When Andy Jassy succeeded Jeff Bezos as CEO of Amazon in 2021, many questioned whether the company could maintain its legendary momentum. Four years later, Jassy has not only sustained but also accelerated growth, adding more than $230 billion in revenue, expanding AI initiatives, and reinventing the management culture of one of the world’s most complex enterprises. That is why I was intrigued by an article in the Harvard Business Review (HBR) entitled, Speed Is a Leadership Decision,” where reporter Adi Ignatius interviewed Andy Jassy.
For compliance professionals, Jassy’s insights about speed, risk, culture, and innovation offer timely lessons. Too often, compliance leaders fall back on the excuse that “we’re too big, too regulated, too constrained to move quickly.” Jassy flips that script: speed, he insists, is a leadership decision. And the same is true for compliance.
Today, we look at five key lessons compliance professionals can draw from Jassy’s leadership playbook.
1. Speed Is a Leadership Decision
Jassy bluntly states that “speed disproportionately matters in every business at every time”. He challenges leaders to stop accepting bureaucracy and regulation as excuses. Instead, leaders must actively identify and remove barriers, empowering teams to act with urgency.
For compliance professionals, the lesson is clear: do not let the weight of regulations, policies, or oversight structures become a drag on effectiveness. Yes, compliance requires controls, documentation, and approvals, but speed is also important. Think of third-party due diligence reviews, hotline triage, or incident investigations. When compliance moves slowly, it signals indifference or ineffectiveness, and risks fester.
The decision to prioritize speed, backed by streamlined processes, real-time monitoring, and empowered teams, can transform compliance from a bureaucratic bottleneck into a proactive partner to the business.
2. Risk-Taking and Failure Are Essential to Innovation
Jassy observes that as companies grow, they tend to become risk-averse. Achievement-oriented professionals “play not to lose” rather than take chances. He emphasizes that the only way to build something truly unique is to take risks, make mistakes, and learn from them. Compliance teams face this challenge daily. The instinct is to avoid risk entirely, to say “no” rather than take a chance. But compliance innovation, whether adopting AI for monitoring, piloting new training formats, or embedding compliance into business processes, requires taking calculated risks. This means that risk management strategies must be implemented, monitored, and updated as necessary.
Failure in compliance is not about missing a regulatory requirement. It is about learning that a new process does not resonate with employees, or a monitoring tool generates too many false positives. Leaders should create safe zones for experimentation. If you never fail, you are not pushing hard enough. Compliance innovation must be iterative, and tolerance for small, recoverable failures is the price of true progress.
3. Flattening Bureaucracy Fuels Accountability
Jassy highlights Amazon’s initiative to flatten its organization and empower individual contributors. By increasing the ratio of builders to managers, reducing layers of decision-making, and encouraging employees to own “two-way-door decisions”. Those are choices that can easily be reversed. With this strategy, Amazon streamlined processes and accelerated innovation.
Compliance functions are often drowning in pre-meetings and approval chains. A compliance officer identifies a risk, drafts a recommendation, and waits while three levels of committees review it. Meanwhile, the risk festers. The compliance profession should adopt Jassy’s model: empower frontline employees to make two-way decisions in real-time. For example, a compliance manager in Brazil should have the authority to pause a suspicious vendor engagement without waiting for headquarters. Flattening decision-making structures creates accountability, agility, and credibility. Compliance must be a builder’s mindset: see the problem, fix the problem, move forward.
4. Culture Must Be Reinvented Continuously
“Culture is not our birthright,” Jassy warns. As companies scale, their culture stretches and must be deliberately reinforced. At Amazon, this means reasserting ownership, accountability, and a customer-centric approach, even as new layers of management emerge. For compliance professionals, this is a powerful reminder: culture is not static. A “speak-up” culture may flourish in year one and decay by year five if it isn’t nurtured. New geographies, acquisitions, and technologies stretch corporate culture in unpredictable ways.
The compliance function must continuously assess cultural health: are employees still raising concerns? Do managers still model ethical behavior? Are incentive structures still aligned with compliance values? A strong compliance culture requires constant reinvention: new training, new channels, new metrics; so that employees see it as living and evolving, not stale or perfunctory.
5. AI, Innovation, and Responsibility Must Go Hand in Hand
Jassy views AI as the biggest transformation since the internet, with the power to reinvent every customer experience. He emphasizes that progress is inevitable, so leaders must focus on using AI responsibly and productively.
Compliance professionals face the same dual imperative. On the one hand, AI tools, such as automated transaction monitoring, predictive analytics, and natural language chatbots, can make compliance faster, smarter, and more effective. On the other hand, AI introduces new risks, including bias, opacity, privacy breaches, and increased regulatory scrutiny.
The compliance leader’s role is not to resist AI but to guide its responsible adoption. Establish AI governance frameworks. Ensure transparency and explainability. Audit data inputs and outputs. Partner with business units to embed compliance guardrails into AI development. If compliance can keep pace with AI’s speed while safeguarding ethics, it will become indispensable to the business.
Compliance at the Speed of Leadership
Andy Jassy’s mantra, “speed is a leadership decision,” rings true far beyond Amazon. For compliance professionals, it reframes the mission. Compliance does not require slow responses, being bureaucratic, or being risk-averse. (Always remember, you do not have brakes on a car to drive slowly; instead, you have brakes on a car to drive fast.) Leaders can choose speed by empowering their teams, flattening the decision-making process, fostering a culture of ownership, tolerating smart failures, and embracing technology responsibly.
The stakes are high. Compliance must move at the same speed as the business, not the other way around. Regulators expect swift detection and remediation. Employees expect rapid answers to ethics and compliance questions. Boards expect real-time risk visibility. Compliance that lags will be seen as irrelevant or ineffective.
The lesson from Amazon’s Jassy is that compliance speed is not about cutting corners. It is about clarity of leadership, empowerment of people, and continuous cultural reinvention. In an era of accelerating technology and mounting risk, compliance professionals must embrace speed as a core leadership choice.
