Something that seems to be implicit in modern day criticisms of Amazon is the idea that it succeeded because of its leadership principles. I'm not saying that'

Something that seems to be implicit in modern day criticisms of Amazon is the idea that it succeeded because of its leadership principles. I'm not saying that's not true, but we shouldn't take it at face value that Amazon's internal values drove its success. The values stuff seemed to me to be mostly propaganda when I was onboarding at Amazon. Could it just be basic market forces that caused Amazon to grow, attracting the best talent due to high compensation, which caused a (to borrow terminology from Bezos) "virtuous cycle"? People talk about Amazon's corporate culture in a way that I don't see them talk about Google, Facebook, Apple, or Microsoft. Which makes me inclined to believe that it's mostly hocum used to justify where they ended up, instead of just attributing it to being in the right place at the right time.