Sunday, December 06, 2020

Story of Amazon - How Bezos' built one of the world's most valuable companies

 A phenomenon that is catching up with the millennials these days across the world is online shopping (B2C) and the one name that facilitates all these hue and cry in the online domain is nothing but Amazon.

I happened to listen to a HBR podcast (Nov '20 click here) on the same topic and which has also been put up as a Google podcast (click here) where HBR interviews Harvard Business School Professor Sunil Gupta.

Amazon (worth $1.6 trillion) Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos is worth $184.6 billion in 2020. How can a company be so successful and source of rage for youngsters and technologists the world over ?

Bezos' 3 strong points are given here

  • Customer focus and the resultant data insights
  • Logistics (Operational and Supply Chain) excellence and 
  • Focus on technology

Amazon is a service oriented company. In services, we lay great emphasis on customer focus. What makes Amazon stand out from other service comp[anies that also focus on customers is the OBSESSION WITH CUSTOMERS.

We see our customers as invited guests to a party and we are the hosts. And it is our duty to make the customer experience a little bit better - Jeff Bezos

Leadership style

What is special about Bezos' leadership and communication styles ?

  • Long term focus
  • Customer focus
  • Willing to experiment, fail, learn and innovate

His communication style is never messages or emails, it is writing 6 page long memos, distributed just minutes before the meeting, which everyone reads and discusses together. 

While most of the CEOs focus on the next quarter or the next, Bezos goes a step further, he is planning now what the company will be doing after 5 years. This long term focus is  helping him in getting the right acquisitions and product introduction like for instance the Kindle and Amazon echo series of AI based Personal Assistants. 

His very popular HR strategy has been to recruit and surround oneself with people smarted than one is. 

Issues :

Has Amazon given a ear to the packaging wastage and the resulting damage to the environment ?. Not yet. 

Amazon wants its employees to go out of the way to make the customer experience always the best, resulting in some compromises when it comes to treating employees. 

How is Amazon planning to integrate the mom and pop stores which they are replacing these days. Amazon does not have a clear answer to that too.

George..

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