How does the richest person on the planet run Amazon?

Jeff Bezos says that he always goes to bed early, wakes up early, and organizes productive meetings before lunch.

Customer-centric, ignore stock prices and distinguish good from bad. This is one of Amazon’s principles of operation.

In the process of building and growing Amazon to become the world’s largest company today, Jeff Bezos has always had a distinct leadership style. This manifests itself in the letters he sends annually to shareholders as well as his articles and interviews.

Jeff Bezos has run Amazon for almost three decades, and he also laid out the principles for everything from sleep (getting 8 hours of sleep) to the best timing for meetings (not before 10 a.m.).

What his maxims have in common is his emphasis on constant innovation. This philosophy has driven Amazon’s dominance in all aspects as well as uplifted the company’s work culture.

Here are some lessons about leadership from Jeff Bezos:

Make a few quality decisions

Bezos told an audience at the economics club in Washington in 2018 that he always went to bed early, got up early, and scheduled productive meetings before lunch. All for making a few clear and smart decisions every day. He added: “I only need to make three decisions a day, but all three must have quality.”

Customers are first

Bezos often attributed Amazon’s success to being responsive to customer needs. In an interview with the Washington Economics Club, he said that from the early days of Amazon, he always attended all the meetings to motivate executives to think about their decisions. how they will affect the customer. And when Bezos considered expanding his business, he emailed 1,000 random customers. He asked them what they wanted to buy on the Amazon website. After getting a response, he concluded that he could sell just about anything on the internet – that’s exactly what he did.

Continuous innovation

The Drucker Institute is a research institution based at Claremont Graduate University in California. In 2019, the Drucker Institute rated Amazon as the best-managed company in the United States. The factor that helped Amazon surpass Apple in this ranking is the company’s intense focus on innovation. The Drucker’s researchers say the number of Amazon’s patent applications, trademarks, and research and development spending far outstrips other companies. At the same time, Amazon’s rate of abandoning applications and patents is also higher than that of other companies. This is a sign of a readiness to transform outdated technology. Not only the company, but Bezos himself is also listed on dozens of Amazon patents.

Referring to Amazon’s innovations in customer reviews, Alexa virtual assistant and convenient shopping, he said: “Even a few years later you invent something very novel, But the new becomes old. People will also get bored of your invention. And that boredom is the biggest driving force for an inventor. “

Face failure

Failure and innovation go hand in hand, from Bezos’ point of view. However, there is still a difference between good failure and bad failure. “When we develop a new product, service or experiment and it doesn’t work, that’s okay. It’s a meaningful failure , “ says Bezos. The billionaire also added: “If we build a new order processing center and it is a disaster, obviously, the execution of that decision is a mistake.”

Organize effective meetings

Mr. Bezos is known for his principle: All meetings must be productive . To do that, he asked the presenters to write a summary, no more than six pages long, to be distributed to everyone at the start of the meeting. Mr. Bezos emphasized the importance of the summary in one of his letters to investors: “They are so brilliant, thoughtful, they arrange the meeting to have a high-quality discussion.” Employees report that they have spent weeks perfecting their summaries. It is the process of helping to sharpen ideas and improve decision making and discussion.

Ignore stock prices

In 2018, Mr Bezos told the economic club in Washington that it was a mistake to focus on a company’s stock volatility, or at least a waste of effort. He said that over the years he kept telling employees: “If a company’s share price goes up 30 percent in a month, don’t feel like you’re 30 percent smarter. And if it falls 30 percent. %, do not feel that you are less “. “Never take the time to think about daily stock prices because I have never done it myself,” he added.