“There are many things that Amazon is doing really well, and they have a strong leader who believes in his position 100%,” said Parish, author of The Experimental Leader: Be a New Kind of Boss to Cultivate an Organization of Innovators. “That’s part of the seduction of the Amazon culture. [Bezos] presents it as if he’s absolutely sure. And that gains a lot of traction.”

Yet, as IT teams, CIOs and entire organizations co-opt ideas that have helped make Amazon a giant company in the digital era, they often find they can’t replicate the same level of success.

That’s not a surprise, according to multiple experts in corporate leadership, management and organizational achievement.

Amazon’s culture has set new standards by cultivating a workplace prime for agility and innovation, which has resulted in the company’s extraordinary growth. But executives elsewhere need a nuanced approach when they consider what pieces, and how much, of Amazon’s culture they can or should adopt to drive success. They should recognize, too, that as much as Amazon’s leaders promote their workplace ideas, workers have increasingly pushed back on the notion that everything is rosy.

“It all comes down to your company and your company’s culture,” said Prasad Ramakrishnan, CIO at Freshworks, a software company. “Yes, you need to foster innovation. Amazon, Facebook and Google all do that really well. But you don’t copy them, you learn from them.” …