This content is hosted by a third party (www.youtube.com).
To view the content, you need to consent to cookies by selecting Accept all in the popup banner. Or you can go to the site footer, select Cookie Preferences, and then select On under Functional Cookies, Performance Cookies and Advertising Cookies.
Russ Grandinetti, Amazon’s Senior Vice President of International Stores recently sat down with host June Sarpong for Culture Conversations, a global podcast series recorded at the London Stock Exchange that explores the link between workplace culture and corporate success, to share what nearly 30 years at Amazon taught him about building culture, empowering global teams, and preparing for the AI era.
Starting from scratch
Russ Grandinetti joined Amazon in 1998, drawn by the conviction that the internet would fundamentally change business even if no one could predict exactly how. "I thought I'd rather get in a boat and pull an oar with people and try and help build one of them," he said. In the early days, culture wasn't handed down and nobody knew yet what the culture should be. It was all defined along the way.
What emerged from that process were the Amazon Leadership Principles. Principles like Customer Obsession and Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit shaped how decisions were made and how mistakes were handled, including through a structured process called the "five whys", which pushes teams to identify root causes rather than surface-level fixes.
Empowering teams and earning customers’ trust
One of Russ’ most consistent messages was the importance of decentralised decision-making. "Any decision in which I'm required to participate is a kind of defect," he said. As Amazon expanded into dozens of countries, empowering local teams became not just a management philosophy, but a business necessity, because a customer in Mexico City doesn't care how well Amazon performs in Europe or in the UK. At Amazon, we want to empower teams all around the world to make that customer happy in a way that suits their preferences and locations.
AI in retail and looking ahead
Looking ahead, Grandinetti was explicit about the scale of AI's impact. "This set of AI technologies will have the same effect: it's the biggest technical wave to impact business since the advent of the commercial internet." said Russ. From AI-powered robotics in fulfilment centres to autonomous vehicle trials in Las Vegas, Amazon is already embedding these technologies across its operations. His message to his own teams: don't play it safe, have the courage to lean into change.
For Russ, the lesson from nearly three decades at Amazon is simple: great things are built steadily, "chiselled bit by bit over long, long periods of time."
