- Jeff Bezos has been at the helm of Amazon for nearly 30 years.
- His successor, Andy Jassy, called him “the most extraordinary business leader of our time.”
- Here are some of Bezos' most famous principles for running a team and a business:
Andy Jassy called him “perhaps the most extraordinary business leader of our time.”
During his 27 years at the helm of Amazon, Jeff Bezos taught his successor, Jassy, and others a lot about how to run one of the world's largest companies.
Below is some of the advice he has shared over the years about managing teams and companies.
Thinking about the bigger picture
Bezos “always had a way of getting his teams to think big,” Jassy said in a 2017 speech.
“It was great to see a lot of ideas coming to him from the team that I thought were really good ideas, really good ideas, and Jeff listened to those ideas, thought about them, and really looked ahead and helped them find solutions and said, 'Should we expand on this idea? Should we look naturally ahead and push the idea beyond what we're thinking today and really reshape what we've built?'” Jassy said.
“Great things start with small things. The largest oak tree begins with an acorn,” Bezos said in 2017.
Have high standards
Bezos had high expectations for the entire organization.
“If you're running a large organization and you can't attend every meeting, you can set a reasonably high standard — maybe an unreasonably high standard, a reasonably high standard that people can reach — and you can have a lot of influence across the organization even if you don't attend every meeting,” Jassy said.
“Strategically patient, tactically patient”
Bezos prioritized speed while sticking to the company's long-term vision.
“He has a long-term vision and a belief in what he wants to accomplish, and even if people tell him it can't be done — and they always tell him it can't be done — he has a belief in it, he believes it can be done and he sticks to that vision,” Jassy said. “But in the meantime, he understands that it may take a long time to get to where we want to be, but speed is of the essence.”
Decide the number of participants for a meeting with two pizzas
Bezos is known for having a “two-pizza rule” for meetings, meaning he limits the number of people in his meetings to only those that could be filled with two pizzas.
He believes this helps improve productivity, speed and collaboration.
Create a story, not a PowerPoint
Bezos said Amazon has “the strangest meeting culture I've ever encountered.” One thing Bezos won't do in a meeting is use PowerPoint, which he has banned from company meetings.
“For each meeting, someone in the meeting prepares six pages of notes that are structured in a narrative format, with actual sentences, topic sentences and verbs,” he says. “They're not just bullet points. They're meant to create a context for the discussion that's going to happen.”
He said his perfect meeting involves days of preparation, “crisp documentation and messy meetings.”
In a 2004 email to his senior team, Bezos explained why he didn't like PowerPoint:
“PowerPoint-style presentations can somehow downplay ideas, flatten their relative importance, and ignore their interrelationships,” he writes.
Bezos makes sure everyone in his meetings reads his notes.
“We read the notes in the room, and like high schoolers, executives bluff during meetings like they've read the notes, so we have to make sure we set aside time to make sure everyone is actually reading the notes, not just pretending to,” he said.
Bezos is no stranger to assigning summer reading assignments to his executives.
Listen to customer feedback
Bezos's emails are public and it is unlikely the jet-setting billionaire responded to customers, but he said he sometimes forwarded customer concerns or feedback to the appropriate department.
“I look at most of those emails. I look at them, mark them with a question mark and forward them to the head of that region. That's shorthand. [for]”I asked, 'Can you look into this?' and 'Why is this happening?'” he said in 2018.
Bezos stressed that Amazon will focus on “customer obsession, not competitor obsession.”
“Companies often say they're customer-focused, but in reality they spend most of their energy dealing with and negotiating with competitors,” he said.
In fact, much of Amazon's success can be traced back to Bezos' early days of soliciting customer feedback.
In 1997, Bezos sent an email to 1,000 customers asking what they would like the company to sell them, and one customer replied that they wanted Bezos to sell them windshield wiper blades, because they were brand new.
“I thought, 'I can sell anything this way,'” Bezos said.
“Against and Commit”
In 2016 Letter to ShareholdersBezos spoke about the importance of an “oppose and commit” strategy in decision-making.
“Even if there's no agreement, if you're confident in a particular direction, it can be helpful to say, 'I know we won't see each other on this, but do you want to take a gamble together? Are you willing to commit despite the dissent?' At this stage, no one knows the answer for sure, and the answer will probably be yes pretty quickly,” he writes.
Categorize your decisions and make them faster than you think
In his 2015 shareholder letter, Bezos made a distinction between Type 1 and Type 2 decisions: Type 1 decisions are high-impact and have a major impact on the company's strategy, while Type 2 decisions are lower-impact and can be easily reversed if necessary.
Bezos says Type 1 decisions should take up most of your time, and Type 2 decisions should be delegated or bundled with other smaller decisions to come later.
Bezos believes you should make decisions with 70% of the information you want and then iterate from there, because he says if you wait until you have all the data you want, you'll act too slowly.
Additionally, Bezos prefers to make decisions in the morning.
“He said, 'Usually we take the important decisions at around 10:30 a.m., we discuss them the day before, we sleep on them, and then we actually decide in the morning,'” said Italian fashion designer Brunello Cucinelli. The Wall Street Journal Lane Florsheim in 2020.
