Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s Chief Executive Officer

Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s Chief Executive Officer

I’m sure you’ve interacted with Amazon.com or even purchased an item or two from the platform. Over time, Amazon.com is rising and is among the top online marketing platforms in the world. For any business or company to succeed, there have to be great leaders. So, who is the leader who has played the role of seeing the rise and success of Amazon? This article has detailed info relating to the CEO of Amazon.

The American engineer Jeff Bezos, who is also an entrepreneur, an investor, and a philanthropist, is the originator, president, and CEO of Amazon.com. He is a great leader, and because of his leadership skills, Amazon has turned out to be the prime online shopping seller in the world. The 56-year-old investor was born on 12 January 1964.

One of the greatest things that make an outstanding leader is his quality of prioritizing customers. A unique thing about Jeff Bezos is that he will always leave an empty chair during his board meetings to represent a customer. Through this, he and his team are conscious of the customer’s reaction to the decisions they will make.

Jeff focuses less on his competitors but instead prioritizes customer satisfaction. Additionally, he has a public e-mail where customers send in their grievances. This rare quality in many leaders has made him an exceptional, outstanding, and great leader.

Significant accomplishments by Jeff Bezos

Jeff Bezos created Amazon.com in 1994 as an online book store and has since then revolutionized online shopping by presenting creative characteristics such as e-mail order verification, customer reviews, and one-click shopping. When it started, Jeff named it ‘Cadabra’ but later changed the name to Amazon after the River Amazon. Throughout his life as an entrepreneur and a CEO, he has made various accomplishments and has been a critical player in developing and seeing the growth of e-commerce. He has received multiple awards and titles that include:

• An award from Carnegie Mellon University for an honorary doctorate in Science and Technology in 2008
• The United States News and World report selected him as the best leader in America.
• In 2011, he got an Innovation award from The Economist for the amazon kindle.
• Fortune named him in 2012 as the Businessperson of the year.
• The National Retail Federation awarded Jeff a gold medal award in December 2012 and titled Amazon, the top retailer of the year.

The reason why his accomplishments are noteworthy is that they have led to the success of Amazon.com. Some of the awards he has received are presented to persons who have obliged the industry with a discrepancy.

What Amazon does

Jeff Bezos has been the president of Amazon.com since its foundation. Amazon was initially founded as an online bookstore in 1995. Nevertheless, it has grown to a market for many different products and services. They offer services and products such as:

• Distributing downloads
• Streaming of music and videos
• Web services
• Kindle store
• Amazon digital game store
• Appstore
• Echo
• Fire tablets
• Electronics
• Software
• Apparel and furniture
• Jewelry, toys, and food

Amazon.com is best known for its Kindle, selling nearly anything online with lightning-fast shipping. They also have excellent retailer relationships that enable them to offer discounted prices to their customers. Amazon has been given various awards because of its excellent performance. In 2018 and 2019, they received 8 and 11 awards, respectively. Some of the company’s awards include:

• Best CEO
• Best company happiness
• Best company compensation
• Best teams marketing
• Best company outlook

Amazon is among the companies that have been recording high profits globally. The primary profit engines are Amazon Web Services and cloud computing division. Third-party sellers and advertising have also been vital in turning in profits. In the year 2018, the company recorded a net profit of $10.1 billion.

Jeff Bezos’s influence on Amazon services and products

When Amazon started, it was just an online bookstore with no other products. However, over the years, with the influence of its CEO Jeff Bezos, Amazon introduced other services and products. In 1998, Jeff expanded into the online sale of video and music, and by the end of the same year, he expanded the company to include a variation of consumer goods. The company started providing music and video streaming, toys, jewelry, furniture, and many other products.

In 2002, Amazon, through its CEO, launched Amazon web services that accumulated data from website traffic and weather channels. However, in the same year, there was financial distress in the company where it almost went bankrupt. The leader had to close distribution centers, and 14% of the workforce was laid off. The following year, nevertheless, Amazon went back on its feet and recorded a profit of $400 million.

Amazon has faced a lot of criticism; for instance, in March 2018, the president of the United States, Donald Trump, accused the company and particularly the CEO of avoiding taxes, engaging in anti-competitive business performances, and abusing postal routes. In response to the negative comments by the president, the company’s share price declined by 9% as well as reduced the CEO’s wealth.

Nevertheless, even with the negative criticisms from all spheres of the business world, from the government to the customers, Amazon always finds a way to sort out such negative comments and continue to record more profits. In recent past years, Amazon has not experienced a reduction in the services and products they produce. Instead, every day is a new day for innovations, and new ideas on the products and services to provide to their customers. With the influence of Jeff Bezos, Amazon is accomplishing this every day.

Bezos influence on Amazon’s strategic directions and goals

It is evident that for any business or company to excel in their dealings, they should have proper strategic plans and aims to help them achieve their objectives. In the same way, Amazon has achieved great success due to the many strategies set and led by CEO Bezos. Here are some of the strategies Bezos uses to ensure Amazon remains successful.

• Standards are contagious

Benzos believe is that high standards are teachable. He claims that if you bring in a new employee in a team with high standards, they will adapt efficiently and quickly. Similarly, if you bring in a new employee in a team with shallow standards, they will adjust to the low standards, and cannot expect them to be productive.

He also articulates that high standards in a particular area are not a guarantee that they will translate to other areas. Everyone has their blind spots, and it is, therefore, essential to identify those spots.

• Set realistic and clear expectations

Before setting standards in any area, it is crucial to outline how the area is and set expectations that are realistic for yourself and the team. Sometimes people set unrealistic high goals, the reason many businesses and companies are failing. For Amazon, Jeff Bezos believes in analyzing situations and coming up with realistic and attainable goals.

• Remain involved with customers.

‘When selling any service or product, always ensure you don’t lose touch with the people you are serving, regardless of how high you climb.’ That is the Bezos principle. To keep his finger on what is going on with Amazon customers, Bezos goes through e-mails from customers in jeff@amazon.com, which is his public-inbox. He believes in focusing on what the customers are saying rather than focusing on what other competitors say.

He moved the priority of the company from making huge profits to prioritizing customers. Due to the strategies that Bezos adopts, Amazon is now ranking as the most extensive online market retailer.

Jeff Bezos’s leadership style

Every great leader has a unique style that defines their leadership. In this modern era, Bezos is one of the great leaders known. Due to his leadership skills, techniques, and qualities, Amazon.com is now the chief online market vendor in the world. So, what are the qualities that Bezos possesses that make him distinct?

1. Giving priority to customer service

According to an article by Forbes, Bezos always puts an empty chair in the conference room during staff meetings, a character that is rare and unique. The essence of the empty chair is to remind him of a customer to assist him, and his team put into consideration the customer’s reaction to any decision they make. Amazon’s is achieving most of its goals, which are 80% related to customers, as a result of the skill.

2. Having a smaller team

Benzos believe in a two-pizza rule during meetings. This means that only two pizzas are served during meetings, if the pieces are not enough for everyone, then it means the team is too big and needs to be reduced. He prefers a team of about five to seven people.

3. Think long term

When starting the company, Bezos had the thought of expanding it to succeed not only in the U.S. but also in the world, which is a success. When reports from Barron’s and Forbes said that the company would not go far, he maintained that internet growth would play critical roles in expanding the business.

4. Make employees think and feel like owners

In his annual letter to the 614 employees he had in 1997, Bezos said that their success would be influenced by their ability to entice and retain an inspired employee base with every employee thinking like an owner. His excellent leadership style has seen the company grow in terms of the employees it has as well as the profits they are making.

Jeff Bezos’s education

Bezos attended Miami Palmetto High School when his family shifted to Miami. He began his first business while still in high school, the Dream Institute, an educational camp during summer for fourth, fifth, and sixth graders. Jeff Bezos later graduated from high school as a valedictorian. In 1982, he went for the Student Science Training Program and got a Silver Knight Award at the University of Florida in 1982.

He joined Princeton University in 1982, where he studied computers and, in June 1984, had a job in Norway during summer as an analyst/programmer. In the subsequent year, he upgraded an IBM program in California. During his time at the university, Bezos obliged as the president of Princeton’s Students for the Exploration and Development.

Serving as the president of the student’s organization garnered him the leadership skills he would later use as the president and CEO of Amazon.com. He later graduated from the university in 1986 with a B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. During a speech in his graduation, Bezos said he had a dream of the day people would colonize space.

This was a dream that he has brought to reality by founding the Blue Origin in 2004, an aerospace company that is aiming at offering space travel to customers.

The jobs Jeff Bezos has had 

Bezos did not just rise from graduating to becoming the CEO of Amzon.com. He had several roles in various companies before he founded Amazon. The first tasks for him were summer jobs during his high school and university life. While in high school, Bezos started a business venture for fourth to sixth graders. He also worked as a cook during the breakfast shift and as a programmer while at the university.

After his graduation, he got different jobs from various firms, such as Investment firm D.E. Shaw and Fitel Bankers Trust. In 1990, he joined D.E. Shaw and was the youngest vice president of the company at the age of thirty years. Though he was successful, he quit after four years to open his own company. In 1994, he originated Amazon.com as an online bookstore. Nonetheless, analysts were skeptical and claimed that the company would not succeed as the traditional book stores had.

In conclusion, Jeff Bezos’s name inevitably is and will remain to be on the list of the most significant business leaders of all time. People will remember him for his innovative and visionary leadership style that has seen Amazon rise from a small online marketing platform to become the largest retail online shop. He has demonstrated that good leadership is a critical player in building a sustainable and healthy organization. His leadership styles, skills, and qualities are things anyone seeking to become a great business leader should emulate.