#21-Amazon Unbound-Jeff Bezos

Sunday Biographies ?? Perfect for those who love learning from the experiences of successful individuals.

Every Sunday, I'll share biographies I've read and the highlights that resonated with me. Your positive feedback on my previous biography-related posts inspired me to create this newsletter.

My Top 10 Highlights from the book

1. Every interesting thing I’ve ever done, every important thing I’ve ever done, every beneficial thing I’ve ever done, has been through a cascade of experiments and mistakes and failures.
2. If Bezos took one leadership principle most to heart—which would also come to define the next half decade at Amazon—it was principle #8, “think big”: Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Leaders create and communicate a bold direction that inspires results. They think differently and look around corners for ways to serve customers.
3. He reiterated that he wanted them to think like cowboys, with India as the Wild West frontier of e-commerce. “There are two ways of building a business. Many times, you aim, aim, aim, and then shoot,” he said, according to three executives who were there. “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.”
4. Bezos also advocated for the practice of stack ranking, where employees were rated by their managers on the basis of job performance, with the lowest performers pushed out the door.
5. Bezos understood that in some quarters, all this might make Amazon an unpopular place to work. But he also felt that the perks factored into those high-profile media surveys of workplace desirability—like lavish compensation, unlimited vacation time, and free meals and massages—had little to do with the passion and purpose employees brought to their jobs. “He once told me, ‘If we ever appear in the “100 best places to work in America,” you’ve screwed this place up,’?” Niekerk said.
6. Averages are bad measures. I want to see actuals, highs, lows and why—not an average. An average is just lazy.
7. “Focus on lowering cost structure. It is better to have low costs and then charge to maximize your value versus charging to cover costs. We do not charge more because we can't figure out how to make it cost less. We invent to make it cost less."
8. Bezos and Kessel were getting impatient. Despite three years of work, Amazon hadn't opened a single store. So in the peculiar fashion of invention at Amazon, they created separate teams to pursue the singular goal of bringing the company into the vast realm of physical retail. Bezos liked to say Amazon was "stubborn on vision, flexible on details," and here was an illustration: groups working on parallel tracks would essentially compete to fulfill the "Just Walk Out" ideal and solve the problem of the cashierless store.
9. Jeff always said that when you focus on the business inputs, then the outputs such as revenue and income will take care of themselves.
10. "If I have to choose between agreement and conflict, I'll take conflict every time," Bezos often said. “It always yields a better result."

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See you all next week, and happy reading! ??