Leadership Lessons from Jeff Bezos
This series of articles seeks to examine the character attributes of highly successful leaders, regardless of their adherence to a strong faith or moral standard. In presenting these thoughts, Leadership Ministries is not agreeing with or advocating these traits or practices, but rather presents these as ideas for discussion and development in your own leadership journey.
Jeff Bezos is an entrepreneur, investor, computer engineer, media mogul and commercial astronaut. He is the founder and executive Chairman of Amazon. As of March 2022 he had a net worth of $117 billion, making him the second-wealthiest person in the world. He founded Amazon.com as an online bookstore in 1994. Today it is the largest Internet company by revenue and sells nearly everything, including video and audio streaming, cloud computing and artificial intelligence. Bezos also founded Blue Origin, a commercial spaceflight services company.[1]
Bezos’ parents were affluent. He grew up in Miami, went to college and then worked in the banking and hedge fund industries. In 1993 he decided to establish an online bookstore, with a $300,000 investment from his parents. He named it Amazon because at the time website listings were alphabetical, so his company would appear sooner when customers conducted online searches. After three years he took the company public. In 2022, Amazon receives $638 million per day in revenue—about $7,300 a second. In February 2022, Bezos announced plans to step out of the CEO role at Amazon to pursue other interests.
An experimental Amazon delivery drone. Amazon’s goal is to close the gap between online ordering and delivery of the product to under an hour, anywhere in the world.
Be customer-centric. Bezos’ development of Amazon.com focused on the customer. He patented 1-click ordering. He enabled third-party vendors to sell on Amazon Marketplace, which greatly expanded Amazon’s product offerings. Every click and view a customer makes at Amazon.com is recorded and tracked, allowing the company to instantly hone it’s product offerings, tailoring what each customer sees to their specific interests. “The number one thing that has made us successful, by far, is obsessive, compulsive focus on the customer,” Bezos said during a 2018 interview.
Amazon has a list of guiding principles, the first of which is “Customer Obsession”. The principle states that “Leaders start with the customer and work backwards”. Bezos believes that customer focus is the heart of innovation, as the customer’s patterns and preferences give the company new ideas for products and services. He said, “Customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great. Even when they don’t yet know it, customers want something better, and your desire to delight customers will drive you to invent on their behalf.”
Have a clear, long-term vision. Bezos’s mission for Amazon was to be a place where a customer could buy literally anything online. During Amazon’s rise, Bezos poured every dime of investment and profits back into the company, nearly bankrupting it several teams. He invested heavily in technology from the outset, so much so that the computer-side of running the giant online company became a business in-and-of-itself, Amazon Web Services.
That vision also required Amazon to build its own logistics and delivery systems. At the outset Amazon relied on rented warehouses and shipping through major carriers. Today you will find Amazon trucks zig zagging through neighborhoods, Amazon planes traversing the country, and Amazon warehouses with Amazon robots moving around products. Amazon Now is a food delivery service that delivers groceries from the freezer to your front door in two hours. But it will get even faster. Amazon is testing drones that will fly products from area warehouses to your front yard within an hour of ordering.
Many people do not realize Amazon is among the largest employers in the world. Amazon employs more than a million workers—or one of every 169 people in the US. It accomplished this level of success in less than 20 years.
Bezos’ vision was not to build a bookstore, but rather an end-to-end distribution company, where any product could be ordered and delivered in one fail swoop. He always tries to think ahead. He said, “What we need to do is always lean into the future; when the world changes around you and when it changes against you - what used to be a tail wind is now a head wind—you have to lean into that and figure out what to do because complaining isn't a strategy.”
Continually innovate. Amazon in 2020 was one of the foremost companies in the US applying for patents on new inventions. Many involve running the online business more efficiently or address specific problems. Some are entertaining and futuristic, like patents for flying blimp fulfillment centers or underwater warehouses. One of Amazon’s six core values is having a “bias for action,” which means employees are always encouraged to take risks over playing it safe.[2]
In the early days of Amazon, executives wanted to know if it would be helpful to advertise on television. They identified two markets with a good blend of the customer demographics: Portland and Minneapolis. They ran a test for sixteen months. Bezos said that Amazon was “unbelievably fixated on it” and that it was a “long, expensive test, but we were really determined to understand this for our company once and for all.” While the ads did give Amazon a slight bump in sales, Bezos determined that it is wasn’t enough to justify the cost. The lengthy experiment proved helpful for Amazon’s strategy.[3]
Of his business decisions Bezos comments, “All of my best decisions in business and in life have been made with heart, intuition, guts... not analysis.”