Jeff Bezos, founder, chairman and CEO of Amazon, is one of the most inspiring entrepreneurs of our time.
The capital of Amazon exceeded the threshold of one trillion US dollars, which exceeds the value of Google and Microsoft. Jeff Bezos has a fortune of about $ 170 billion USD
1, making him the richest person in the world, even in modern times.
In addition to Amazon, Jeff Bruce founded Blue Origin, a commercial space firm, that plans to be the first private company to land on the moon.
There are a lot of lessons that we can learn from this unique character, not only in business, investment and management, but also in everyday life and personal. In this article, we will present 10 of the most important lessons that can be learned from Jeff Bezos, which are mainly drawn from the annual messages Jeff Bezos to Shareholders
2, a key reference for the company’s employees, as the founder and director of Amazon reveals some insights into the successes of his flagship company. Over the years, his speeches have become an important reference for entrepreneurs around the world.
Table of Contents
Be Stubborn in Your Vision and Goals, Flexible in The Details
According to Jeff Bezos, entrepreneurs (and people in general) should be stubborn and resilient at the same time, Bezos says of Amazon philosophy, “We are stubborn in our vision. But they are flexible in the details.”
You should stick to your vision and goal, but at the same time be flexible in the methods and approaches of lowering your vision and achieving your goals, according to Jeff Bezos, “If you’re not stubborn, you will soon hand over on experimentation and innovation. If you are not flexible, you will hit your head in contradiction of a wall, and you will not see another solution to the problem you are trying to resolve.”
It is easier said than done, because applying this principle is not always easy, because the challenge is knowing when to be stubborn and not to compromise, and when to be flexible. A successful businessman is the one who knows how to differentiate between the things he should be stubborn and stick to his opinions and ideas, and the things he should be open to change and dissenting opinions. So you are a shipping business, and you have done the needful and connected to your prospective clients on a great online shipping website where thousands are browsing for loads to deliver. Here you have every rule and regulation pretty laid out for you, helping to guide your business towards success. You would still need to be flexible in some of your methods to suit the differences in each job
you’ll be handling.
Leaders are said to be stubborn in nature. They strive to take responsibility and get things done on their way. This may be true when it comes to vision and major goals, but in terms of details, they are flexible and open to new ideas, and do not hesitate to review themselves if they see that the path, they take to their goals is impassable.
The Law of Pizetine
Jeff Bezos believes that small and independent teams are the best (this may be rooted in his work as CEO of a startup earlier). He believes in the “two pizza rule”, which means that teams must be small enough to have two pizza enough. In practice, this means that the number of people should be between 5 and 7 in the team.
Jeff Bezos believes that the big teams are usually less efficient. This lack of efficiency weakens the team’s results and achievements and leads to waste. So, he calls for the task forces to be small, and to be given the freedom to work and experiment.
We can see that such an approach has a problem, especially in large companies, because in a large company where hundreds or thousands of employees work, the base of pizetine will necessarily lead to the creation of a very large number of teams, which may reach hundreds, and this raises the problem of monitoring and directing those The difference, as well as the coordination between them. But if Amazon can apply this rule, which employs more than half a million employees, I suspect that the rule will be more suitable for companies and smaller projects.
Innovation and Permanent Experimentation
One of the beautiful quotes of Jeff Bezos: “If you double the number of experiments you do annually, it will double your creativity.”
Most CEOs will agree that experience is necessary for their business. They are the incubator and source of new innovations, and an important competitive advantage in the market. Experience is indispensable in the field of business, as car companies constantly experiment with new technologies and designs, food companies are experimenting with new flavors, and pharmaceutical companies are trying new real estate; technology companies are constantly in pursuit of the new, and they encourage their employees to innovate and experiment, for example, Google gives its employees 20 % Of their time on the job to try new things, and work on side projects.
Jeff Bezos ‘philosophy has been reflected on Amazon, it suffices to take a look at the great diversity of products and services provided by Amazon, part of that is due to Bezos’ philosophy of experimentation and rapid innovation. From this perspective, Jeff Bezos can be considered contrary to Steve Jobs, as the Apple company he founded is content with offering only a few products, unlike Amazon which provides dozens. The following image is found at the bottom of the Amazon website pages, and it includes the various services provided by the company, you can see the number and the wide variety of those services.
Jeff Bezos likes to describe his employees as pioneers and creators a lot, in addition to being himself an inventor and innovator, he is the founder of the Blue Origin space company, and he holds some patents for some of his innovations, such as the phones airbag system 3, or the solar stove that he invented when he was a child 4 And don’t forget its most important innovation, the Amazon giant.
If you want to be a successful entrepreneur, regardless of the field in which you work, you should not be afraid to try new things, innovate and create. Innovation and innovators are pushing the world forward.
Long-Term Thinking
If there is one thing that distinguishes Jeff Bezos, it is that he thinks in the long run.
When Jeff Bezos was once asked about Amazon’s revenue growth, he didn’t remember the exact growth rate, which is rare for a CEO. When asked about it, he said, “I have been thinking for a few years ahead. I have already forgotten these numbers.”
Amazon store was established since 1994. At that time, computers were slow, and the Internet was in its infancy, but Bezos knew from that time that there would come a time when people would buy what they needed online. Jeff said those days were one of the most difficult days of his life. He was striving to raise a million dollars to establish Amazon. And it was very difficult. He said he spoke to 60 people, 22 of them answered, and raised him $ 50,000.
But why was that so difficult? People did not know what the Internet was then. Bezos said, “The first question most of these [investors] were asking was ‘What is the Internet?'”
Think about it a little, most people at the time did not know what the Internet was. Yet Bezos was able to predict that in the future people would buy the products they needed from him. This is a lesson in long-term thinking.
Avoiding doing something early, or a promising idea, because it is bad in the short term is one of the mistakes many entrepreneurs make. Some ideas will not pay off immediately. Focus on long-term thinking and you will achieve better results. Because short-term results are an unreliable indicator of long-term results, how many ideas stumbled at the beginning and did not receive the support or expected success, then after that it succeeded.
Obsession with Consumers
On Amazon, there is a famous saying: “Start with customers, then go back.”
Jeff Bezos says: “We are not obsessed with competitors, but obsessed with customers. We start with the customer, then work back.” What is meant by working backwards is to start with customers, their needs and problems. This is in contrast to what some companies do, looking for ideas, then making products, and then hoping that customers will love them.
Here are some examples of Amazon’s focus on the customer, giving it priority, and sometimes even the customer’s interest ahead of its short-term profits:
- Help customers avoid unintended duplicate orders: Amazon noticed that some of its customers mistakenly requested products they had previously purchased. So, Amazon decided to help its customers by placing an alert on the product pages that the customer had previously purchased.
After Amazon did its calculations, it noticed a decrease in sales, but that did not deter it from continuing to help its customers avoid buying products they had previously purchased accidentally, because it believed that this would increase customer loyalty to the company.
- Allowing competitors to advertise on your site: Another example of Amazon introducing its customers in the interest of short-term profits is the decision taken by Jeff Bezos, which allows competitors to advertise on Amazon, and promote their prices. At first glance, this seems strange (perhaps because it is really strange), allowing competitors to advertise their prices on Amazon may weaken its competitive position, but Bezos insisted on this anyway, because he believes that this will be better for customers. And in this he says: “The decision was controversial within the company. There was a lot of anxiety about him.”
- Introducing more to customers without asking: When Amazon introduced Amazon Prime, a premium subscription-based service, it was very popular, Bezos wrote in his 2012 letter, that customers were happy when Amazon added new features to the service, such as movies and books Without costing them anything extra. This has made customers more loyal to the company.
Amazon gives its customers a high priority, and puts them above all considerations, but it has reached the matter that it was giving compensation for the goods whose prices have decreased after the customers requested it, and perhaps this obsession with customers is what made Amazon what it is today, a giant company whose market value exceeds all economies Arabic.
Build Your Strategy on Things That Won’t Change
“People often ask me the following question,” Jeff Bezos said at the re: Invent 2012 conference. “What will revolution in the next ten years? “This is an interesting question; we hear it a lot. But no one asks the following question: “What will not revolution in the next ten years?”, And the second question for me is extra important than the first – since you can only base your strategy on the steadfast things … In the digital trade that I work in, we know that clients want low prices, and I am sure this will not change ten years from now. They want fast transfer, and they want a variety of choice. And I don’t imagine that ten years from now, the customer will come to me and say: “Jeff love Amazon, I would prefer if the charges were a little higher, or I love Amazon, but I hope you deliver the goods slower. It is impossible to imagine this in the future. Consequently, the efforts that we have made in these matters, we know for sure that it will pay off ten years from now.
What will not change for your project and clients over the next ten years? Take the Bezos advice, focus on those things, and you will reap the rewards of your efforts in the upcoming.
Start now so you don’t regret later
One of the worst feelings a person can feel is remorse. When Bezos was thinking about building Amazon, he had to make an important decision about whether to start his own business and start his own business, or keep his good job on Wall Street. Jeff Bezos based his decision on a concept he called the Regret Minimization Framework. This helped him realize that if he did not try and establish his project, he would regret it later. This fear of remorse is one of the main reasons behind his decision to go ahead and start the Amazon project. Jeff Bezos said that when he wanted to make this difficult decision, imagining himself at the age of eighty, he said he knew then that he would not regret trying to start his own company, and experimenting with his idea of this strange (then) thing called the Internet, and he said he would not regret even if He fails, but he may regret it if he never tries. You can follow this short video by Jeff Bezos on this topic:
If You Wait and Need People to Support You with Every Decision You Make, You Will Not Succeed
If Jeff Bezos was waiting for people to support him in all of his decisions, he would not have founded Amazon, then at that time, the idea of creating a website for trade on the Internet was an odd idea, and it seemed that it could not succeed, until he found it very difficult to persuade investors to finance his project. However, Bezos did not give up, and his resolve did not diminish simply because he did not receive the support his idea deserved, he continued to dream, and resigned from his comfortable position.
You can look at it from this perspective, if all your ideas are acceptable to people, and they see them as logical, and support them, then it is likely that these ideas will not bring about radical changes, and will not open new horizons, so long as people support them, then it is likely that many of them have preceded you . And you’ll find intense competition for it, but on the other hand, if you have an idea that people seem strange and reluctant to support, and you are convinced of its success, then perhaps that idea will change your life, and maybe change the world, as many have done, such as Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, Larry Page and Sergey Brin are founders of Google, and many others.
This does not mean that the traditional ideas that people support are not necessarily good, on the contrary, many of them are viable, what I mean here is that you must chase your dreams, even if people saw them as far away, or impossible, if you believe in them and you are certain of the success of the idea, So start and trust in God Almighty.
Commit Yourself and Those Around You with High Standards
It can sometimes be tempting to lower our standards to the standards of the clients we serve. If they are satisfied with a good or service that we provide, we may see that this is sufficient, and there is no need to search for the best. Or sometimes you might say that you don’t have to do everything to the required level, or always stick to the delivery time, customers will understand your faults and slips.
Bezos said that if you add a person to a team that works according to high standards, that person will adapt to those standards. And vice versa, if you add a person to a team with low standards, he will adapt to it and adopt those criteria.
Even people who have high standards in general, must have weaknesses. So, you must constantly raise your standards, always try to improve yourself, enhance your skills, and fix your recurring mistakes. If, for example, you notice that you are not committed to delivery time in most of your projects, fixing this should be a priority for you and your team.Also, invest in the quality of your teams. There are many software out there that can assist you a bit more to improve the quality of workflow in your business which must not be taken for granted. From time and attendance to scheduling and shifting, even payroll optimization and employee tracking, you will find the simple Deputy roster software a most useful resource for your business.
Save Your Effort for Irreversible Decisions
Slow decisions kill innovation, Bezos writes in his 2015 letter. Learn how to distinguish between options that will lead you to a point of no return, and options that can be undone. Don’t waste too much time making reversible decisions, you can change course later if necessary.
Bezos says that an in-depth analysis of all decisions, as if they were all equal, could discourage you from risk and experimentation. Focus your effort on those options that will take you in one direction and cannot be reversed at a later time.
Be bold. Be brave, and risk. And do not wait for the future to ravage you, but participate yourself in the industry. These may be the most important lessons we can learn from Jeff Bezos, the richest man in modern history.
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