Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is an outstanding business leader and innovator with a strong focus on long-term business growth. Many of Bezos' management philosophies are worth learning from. For example, his "reverse working method" requires that everything starts from the needs of the customer, rather than the existing technology and capabilities to determine the next move. Under the guidance of these management philosophies, Amazon eventually became the world's largest online retailer with a market value of over $100 billion.
If you want to understand Jeff Bezos' obsession with long-term goals, look at the projects he works on in his spare time. His mysterious airline, Blue Origin, for example, and his 10,000-year-old clock built in the far-flung mountains of Texas, for example, he gave himself $42 million , hired people to dig holes in the mountainside to place a giant clock that could show the time in the next 10,000 years.
Why should he be obsessed with things 10,000 years from now? We might find the answer in a letter from Bezos to shareholders when Amazon went public in 1997—a “manifesto” that laid out the benefits and methods of long-term goals. The main message of the letter is this: If we, as individuals or as a business, cannot plan for the long term, then we cannot realize our potential.
In each of the years since, Bezos has included the letter in all of his letters to shareholders, reminding businesses of the importance of foresight, and each year he has proven himself right.
Founded in a garage with just a few employees, Amazon has revolutionized the way we buy everything from books to toys to clothing. Amazon is currently one of the top 100 companies in the US, and its success is largely due to long-planned products like the Amazon Kindle.
Bezos told Wired in 2011: "If everything you do revolves around a three-year plan, you have too many competitors; but if you're willing to invest in a seven-year plan If you don’t plan for a long period of time, you have a lot fewer competitors—because few companies are willing to do it.”
In order to pay tribute to Bezos' obsession with long-term planning, we have compiled the content of Bezos' interviews and sorted out a large number of his daily habits, hoping that everyone can have a long-term vision like Bezos and don't care about the moment. gains and losses.
Here are six management philosophies that Bezos has mastered
：
1. Write down new ideas
At Amazon, executive meetings don’t begin with conference calls or PowerPoint presentations, but with reading, a lot of reading. According to Fortune, Bezos said group reading helps keep the team from being distracted. Even more critical for executives is the skill of writing memos. "It's harder to write complete sentences. They have verbs. Paragraphs have topic sentences. You simply can't write a six-page memo with narrative structure without a clear idea," he said.
As the entrepreneur and author Ben Casnocha puts it, when you're speaking, it's easy for the audience to fill in the blanks of your creativity, making it easy for you to hide mistakes in detail. By asking team members to jot everything down, Bezos enables them to think through every detail of an idea, making it more testable for years to come.
2. Make team members the owners of the business
Compared with other Silicon Valley tech giants that offer high salaries and high benefits, Amazon prefers the "lean management" model. Instead of offering free lunches to employees, it keeps salaries so low that Amazon has even been rumored to use door panels as desks instead of expensive modern office tools. But that doesn't mean Amazon employees aren't well-paid.
Amazon prefers to incentivize employees with options rather than cash. In his 1997 letter to shareholders, Bezos said: "We are well aware that Amazon's success depends largely on our ability to attract and retain employees, and every employee wants to be a master, so it should be They become masters."
3. Follow the "Two Pizza Rule"
Bezos insisted on avoiding complacency at all costs. The Wall Street Journal once reported that a former Amazon executive recalled that at an event, several managers suggested that employees should increase communication, but Bezos stood up and said, "No, communication is terrible!"
Instead, Bezos argues that companies should be decentralized, and that it doesn't matter even if they fall into a state of disorganization, only in this atmosphere can independent thinking prevail in the battle against collective opinion. He believes that to keep the team as small as possible, while moderately limiting the communication between employees. Bezos said he's a big fan of the "two pizza principle": If two pizzas can't feed a team, it's too big.
4. Dedicate time to thinking about the future
Wired magazine revealed in a 1999 interview about Bezos that he set aside two days a week to imagine life and find new ideas. Sometimes, he just surfs the Internet, or immerses himself in his own world.
5. Routine "check-in" to long-term goals
Wired magazine also reported in 1999 that Bezos met quarterly with aides to assess their progress on 12 caucuses. Bezos did this mainly in the hope that by testing his performance in the past three months, he would not waste time every day. This check-in-style approach helps ensure he stays on top of his long-term goals without getting distracted by new, fleeting ideas.
6. Reverse working method
In the nearly 20 years since its establishment, Amazon, which started out selling books online, has continued to enter new fields such as music, cloud storage, and content production. These attempts seem random, but in fact they all have a common goal, that is, everything from Customer needs start. This "work backwards" model differs from the "skills-forward" approach, in which an individual or business often decides its next move based on existing skills and capabilities.
In a 2008 letter to shareholders, Bezos wrote: "Ultimately, the existing skills will become obsolete. The 'reverse work law' requires that we must explore new skills and hone them, never caring about taking the first step. The discomfort and embarrassment of a step."
Bezos also applies this logic to his personal life, and whenever he has to make a major decision, he often thinks about it in this way, assuming he is 80 years old, and he is 80 years old. What kind of attitude.
When he was considering whether to quit his job and start Amazon, fear of regretting missing out on the Internet eventually led him to make a decision: "Would I regret leaving Wall Street? No. I would regret not taking advantage of the rapid development of the Internet regret the great opportunity? Yes."