Jeff Bezos the $189bn man who adopts on two Pizza team policy
Bloomberg Journalist, Brad Stone, charts a revelatory and definitive portrait of Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder’s journey to become the world’s richest man and Amazon’s expansion exponentially, inventing novel products like Alexa and disrupting countless industries. Its workforce quintupled in size ad its valuation has soared Lowell over a trillion dollars.
Jeff Bezos who once housed in a garage, now is empire spans the globe. Between services like Whole foods, Prime Video and Amazon’s cloud computing unit, AWS plus Bezos’s ownership of The Washington Post, it is impossible to go a day without encountering its impact as we live in a world run, supplied and controlled by Amazon and its iconoclast founder who became one of the most powerful and feared entities in global economy.
Bezos, who started as an unfashionable, single-minded geeky technologist, fo the ecommerce company, totally devoted to building Amazon, and became a body belt business kingpin almost mystical aura of invincibility, disciplined billionaire with global ambitions, who ruled Amazon with an iron fist amid his personal life splashed over the tabloids.
Amazon has successfully ridden the black swan of the pandemic, reporting two successive quarters of more than $100bn in sales.
Bezos also anointed his successor Andy Jassy, who heads the increasingly important AWS cloud computing subsidiary, which rents out computing power and data storage.
Amazon was worth $120bn in late 2012, and had fewer than 150, 000 employees is now worth $1.65trn and employed over 1,5m by the end of last year. It has added AWS, Alexa voice activated speakers and prime videos. This week Amazon is in talks to acquire MGM, the studio behind the James Bond films.
Bezos s the real-life equivalent of a bond villain, who sits atop an expanding empire that is able to sustain a cycle of low prices, customer loyalty and constant reinvestment. Amazon now faces looming questions about its political licence to operate as freely as it has in the past, and its ability to maintain momentum.
Stone reveals Bezos’s leadership style as “stern paternalism” or single minded aggression.
“Jeff just wanted us to be unbounded” says one of executives on the Alexa project. In the interest of serving customer, Bezos requires many sacrifices of his nearest lieutenants and the more distant, hard-pressed warehouse staff, from the tribal (economy air travel, even on long haul routes) to the most serious the physical stress of working in algorithm and robot-dominated warehouses.
Megan Wulff, the product manager who launched Prime Day, Amazon’s unabashed mid-year festival of discount consumerism, who asked herself “ Was the overall impact of Amazon’s consumer obsession on local businesses, the climate, and warehouse worker worth it “. She concluded it was not and not only quit the company inn 2019 but cancelled her Prime membership, recycled her Amazon echos and closed her Amazon account permanently.
Stone highlights Amazon’s early public testimony from enthusiastic users of Amazon’s popular but controversial marketplace for third party sellers.
“ I did not start my business and go sell on Amazon so that I could eventually become fertiliser for Amazon’s growth as I am buried and destroyed.” Says one third party seller.
Stone also concentrates on the huge political and regulatory opposition on Amazon’s home territory, reinforced this year with president Joe Bidden’s appointment or nomination of critics of Big Tech. Amazonians were instructed to knock over coffee, stand up, and loudly object if they heard colleagues hint at price-setting or collusion to internal meetings.
Amazon’s executives were astonished by the customers who benefited from its heavy discounting , immense product range and competitive and innovative drive might also object to its ubiquity.
The group’s hubris was on full display in its abortive attempt to crown the New York Borough of Queens with its second headquarters in 2019, after a contradictory and controversial auction in which it sought incentives and rebates from US cities.
Stone, however, shows his admiration for the way in which Amazon continues to use its leverage to grow, and the management techniques the Amazon founder uses. Some, such as the insistence on two pizza teams ( small enough to be fed with two pizza), are well known. There is plenty of ideas to emulate Amazon’s success. However, Bezos’s intensity is likely to be harder to replicate.
Executives assigned to a “Jeff Project”, where Bezos insisted on regular updates were in the “Hottest crucible at Amazon”.
The tough challenge of maintaining the temperature at Amazon now falls Jassy who also inherits the trickle political challenges and perennial problems of how to ensure large companies continue to grow without without losing their innovative zest.
Bezos’s mantra was drummed into Amzonians that they “seek to nurture the start up spirit of DAY 1. He is shown worrying constantly that Amazon may be sliding into bad habits of DAY 2 companies, which are stasis, followed by irrelevance, followed by encrusting, painful decline, followed by death”, he tells one staff meeting.
Covid-19 dragged Bezos back into the operational centre, his other interest his blue origin space rocket company, his ownership of the Washington Post, his new partner -were occupying increasing tracts of his time.
Amazon now employs 1, 000 public relations and policy staff almost four times as in 2015.
“My life is based on a large series of mistakes” Jeff Bezos once said speaking to an audience of luminaries that included Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama an Nancy Pelosi at a black event in Washington in 2019.
Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire by Brad Stone, Simon & Schuster £20/$30, 496 pages.