Jeff Bezos has become the tech world's philosopher-in-chief since Steve Jobs passed away.
Bezos founded Amazon in 1994 after he predicted that online retailing would take off. A pioneer of aggressive digital growth and focus on total customer satisfaction, "the everything store" has become one of the highest-valued companies in the world.
The Washington Post is still owned by Bezos even though he stepped down as CEO and president of Amazon in late 2021. He has a net worth of $122 billion.
How do you become the richest man in the world? His leadership style is believed to be a factor in it.
"customer obsession," "invent and simplify," "bias for action," and "have backbone; disagree and commit" are just a few of the leadership principles that make up the core of the company.
Setting the bar high in our approach to hiring has been, and will continue to be, the single most important element of Amazon.com's success, according to the man himself.
Bezos said at the awards that good leaders are correct a lot. You can be right more often if you practice.
According to Insider, Bezos has gotten a lot of things right, and that's because he's a good person. Finkelstein said that his philosophy is "courage and curiosity, which I found to be the real hallmark of pretty much every great leader that I have studied or worked with."
In an interview with Insider, Bezos said that his time on his grandparents' ranch taught him the importance of being smart. There is a solution if there is a problem. Finkelstein said that Bezos kept a constant focus on developing new and better ideas that were important to Amazon's culture.
An example of this is the empty chair Bezos left in executive meetings to represent the customer. The customer is the most important person in the room and should be accounted for in the quest for customer satisfaction.
The email address Jeff@amazon.com is used to forward customer feedback to executives. The University of Michigan's annual retail customer satisfaction survey places Amazon at or near the top.
Bezos told Forbes in 2012 that they don't pay much attention to the next quarter. We are willing to plant seeds and wait for them to grow into trees.
Finkelstein said that one of the main challenges for Amazon was that it was competing with Bezos' other interests for his attention.
His team was given the power to manage his interests. Finkelstein said thatBezos is a big delegator. He's willing to go with other people's ideas even if he doesn't like them. He will accept them if they are argued well and if they go wrong. It's not normal for a leader of a company of this size.
Amazon has taken "sizable chances" on expanding into streaming with Amazon Prime and food delivery service Amazon Restaurants. They fold them when they don't work. They're not afraid to do it despite the cost.
Finkelstein said that Bezos' ability to build the right team around him has been a big part of his culture of success, and that he will be critical as he moves from being the disrupter to the disrupted and businesses target Amazon's customer base with product innovations, growth opportunities, and better
Greg Greeley, the former Prime boss, is one of the notable figures who has formed part of his executive team. The exodus of executives from Amazon, which had very little turnover during its rapid growth years, is now a prime recruiting ground for talent.
Finkelstein said that it's normal for companies to become more conservative as they get bigger and more successful. Big companies are usually disrupted because they start to be afraid. As they get bigger, their innovation has accelerated.
He uses the word relentlessly. His decision making is underpinned by the culture of metrics.
Some 80% of the goals Amazon tracks are related to customer objectives, according to reports. The way Amazon uses data has changed the way companies use data.
Personalization of experience and technical rigor are what the company focuses on. According to a 2012 Forbes article on Bezos, the company's metrics revealed that 0.1-second delay in the loading of a page equates to an1% drop in customer activity.
These metrics have a cost. Amazon has been criticized and accused of pushing its employees beyond limits, with examples emerging of workers forgoing bathroom breaks for fear of interfering with productivity stat and warehouse employees being told to return to work after a colleague died. Amazon increased its minimum wage and challenged other companies to do the same.
White-collar Amazon workers are also pushed to find new limits of productivity, with Bezos himself telling potential hires that it is not easy to work here. The New York Times reported in 2015 that employees at Amazon received 50-plus-page printouts the day before meetings to be cold-called for questions on the numbers contained in them. Office employees complain of a culture where nothing is done or good enough.
Finkelstein wondered if the misinterpretation of Bezos' philosophy was the cause of the lower-level workplace culture's problems. He said that sometimes lower-level supervisors think they are embracing senior leadership philosophy and act in ways that are clearly inappropriate and not in line with the actual leadership philosophy.
Unless it's absolutely necessary, Bezos doesn't like meetings. He uses a "two pizza rule" where he won't have a meeting where two pizzas aren't enough for everyone. The more people in the meeting, the less productive it is according to him.
According to Bezos, no PowerPoints are used at Amazon. Meeting requirements include a six-page memo that is read in silence at the beginning of the meeting. He said that it has real sentences, and topic sentences, and verbs, and nouns. Bezos told the George W. Bush Presidential Center's forum that the memos teach the writers about finding the right scope as well as the discipline of drafting and reconsidering ideas.
Finkelstein said that Bezos balances his penchant for efficiency with courage and curiosity in a way that makes him stand out.
Bezos wrote in a letter to shareholders that wanderer is an essential counterbalance to efficiency. Franklin Foer of The Atlantic said that employees at Amazon's Seattle headquarters can continue to look for out-of-the-box opportunities. Employees are encouraged to put their ideas into a six-pager for a meeting to approve them.
The blind alley approach to innovation is one of the key pillars of Amazon's culture. If customers embrace a new way of doing things, the blind alley can open up into a huge avenue.
Bezos believes that paying attention to what customers want is more important than what everyone else is doing. He said in 2004 that if you're watching your competitors, you're unlikely to invent a bunch of stuff on your own.
The "blind alley" strategy has seen some failures, such as the Amazon Fire smartphone that lasted for one year and is believed to have cost the company $170 million, but it has also seen some huge rewards.
Bezos is a digital native as opposed to a digital immigrant, according to Finkelstein.
Finkelstein said that the key to Amazon's success is the day-one and day-two mindset. Every company has to build out structures to survive and succeed according to Bezos. The more systems and processes you build, the harder it is to maintain the day-one mindset.
When it came to company expenses, Bezos was notoriously frugal. Bezos has been known for buying a private jet on his own dime and there are no hammocks or free meals at the internet giant.
It's very difficult to get back to day one when you have established systems, processes, and structures that fit the world you are in. Walmart has been trying to catch up to Amazon in order to become a major player in the online retail space.
Finkelstein said that Bezos thinks he's running a startup. He is an innovative thinker and leader.
The article was first published on Insider. New information has been added to it.
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