Jeff Bezos has been CEO of Amazon for 27 years. David Ryder / Stringer
Jeff Bezos has been at the helm of Amazon for almost three decades and will step down as CEO in July.
His successor Andy Jassy called him the “most unusual leader of our time”.
Here are some of Bezos’ most famous principles for leading a team and a company.
This is a machine translation of an article from our US colleagues at Business Insider. It was automatically translated and checked by a real editor.
Andy Jassy described him as “probably the most unusual leader of our time”. In his 27 years at the helm of Amazon, Jeff Bezos has taught his successor and others a lot about running one of the world‘s largest companies.
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Here is some of the advice he has given over the years about leading a team and a company:
Think about the big picture
Bezos “always had a way of getting teams to think bigger picture,” Jassy said at a 2017 talk. “It was amazing to see how many ideas came to him from teams — that I thought were really good ideas. They were really good ideas too – Jeff listened to them and really thought about them. He helped make sense of things and asked, ‘Shouldn’t we expand on this idea? Shouldn’t we think outside of this corner to develop the idea further and really make a difference?” told Jassy. Suitable for this said Jeff Bezos in 2017: “Big things start small. The largest oak tree begins with an acorn.”
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Have high standards
Bezos’ had high expectations that applied to the entire company. “If you run a large organization and you can’t attend all the meetings, you can set reasonably high standards – I would say maybe even unreasonably high standards. “Having reasonably high standards that people measure themselves against – that gives you a lot of influence within the organization if you don’t attend all the meetings,” so Jassy.
Be “strategically patient and tactically impatient”
Bezos prioritized speed while sticking to his long-term vision for the company. “He is confident in his long-term vision and where he wants to take things. Even if you tell him it’s not possible – which you do all the time, by the way – he’s convinced of it. He believes it is possible and he is stubborn about that vision,” reported Jassy. “But in the meantime – even though it may take a long time to get where we want to be – he understands that speed is disproportionately important.”
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Determines the number of participants in a meeting based on two pizzas
Jeff Bezos is known for using the “two pizza rule” at meetings: he limits it to the number of people who can be fed with two pizzas. He believes this promotes productivity, speed and collaboration.
Create stories, not powerpoints
Bezos once said that Amazon “has the strangest meeting culture ever.” One of Bezos’ meeting no-gos are Powerpoint presentations, which he has banned in company meetings. “For each meeting, someone in the meeting prepared a six-page, detailed, structured memo with proper sentences and topic sentences,” he says. “It’s not just bullet points. It’s meant to provide context for the discussion we’re about to have.”
He explains that his perfect meeting takes days to prepare and involves “a crisp document and a messy meeting.” In a 2004 email to his leadership team, Bezos explained why he dislikes PowerPoints: “PowerPoint presentations allow ideas to be glossed over, a sense of relative importance to be flattened, and the context of ideas to be ignored,” he wrote .
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Bezos ensures that meeting participants read the memos. “We read in the room. Just like schoolchildren, executives will bluff their way through the meeting as if they had read the memo. “So you have to take time so that everyone has actually read the memo and not just pretends,” said the Amazon founder. Bezos is said to have previously assigned summer reading material to his top managers.
Obtain customer opinions
Bezos’ emails are public. Although it’s hard to imagine the jet-setting billionaire responding to all customers, he says he sometimes forwards their concerns or feedback to the appropriate departments. “I see most of these emails. I see them and forward them to the managers responsible for the respective area with a question mark. That’s an abbreviation for: ‘Can you look at this?’, ‘Why is this happening?'” Bezos said in 2018.
At Amazon, Bezos made it a point to focus on “customer obsession rather than competitor obsession.” “Companies often say they focus on customers. But in reality, they spend most of their energy reacting to and talking about competitors,” he explains.
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In fact, much of Amazon’s success can be attributed to Bezos asking customers for suggestions in the company’s early days. In 1997, Bezos wrote to 1,000 customers and asked them what they wanted for the company. A customer wished Bezos would sell windshield wiper blades because he needed new ones. “I thought to myself, ‘This way we can sell anything,’” Bezos said.
Jeff Bezos: “Disagree and engage”
In his published in 2016 Letter to shareholders Jeff Bezos spoke about the importance of the strategy of “disagree and engage” in decision-making. “If you feel strongly about a particular direction even though there is no consensus, it’s helpful to say, ‘I know we don’t agree on this, but would you bet on it with me? When you get to this point, no one can know the answer for sure. You’ll probably get a quick yes,” he writes.
Categorize decisions and make them earlier than expected
Bezos wrote in his 2015 letter to shareholders that he differentiates between Type 1 and Type 2 decisions. Type 1 decisions have a major impact on corporate strategy. Type 2 decisions, on the other hand, have less at stake and are also easier to reverse if necessary.
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According to Bezos, Type 1 decisions take the most time, while Type 2 decisions should be delegated or grouped with other, smaller decisions for later. The Amazon founder believes that you should make decisions with 70 percent of the information you would like to have and repeat this process. He justifies this by saying that one would act too slowly if one had to wait for all the desired data.
Jeff Bezos also prefers to make his decisions in the morning. “He said, ‘I usually make important decisions around 10:30. I discuss it the day before, sleep on it, and then make the decision in the morning,'” Italian fashion designer Brunello Cucinelli told the Wall Street Journal in 2020.
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