PARIS, FRANCE – JUNE 17: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is a skilled storyteller who created communication strategies to fuel Amazon’s growth (Photo by Mustafa Yalcin/Anadolu via Getty Images)Anadolu via Getty Images
Jeff Bezos is an intentional storyteller, combining words and symbols to bring the company’s values to life. Three decades after Amazon started in a cramped Seattle garage, Bezos is still using proven communication strategies that fueled the company’s growth.
Amazon was just named the world’s largest company by revenue. When founder Jeff Bezos posed for a photograph to commemorate the milestone, he could have been standing in one of Amazon’s giant fulfillment centers or alongside some of the company’s one million robots.
Instead, Bezos is seen leaning against a desk. Not just any desk, but one made from a plain wooden door.
The now-famous Amazon “door desk” is a brilliant and intentional storytelling device that played an important role in the Amazon narrative. It also represents a storytelling tactic that leaders often overlook.
Great communicators don’t just share stories that are spoken or written. They create symbols that reinforce the story even when they’re not in the room.
Why Jeff Bezos Turned a Door into a Symbol
Words and slogans tell people what matters. A symbol reminds them of what matters every day, even if the symbol is as simple as a door.
The story of the Amazon ‘door desk’ traces its origin to 1995, when Bezos could count his employees on one hand. The scrappy startup needed to save money on expenses, but it still needed basic equipment and furniture.
Bezos went to a nearby Home Depot. According to an early employee, Bezos “looked at desks for sale and looked at doors for sale, and the doors were a lot cheaper, so he decided to buy a door and put some legs on it.”
Yes, the desks saved money, but they also served as a reminder of one of Amazon’s core principles: frugality.
In an interview for 60 Minutes in 1999, Bezos explained, “It’s a symbol of spending money on things that matter to customers and not spending money on things that don’t.”
The spoken word is just one element of the storyteller’s toolkit. Since neuroscientists have long known that the brain remembers concrete images better than words and abstract ideas, effective communicators create visual reminders in the form of symbols that embody those values.
For example, “frugality” is just an abstract concept. A door desk is concrete, tangible, and serves as a visual reminder to pay attention to how much you spend.
At Amazon, symbols didn’t end at door desks. When Bezos and his team attended meetings, they saw another symbol in the conference room: an empty chair.
An Empty Chair Reinforces Amazon’s Core Value
One empty chair. A simple object spoke volumes at Amazon because it spoke for the person not in the room—the customer. To this day, an empty chair in a meeting reinforces the company’s core value, the principle of “customer obsession.”
In The Bezos Blueprint, I dedicated an entire chapter to symbols Bezos created at Amazon, from door desks to empty chairs. The key takeaway is that the best symbols are intentional. Impactful symbols reinforce core values.
For example, when I created a word cloud of all 50,000 words Bezos wrote for Amazon’s annual shareholder letters, one word towered above the rest. Bezos cited the “customer” more than 500 times. For context, the word “cloud” only appears 24 times, despite AWS, Amazon’s cloud computing division, being its most profitable business.
Jeff Bezos repeatedly wrote about core principles in Amazon’s annual shareholder letters.Gallo Communications
Empty chairs and door desks are what organizational psychologists call ‘environmental cues’: deliberately placed objects that prompt people to remember and act on a company’s values.
Research shows that physical symbols can spark “inner questions,” prompting people to ask themselves questions that, in turn, direct their behavior. A chair doesn’t tell people what to do, but it gets them to ask, “What would the customer think of this idea?”
You don’t need to copy Amazon’s symbols. Come up with your own and make them relevant to your vision, values, and culture.
Begin by asking yourself:
What’s the story I want my team to internalize?
What are the values that need to be amplified when I’m not in the room?
What is the one value that should guide every decision?
Symbols aren’t decoration. They direct behavior. They’re not clever props, but reminders of what matters most. If your values are that important to the growth of your organization, make sure those values are impossible to ignore.
This article was originally published on Forbes.com