Jeff Bezos, Founder of Amazon - Amazing Facts About His Style!
Jeff Bezos likes to read. That’s a dog-bites-man revelation if ever there was one, considering that Bezos is the cerebral founder and chief executive of a $100 billion empire built on books. More revealing is that the Amazon CEO’s fondness for the written word drives one of his primary, and peculiar, tools for managing his company: Meetings of his “S-team” of senior executives begin with participants quietly absorbing the written word. Specifically, before any discussion begins, members of the team — including Bezos — consume six-page printed memos in total silence for as long as 30 minutes. (Yes, the e-ink purveyor prefers paper. Ironic, no?) They scribble notes in the margins while the authors of the memos wait for Bezos and his minions to finish reading.
Amazon AMZN -0.29% executives call these documents “narratives,” and even Bezos realizes that for the uninitiated — and fans of the PowerPoint presentation — the process is a bit odd. “For new employees, it’s a strange initial experience,” he tells Fortune. “They’re just not accustomed to sitting silently in a room and doing study hall with a bunch of executives.” Bezos says the act of communal reading guarantees the group’s undivided attention. Writing a memo is an even more important skill to master. “Full sentences are harder to write,” he says. “They have verbs. The paragraphs have topic sentences. There is no way to write a six-page, narratively structured memo and not have clear thinking.”
Jeff Bezos has always done things his own way, whether he’s ignoring Wall Street’s pleas for consistent earnings growth or requiring his top people to construct artfully written missives or launching seemingly disparate businesses — all at razor-thin margins. Only there’s nothing random about Bezos’s strategy. Indeed, like the memos he makes his managers write, his moves are driven by clear thinking and a cohesive vision, even if it takes a while for rivals to figure out Amazon’s motives — at which point it may be too late.
Bezos is the ultimate disrupter: He has upended the book industry and displaced electronics merchants. Now Amazon is pushing into everything from couture retailing and feature-film production to iPad-worthy tablet manufacturing. Amazon even sells ultracheap database software for businesses. (Oracle ORCL 0.63% , take note.) He’s willing to take risks and lose money, yet investors have embraced him, pushing Amazon’s stock up 30% so far this year. And even as Amazon expands and experiments, Bezos remains zealous about delivering a good customer experience. For all these reasons and more, Fortune has named Bezos its 2012 Businessperson of the Year.
It’s not just Fortune that deems Bezos praiseworthy. He counts among his fans Amazon’s sharpest competitors and a legion of entrepreneurial imitators. “Jeff is a manic competitor, a delightful human being, and a trusted supplier,” says Netflix NFLX 0.51% CEO Reed Hastings, whose company is enduring a full-frontal assault from Amazon’s instant-view movie-streaming service. Marc Andreessen, the Netscape co-founder and venture capitalist, marvels at Bezos’s “staying power and willingness to withstand beatings.” And in the absence of Apple’s Steve Jobs, Bezos is the new undisputed role model for founders who want to keep control of their companies. “With Steve’s passing, Bezos is the epitome of the venture-backed CEO,” says Bill Gurley, another VC and longtime Amazon watcher, as well as the lead investment-banking research analyst for the company’s 1997 IPO. “If you were to ask 100 startup entrepreneurs who the CEO is they admire most, he would show up on 95 of the ballots.”
Amazon AMZN -0.29% executives call these documents “narratives,” and even Bezos realizes that for the uninitiated — and fans of the PowerPoint presentation — the process is a bit odd. “For new employees, it’s a strange initial experience,” he tells Fortune. “They’re just not accustomed to sitting silently in a room and doing study hall with a bunch of executives.” Bezos says the act of communal reading guarantees the group’s undivided attention. Writing a memo is an even more important skill to master. “Full sentences are harder to write,” he says. “They have verbs. The paragraphs have topic sentences. There is no way to write a six-page, narratively structured memo and not have clear thinking.”
Jeff Bezos has always done things his own way, whether he’s ignoring Wall Street’s pleas for consistent earnings growth or requiring his top people to construct artfully written missives or launching seemingly disparate businesses — all at razor-thin margins. Only there’s nothing random about Bezos’s strategy. Indeed, like the memos he makes his managers write, his moves are driven by clear thinking and a cohesive vision, even if it takes a while for rivals to figure out Amazon’s motives — at which point it may be too late.
Bezos is the ultimate disrupter: He has upended the book industry and displaced electronics merchants. Now Amazon is pushing into everything from couture retailing and feature-film production to iPad-worthy tablet manufacturing. Amazon even sells ultracheap database software for businesses. (Oracle ORCL 0.63% , take note.) He’s willing to take risks and lose money, yet investors have embraced him, pushing Amazon’s stock up 30% so far this year. And even as Amazon expands and experiments, Bezos remains zealous about delivering a good customer experience. For all these reasons and more, Fortune has named Bezos its 2012 Businessperson of the Year.
It’s not just Fortune that deems Bezos praiseworthy. He counts among his fans Amazon’s sharpest competitors and a legion of entrepreneurial imitators. “Jeff is a manic competitor, a delightful human being, and a trusted supplier,” says Netflix NFLX 0.51% CEO Reed Hastings, whose company is enduring a full-frontal assault from Amazon’s instant-view movie-streaming service. Marc Andreessen, the Netscape co-founder and venture capitalist, marvels at Bezos’s “staying power and willingness to withstand beatings.” And in the absence of Apple’s Steve Jobs, Bezos is the new undisputed role model for founders who want to keep control of their companies. “With Steve’s passing, Bezos is the epitome of the venture-backed CEO,” says Bill Gurley, another VC and longtime Amazon watcher, as well as the lead investment-banking research analyst for the company’s 1997 IPO. “If you were to ask 100 startup entrepreneurs who the CEO is they admire most, he would show up on 95 of the ballots.”
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