Culture is the Ultimate Scaling Mechanism
The Playbook for Eliminating Bureaucracy
At Amazon, we document everything—tenets, team norms, and our metrics framework (instrumentation)—because culture drives execution. These artifacts define how we work, align teams, and ultimately determine whether we succeed or struggle. Don’t treat this exercise as a checkbox, treat it as the key to your org’s success. These are arguably the most important artifacts you create.
We’re not perfect, yes, we do end up in situations where we do fall into the Scrummer-fall trap (where teams claim to be agile but still follow rigid waterfall processes). However, our results are downstream of the culture.
When these mechanisms are in place, organizations can scale and move fast—deliberately, not chaotically, in a high-speed, low-drag way. Instead of trudging through a bureaucratic, waterfall-esque, sequential workflow, high-performing teams execute in parallel, scaling efficiently without unnecessary bottlenecks and individuals are empowered to unblock themselves.
Culture Is Your Operating System
Every project plan, user story, spreadsheet, Jira ticket, and RAID log? Those are simply tools and a means to an end. But when you’re juggling 10 projects across multiple teams, you can’t afford to micromanage every moving piece. What keeps the machine running smoothly is a shared understanding of how decisions get made.
If you don’t define and reinforce team culture, entropy takes over. I’ve seen teams that neglect this investment—they churn, they struggle, and eventually, they collapse into a death spiral of misalignment and inefficiency. On the other hand, high-performing teams operate with clarity, trust, and autonomy because they consciously invest in an operating framework.
The Four Laws of Combat Applied to Team Culture
Two of my favorite leadership books are Extreme Ownership and The Discipline Equals Freedom Field Manual. They define four laws of combat—principles that directly apply to scaling teams. I like these four laws because they are easy to memorize, universal, and effective. Below are the definitions of the four laws of combat from the books (https://echelonfront.com/what-is-extreme-ownership/) :
Cover and Move: Teamwork is the key to success. You will fail if you’re not aligned and mutually supporting each other.
Simple: Leaders tend to overcomplicate their plans and communication, leading to confusion, chaos, and bottlenecks.
Prioritize and Execute: There’s only so much time and so many resources. Are you utilizing them to their fullest or losing a war of attrition?
Decentralized Command: Everything you know about leading is wrong. Learn how empowering your people leads to success.
Cover and Move: Scaling Requires Teamwork
Hiring more people is not the key to scaling. Every team member must be onboarded, empowered, contribute, and understand how to make decisions within the framework. If your team relies on a single person to make every call, you’ve already failed. Remember Brent from The Phoenix Project?
Failover is critical, but role clarity matters just as much. Without clear swimlanes, execution suffers. Every player on the field has a critical role to play and executing in that role requires clarity. There are various mechanisms to bring clarity to this including RACI, RASCI, and DACI.
This is where Cover and Move comes in. Great teams operate like special forces units—when one person isn’t available, others step in and execute seamlessly. They don’t wait for permission; they know how to move forward and are empowered to do so because team norms define how work gets done.
Prioritize and Execute: Scaling Requires Trade-offs
Effective prioritization requires clear frameworks for decision-making, stack-ranking, and tie-breakers. Teams must define goals, measure progress, and continuously realign to stay on track. A metrics framework is the basis for your ability to gauge this. For example, you can’t drive a car or fly a plane and get to your destination without an instrumentation panel. You cannot know how to decide what’s next without knowing what your decision-making framework or tenets are. You cannot know how to execute without SOPs.
Delivering results means making trade-offs and continuously prioritizing work to hit your goals. An example implementation of this is the OODA loop (Observe, Orient, Decide and Act) developed by John Boyd. Prioritization frameworks I have used with varying success include: RICE, RITE, WSJF, MoSCow, etc. Document what guides your priorities (metrics framework), how you make trade-offs (tenets), how you prioritize (frameworks), and how you execute (SOPs).
Decentralized Command: Scaling without Bottlenecks
This is the opposite of micromanagement. To move fast, you can’t have managers scrutinizing every decision. This is where Decentralized Command shines. Every team member should understand the mission, constraints, and trade-offs—so they can execute decisively without waiting for approval. This only works when the team:
Has a shared understanding of priorities
Knows and contributes to the decision-making framework
Trusts each other to execute
Without these, you will suffer from the dreaded “analysis paralysis,” where every decision requires an escalation. This is slow, expensive, and completely avoidable.
Keep It Simple: The Antidote to Gold Plating
Complexity is the silent killer of speed. At Amazon, we operate under the Invent and Simplify leadership principle, but I also like Gall’s Law:
"A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked."
Translation? Don’t build castles in the sky or a Rube Goldberg machine for problems that don’t exist. Solve for today’s complexity, not tomorrow’s hypotheticals. Otherwise, you’ll end up over-engineering, gold-plating, and creating unnecessary bloat.
Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast
Peter Drucker’s famous quote still holds true. “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” A well-defined culture creates an environment where teams move with speed, autonomy, and purpose.
Culture isn’t just an idea—it’s your team’s operating system. If you don’t document it, expect ambiguity, misalignment, and slow execution. Write it down. Make it clear. Set your team up to win.
Culture isn’t just an idea, but what makes winning repeatable, and not just happenstance. Write it down.
If you enjoyed this, give Culture Flags a read.
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