Profile
Age 57
Born Albuquerque, New Mexico
Relationship status Divorced
Net worth £146 billion
Randomise some elements of meetings
At Bezos' cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services (AWS), a two-hour weekly meeting on Wednesday mornings would see 200 managers discuss the technical performance of various web services the company offered. These would be selected randomly by a multicoloured roulette wheel with each service marked on it. If a manager's particular purview was chosen, he or she would have to present, in detail and on the spot, to the rest of the division. The idea was to make sure, according to then AWS head Andy Jassy, that managers were "on top of the key metrics of their service all week long, because they know there's a chance they may have to speak to it in detail".
Design your future products now
During the design process of Amazon's Kindle e-reader, engineers were surprised to find Bezos had included a microphone in the device in a draft sketch, even though there weren't any voice-activated features yet available or planned for the Kindle. The engineers weren't keen on the redundant feature, but Bezos insisted it stay. "It felt a bit more like Star Trek than reality," says one employee who was a Kindle hardware director at the time. And yet, eventually, the kernel of this feature would become the basis of Amazon's voice-activated assistant, Alexa.
Write 'PR FAQs'
It might seem normal to write a press release after an initiative is wrapped up or just when it's being brought to market, but at Amazon executives write documents known as "PR FAQs" before they begin work on a new project. These are six-page reports that take the form of a press release outlining the proposed new product's market impact – the idea is to describe what you ultimately want to produce and then work backwards from that end goal to make it. Writing the paper is an essential and deep-rooted part of Amazon's company culture of innovation and forces the executives to begin any conversation about a new product by considering the benefit it will create for customers further down the line.
Act on customer feedback selectively
During the development of Amazon's smart Fire Phone from around 2010 to 2014, Bezos became obsessed with incorporating new technology into the handset, such as 3-D cameras that could track a user's gaze. Despite placing a hugely strong emphasis on customer feedback in all other parts of Amazon's business, these were not features that Amazon customers had requested. In a later letter to shareholders, Bezos would write, "The biggest needle movers will be things that customers don't know to ask for. We must invent on their behalf."
'Draft' employees between divisions
During the development of Alexa, the dedicated division behind it struggled to hire fast enough to fill all the engineering and development roles required. In response, Bezos and his company instituted a company-wide "draft", offering every qualified new hire in certain other parts of Amazon – including Amazon Web Services and retail division – an alternate job offer to join Alexa instead, hugely speeding up the recruiting process.
Mentor through high-level 'shadowing'
Bezos has consistently had a "technical advisor", a coveted role given to a promising executive hand-picked to shadow the CEO at all times. This "TA" would take notes in all of Bezos' meetings, write the first draft of the yearly letter to shareholders and learn by closely following and interacting with Bezos for more than a year. Among the beneficiaries of this mentoring system have been some of Amazon's most senior figures, including new CEO Andy Jassy, who was the first, after joining Amazon in 1997, and who replaced Bezos in July.
Learn when to aim and when to shoot
During a trip to the subcontinent in 2014 to celebrate an infusion of $2 billion (£1.4bn) of capital to Amazon India, Bezos addressed local executives. He said he wanted them to act and think like cowboys and that India was the e-commerce equivalent of the Wild West. "There are two ways of building a business," he told his audience. "Many times, you aim, aim, aim and then shoot. Or you shoot, shoot, shoot and then aim a little bit. That is what you want to do here. Don't spend a lot of time on analysis and precision. Keep trying stuff."
Hit two of the world's three key markets – at least
Returning to India in autumn 2015, Bezos became convinced that there were three major national markets that mattered in the world and that Amazon needed to dominate at least two of them. "The future is going to be the US, China and India," he told colleagues. "For Amazon to be a truly world-class global company, we have to be relevant in two out of the three markets." In this case, Bezos focused on India and the US, after Amazon's attempts to penetrate China had struggled.
Amazon Unbound by Brad Stone (Simon & Schuster, £20) is out now.
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