The story of how a side-of-desk passion project reached 1.5 million people and what it taught me about what leaders actually want
I was recently featured in a Forbes article entitled 3 Lessons Amazon’s Chief EQ Evangelist Learned Scaling EQ To 1.5 Million People. The article provided a wonderful overview of the work I did at Amazon, but I wanted to dive deeper and share more insights to empower others who also want to make an outsized impact as leaders. Here is my first article which details the origin story of the EQ@Amazon movement. It started with a “weird” talk.
In 2019, I did something that most people at AWS thought was a little strange. I submitted a talk proposal for our annual sales kickoff (SKO) — an event that draws 25,000 people — on a topic that had never been discussed there before.
Emotional intelligence.
It wasn’t about the usual fare—cloud architecture, technology offerings, or sales plays. This was at one of the most technologically forward, analytically rigorous, and data-driven companies on the planet.
An executive took a chance on me and said “yes” to sponsoring my talk. The organizers put me in a room for 85 people. Fair enough — it was an unproven topic by an unproven speaker. But I had a feeling more people would show up, so I pushed for a bigger room. They expanded to 130 seats.
The day before the event, I got a call. So many people had registered that they were moving me to a room that held 1,000!
It was standing room only. People were turned away at the door.
I received a standing ovation at the end of the talk (not something that happens often at tech-heavy sales events), and it wound up being the highest-rated and highest attended breakout of the entire event.
That moment changed the trajectory of my career. But more importantly, it confirmed something I had suspected for years: there is an enormous, unmet hunger among high-performing professionals for the skills that actually determine whether they thrive and succeed—not just as operators, but as leaders, teammates, partners, parents, and human beings.
The genius robot who discovered the missing variable
To understand why I was the one giving that talk, you need a little context.
I was born in Taiwan and immigrated to the U.S. at almost four years old. I didn’t speak English, I had ADHD, and I was painfully awkward. In preschool, a teacher put me in the corner thinking I was cognitively impaired. The actual issue was that I didn’t respond to my American name because we didn’t use it at home.
Eventually, I figured out that I was pretty smart, so I decided that intelligence would be my way out of every problem. I aspired to becoming what I now call a “genius robot.” It worked out great for a while. I got straight A’s in school, achieved a perfect SAT score, and studied Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at Berkeley. The plan was working perfectly.
Then I did one that that totally messed up my plan: I got married.
My wife did not care about the genius part. And she really disliked the robot part (for some strange reason). She wanted things like empathy, vulnerability, emotional connection. There were things I had never developed because I had spent my entire life optimizing my IQ.
My marriage, along with 23 years as a missionary in the Philippines and evangelist in the San Francisco Bay Area, pushed me to develop the skills I had spent my whole life avoiding. I read everything I could find: Daniel Goleman, Marc Brackett, Travis Bradberry, Amy Edmondson. I studied, I practiced, I failed a lot (and succeeded some), I practiced more.
And then something unexpected happened. The more I developed emotional intelligence, the more effective I became at everything — leadership, communication, relationships, decision-making. EQ did not replace my IQ. It supercharged it.
A side-of-desk project with no budget and no mandate
When I joined AWS as an account manager and later became a business development leader, I started noticing the same pattern everywhere: brilliant people being held back—not by a lack of intelligence, but by a lack of emotional and social skills. These were engineers who couldn’t read a room, sellers who couldn’t navigate conflict, and managers who didn’t know how to make people feel heard.
So I started giving talks off the side of my desk. I had no budget, no mandate, and no official role. I just had a conviction that these skills mattered and a willingness to be the person who said so out loud.
The response floored me. After every session, people would come up and say some version of: “I’ve been waiting for someone to talk about this. How can I help?”
Not “that was interesting.” Not “thanks for sharing.” “How can I help?”
That question became the fuel for everything that followed.
From 12 people to 800 champions
After the sales kickoff, the movement grew organically. A small group of about 12 people became the founding team. They were all volunteers—people with demanding day jobs who chose to spend their “extra” time and energy spreading EQ because they believed in it.
That volunteer model turned out to be one of the most important decisions we made, even though it wasn’t really a “decision” at all. It was simply the reality: there was no budget, so the only people who showed up were the ones who were intrinsically motivated.
And that changed everything. When someone delivers a workshop on their own time because they genuinely believe it will improve people’s lives, the energy in the room is completely different. People can feel it. For example, one EQ Evangelist was a former Navy SEAL commander. He delivered EQ workshops not because it was in his job description, but because he was passionate about helping people become better versions of themselves. That passion and authenticity is something you cannot manufacture. These people exemplified the idea of being missionaries, not mercenaries.
Over and over, these Evangelists would tell me that delivering an EQ keynote or workshop was the highlight of their week, even in weeks packed with high-stakes deliverables. The work gave them energy instead of draining it. That is the power of tapping into intrinsic motivation.
Today, the movement has grown to over 800 EQ Champions across the company worldwide, not just at AWS, but across all parts of Amazon. Over 150 trained EQ Evangelists have been certified through a rigorous process that includes deeply learning the content, shadowing a delivery, reverse shadowing deliveries, and getting coaching to keep the quality bar high. Together, they have reached over 500,000 employees at Amazon and a million people outside Amazon through keynotes, workshops, podcasts, and media publications.
The newsletter that went viral
Not every idea that worked was my idea. And some of the ideas I was most skeptical about became the most impactful.
Early on, someone suggested I start an email list. I had been reading voraciously about EQ and was already forwarding the best stuff to a few hundred friends and colleagues with a simple thought: this really helped me so maybe it will help you too.
So I formalized it into an internal mailing list (aka newsletter). It started with a few hundred subscribers and grew to 50,000.
It became the largest opt-in mailing list at the company. People forwarded it to their managers, their VPs, their entire teams. One person told me: “I work here, and the biggest perk of working here is getting your email every day.” That is not a perk anyone in HR designed. That is organic demand being met with quality content.
Someone else suggested a Slack channel. I was skeptical because I barely had time to check my own Slack channels. But I created one, and it grew to 15,000 members. It’s a living community where people share articles, reflections, questions, and support every single day.
Together, these systems created conditions for “ambient learning,” or what I call an EQ growth flywheel. EQ was no longer something people encountered in a workshop once a year. It was a system of nudges woven into their daily information flow. It was a tip in their inbox, a conversation in their Slack channel, a monthly podcast with a world-class expert. The learning became continuous and self-reinforcing.
The jiu-jitsu of cultural change
Here is an important principle for anyone trying to build something like this in their own organization.
I did not fight the existing culture. I leveraged it.
Amazon is data-driven, engineering-oriented, and intellectually rigorous. Many people were openly skeptical: “What is this emotional fluffy stuff? I am data-driven. I don’t need that.” That skepticism was not an obstacle. It was information.
My theory of cultural change drew from my decades of martial arts training in hapkido (it has its origins in jiu-jitsu), where you redirect energy rather than oppose it. Instead of positioning EQ as something new that the culture needed to adopt, I showed that EQ was already embedded in the company’s own Leadership Principles. Behaviors such as “earn trust,” “respectfully disagree even if it’s awkward or uncomfortable,” “lead with empathy,” and “make it easy for others to have fun at work” were already expected of leaders. I simply pointed out that you cannot exhibit these principles effectively without emotional-social skills.
The other move that made a big difference was reframing the question around the value of EQ. I did not ask: "Would you like some empathy training?" Most leaders would nod in agreement and say, "Let me get back to you with a good time to do that” (which is never).
Instead, I would ask: “What business problems could be solved with greater connection and understanding?” That completely changed the conversation. Leaders would immediately think of a long list: retention issues, teams that weren’t jelling, insufficient dialogue, people not speaking up in meetings, leaders who couldn’t get along. They didn’t need to be convinced that EQ mattered. They just needed someone to connect it to the business problems they were already trying to solve.
When you do that, leaders don’t resist the work. They invite it in.
What I learned about what people actually want
Over the years, I have received thousands of messages from people describing how this work changed their lives. Not their performance reviews, their lives.
People whose spouses had died told me that an article from the newsletter was the thing that helped them through their darkest moment. Parents struggling with a child’s depression found resources and connection through the community. Managers who had been promoted for their technical skills but felt completely lost as leaders found a path forward.
This is what I mean when I say the demand is there. People are not short on IQ. (All of my colleagues were smart “enough.”) They are hungry for help on the EQ side. It’s the skills that help them sustain their performance without burning out, lead a team that actually wants to follow them, and build relationships that energize rather than deplete them.
They just need someone to go first.
From internal movement to global mission
What started as a side-of-desk passion project eventually became a funded program. I gathered data from tens of thousands of participants showing that EQ training improved effectiveness, leadership, happiness, and health. I wrote a formal proposal (the famous Amazon six-page narrative) and presented it to my VP and his leadership team. To my delight, I received a hearty thumbs up and the question: “How much headcount do you need?”
The movement formalized into what is now the EPIC Leadership Program at Amazon. It has reached over 1.5 million people globally, at Amazon and at Amazon’s corporate customers such as Sanofi, Mitsubishi Electric, bolttech, and Equals Group. We certified external EPIC facilitators at partner companies like Splunk, and now they deliver the workshops within their own organizations, extending the reach far beyond anything one person or one team could accomplish.
And now, with the launch of EPIQ Leadership Group, I am taking these real-world, battle-tested strategies, frameworks, and lessons and sharing them with many more leaders and organizations. My fundamental thesis is the same one that filled that 1,000-seat room in 2019: EQ is essential for any leader, professional, or human to thrive and succeed in our day and age. Those who can expertly harmonize their EQ + IQ—what I call the EPIQ skill set—are the ones who will experience outsized impact.
What this means for you
If you are a leader who believes your organization needs more of this, I want you to know something: you do not need permission, budget, or a formal mandate to start. I didn’t have any of those things. What I had was a conviction, a willingness to be the person who went first, and a commitment to delivering something so valuable that people would ask “How can I help?” rather than “Why are we doing this?”
The demand is already there. Your people are already hungry for it. The question is whether someone in your organization is willing to stand up and name what everyone already feels.
If you want help building that kind of movement in your organization — or if you want to bring this to your next leadership event — that is exactly what EPIQ Leadership Group exists to do. Reach out. Let’s talk about what’s possible.
This is Part 1 of a series on building the largest EQ movement in corporate history. Next: how we scaled EQ to 1.5 million people without mandating a single training.