Jeff Bezo's disruptive ways of building business

Reading Bezos's biography & 20 years of letters to shareholders shows that becoming a top performer isn't rooted in special tactics. Instead, it's rooted in simple principles.

Principles are like a compass which guides you and helps you to keep an unwavering focus on your goal. Many will try to shame you and question your way of doing things, but your philosophy will be the guiding star for you to navigate the difficult times. 

"We don't claim it's the right philosophy; we just claim it's ours!" - Jeff Bezos

From the very beginning, his focus was not on his competitors, but his customers - 

Just this above principle has guided him to where he is today. He was a child prodigy, covered in newspapers and magazines from the age of 15 for his academic genius and street smart. He worked at two startups and soon found the high market demand for books, also saw that internet users were growing at an exponential rate. So he decided to start an online bookstore. 

He took a course on bookstore business. 

He was technically capable of building a website but still hired two people smarter than him to make the website. The bookstore was a resounding success, but he kept disrupting his business to keep the customers always happy and at the center of his business.  

5 times he went against his own business to offer his customers a better service - 

1. He pioneered by first time allowing negative feedback about books on his website which many thought was counter-intuitive. Customer who would have bought the book might not buy it seeing the negative review(lost sale). But it helped the customers to make a better choice and not waste money on wrong products. 
2. He then allowed other sellers to sell their stuff on his platform, again a bold move. He saved the customer time by getting all the sellers at one place. Now the customer will not waste time searching for the best price; they can compare it all on one platform and buy it from there. 
3. He started selling Digital books which were bad for print books and may have killed his business. When people were moving away from cassettes and CDs to iTunes, he quickly sensed the same might happen to books, and he was ready to embrace the change and kill his revenues on print books. 
4. He allowed people to read almost half the book online. For just $1.99 per book, anybody can read as many pages of a book as they wished. He was testing the idea of paying for access to digital books while the Kindle was being tested. No Surprise for readily killing the paper product which started his company. 
5. Then he started selling kindle & discounting digital books like crazy. The book publishing industry was irrevocably changed. 

The thing about inventing is you have to be both stubborn and flexible. Of course, the hard part is figuring out when to be which! - Jeff Bezos 

Whenever he sees another company with similar values, he invests in them. He has not just learned to build a great company but also recognize other great companies. He was an early investor in both Google & Twitter. 

The Key is to look beyond current conventional wisdom & embrace a radical new idea. Engineers in his company are given freedom to experiment; good ideas are embraced, one such idea from an employee led to Amazon web services business which proved to be a huge success also shows how bold Bezos can be when adopting new opportunities. 

4 Simple philosophies he follows for everything he does (from the book One Click)- 

1. "Obsess over the customer." - There is no rest for the weary. I constantly remind our employees to be afraid, to wake up every morning terrified. Not of our competition, but of our customers. Our customers have made our business what it is, they are the ones with whom we have a relationship, and they are the ones to whom we owe a great obligation. And we consider them to be loyal to us--right up until the second that someone else offers them a better service.- Jeff Bezos
2. "Focus on the long term, keep an eye on the distant prize "

3. "Invent & reinvent until you get it right." 

4. "It' s always Day One." - “Staying in Day 1 requires you to experiment patiently, accept failures, plant seeds, protect saplings, and double down when you see customer delight. A customer-obsessed culture best creates the conditions where all of that can happen.” — Jeff Bezos “Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death.” — Jeff Bezos

Bezos warns against this as follows:

“You stop looking at outcomes and make sure you’re doing the process right. Gulp. It’s not that rare to hear a junior leader defend a bad outcome with something like, “Well, we followed the process.”

Among all the leaders I have read about so far I found Jeff Bezos to be the most inspirational followed by Elon Musk. Look forward to your thoughts and comments on the above philosophies. 

(Sangeeta Devni is an entrepreneur, creative thinker with a passion for bettering people’s lives. She was invited by the United States Government as an emerging foreign leader on an International Visitor leadership Program to meet the world’s best accelerators, Incubators & startups in San Francisco, Austin, Boston, & Texas. Sangeeta is one of the active startup's ecosystem collaborators in India and has been invited on live TV shows like News9 and BBC News London, delivered keynotes & lectures at the various events, programs and IITs.)