbone

The last piece I'm stealing is straight out of Ray Dalio's playbook too: radical honesty. When something goes wrong, you talk about the project, the process, the delay — not the person. No attacking, no politics, just facts on the table so the team can actually fix it. Combine that with the Bill Belichick line I heard this same week — "do your job" — and you've basically got Amazon's culture in five words: be honest, own your piece, deliver.

## Who should read this

If you want the Bezos biography, read The Everything Store first. But if you want the actual operating manual — the thing you can lift principles from and apply to your own company on Monday morning — read The Amazon Way. It's short, under 200 pages, and every chapter is something you can act on immediately.