- Jeff Bezos spent nearly three decades at the helm of Amazon.
- His successor, Andy Jassy, called him “the most unusual business leader of our time.”
- Here are some of Bezos’ most famous principles for managing a team and a business.
Andy Jassy called him “arguably the most unusual 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 biggest companies.
Here are some of the tips he has shared over the years on managing a team and a business:
Think big
Bezos “always had a way of getting teams to think bigger,” Jassy said at a 2017 conference.
“It was amazing how many ideas came to him from teams – which I thought were really good ideas, and they were really good ideas – where Jeff would listen to them, think about them, and then really look around the corners and help to understand and said, “Well, shouldn’t we expand this idea naturally?” change the shape of what we have built?’” says Jassy.
“Big things start small. The biggest oak tree grows from an acorn,” Bezos said in 2017.
Have high standards
Bezos had high expectations that extended throughout the organization.
“When you run a large organization and you can’t attend every meeting, you can set reasonably high standards – I might even say unreasonably high standards, reasonably high standards that people strive for – ”It gives you a lot of real leverage within the organization, where you’re not at all these meetings,” Jassy said.
Be “strategically patient and tactically impatient”
Bezos has emphasized speed while remaining true to his long-term vision for the company.
“His conviction about his long-term vision and the direction he wants to take something – and even when people tell him it’s not possible, which by the way, all the time, they people tell him it’s not possible – he has a conviction about it and believes it’s possible and is stubborn about that vision,” Jassy said. “But, in the meantime, even though it may take us a long time to get where we want to go, he understands that speed matters disproportionately.”
Determine the number of meeting participants by 2 pizzas
Bezos applies the “two pizza rule” to meetings: he limits them to the number of people who can be fed with two pizzas.
He credits this with helping productivity, speed and collaboration.
Create stories, not PowerPoints
Bezos said Amazon had “the strangest meeting culture you’ve ever encountered.” One of Bezos’s meeting don’ts is PowerPoints, which he has banned in company meetings.
“For each meeting, a meeting member prepared a six-page, narratively structured memo containing real sentences, topic sentences and verbs,” he said. “It’s not just about bullet points. It’s meant to create context for the discussion we’re about to have.”
He said his perfect meeting required days of preparation and involved “a clear document and a messy meeting.”
In a 2004 email to his senior team, Bezos explained why he doesn’t like PowerPoints.
“Powerpoint-style presentations somehow gloss over ideas, flatten any sense of relative importance, and ignore the interconnectedness of ideas,” he wrote.
Bezos makes sure meeting participants read the memos.
“We read to the room. Just like high school students, leaders will bluff throughout the meeting as if they have read the memo. So you have to allow time for everyone to actually read the memo – they are not not just pretend,” he said.
Bezos has also previously assigned summer readings to senior executives.
Get Customer Reviews
Bezos’ email is public, and while it’s hard to imagine the jet-setting billionaire responding to clients, he says he sometimes forwards their concerns or comments to the appropriate departments.
“I see most of these emails. I see them and forward them to the people in charge of the area with a question mark. It’s shorthand (for) ‘Can you look into this?’ “Why is this happening?” he said in 2018.
Bezos has made it a point at Amazon to focus on “customer obsession, as opposed to competitor obsession.”
“Often companies say they are focused on customers, but they actually spend most of their energy reacting and talking about their competitors,” he said.
In fact, much of Amazon’s success can be traced back to Bezos soliciting customer feedback early on in the company.
In 1997, Bezos sent an email to 1,000 customers asking them what they would like to see the company sell. One customer said he wanted Bezos to sell windshield wiper blades because he needed new ones.
“I thought, ‘We can sell everything this way,’” Bezos said.
“I do not agree and I agree”
In his 2016 letter to shareholdersBezos spoke about the importance of the “disagree and engage” strategy in decision-making.
“If you’re convinced of a particular direction even if there’s no consensus, it’s helpful to say, ‘Look, I know we don’t agree on this, but are you going to play with me on this? Disagree and commit?’ At this point, no one can know the answer for sure, and you’ll probably get a quick yes,” he wrote.
Categorize decisions and make them sooner than you think
Bezos wrote in his 2015 letter to shareholders that he distinguished between Type 1 and Type 2 decisions. Type 1 decisions are high impact and have great influence on company strategy, while that Type 2 decisions have lower stakes and can be more easily overturned if necessary.
Bezos says that Type 1 decisions take up most of your time, while Type 2 decisions should be delegated or grouped with other smaller decisions for later.
Bezos believes you should make decisions with 70% of the information you wish you had, and iterate from there. He says he does this because if you waited for all the data you wanted, you would act too slowly.
Additionally, Bezos likes to make decisions in the morning.
“He said: ‘Normally I make important decisions around 10:30, I will discuss it the day before, I will sleep on it and in the morning I will make the decision,'” Italian fashion designer Brunello said. Cucinelli said The Wall Street Journal Florsheim Way in 2020.
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