Summary: Invent And Wander: The Collected Writings Of Jeff Bezos By Walter Isaacson 5t6j1h

SUMMARY - Invent And Wander: The Collected Writings Of Jeff Bezos by Walter Isaacson

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Table of contents

Introduction

Jeff Bezos' personal qualities have contributed greatly to his success

In 1995, the launch of Amazon was a bet on the future

Focus on the long term

Focus on the consumer rather than on your competitors

Your role as a leader is to make the big decisions

Hire talented and motivated people

Always be innovative

Jeff Bezos is a true explorer

Conclusion

Introduction

By reading this summary, you will discover how Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, thinks and acts.

You will also discover:

how he knew how to take risks to create and develop Amazon ; how he makes decisions; how he hires and manages his employees; the principles he followed to push Amazon further and further; what he is planning for the future.

Jeff Bezos regularly makes headlines. This is either because he is one of the richest men in the world, or because the hegemony of his company, Amazon, on the trade becomes problematic for his competitors. A brilliant and innovative entrepreneur, he instinctively knows what to do and how to act to achieve his goals. However, he follows certain principles, which can be successfully imitated by any business leader. These are explained in the light of letters, interviews and speeches produced throughout his career. Will you be able to use them as well as he did?

Jeff Bezos' personal qualities have contributed greatly to his success

While almost everyone has heard of Jeff Bezos and Amazon, the motivations and personality of the "richest man in the world" are less known. Yet, they explain much of his impressive success. What are his most outstanding traits?

Born on January 12, 1964 in Albuquerque in the United States to a father and mother who were still in high school, Jeff Bezos was abandoned at birth by his father. He was later adopted by Miguel Bezos, his mother's second husband.

Jeff demonstrates very early on significant inventive skills, insatiable intellectual curiosity and great intelligence.

For example, he is able to:

take apart the bars of his bed with a screwdriver at the age of 4; inventing a solar cooker and setting up an alarm to prevent his brothers from coming into his room; to dismantle and repair the tractor of his grandfather, a nuclear engineer, by building a crane. He lives with him almost independently on a ranch in Texas; to read hundreds of books at the bookstore. He ires the genius of Edison and the visionary talents of Disney; to show such concentration that the teacher is obliged to move him with her

chair so that he agrees to move to another activity.

A gifted child, he exploded the IQ score at age 8, and finished first in school, college and high school. Despite his great intellectual abilities, he does not hesitate to challenge himself with humility when necessary.

For example, he initially intended to become a physicist at the university. However, he decided to change his path when he realized that he couldn't mentally solve complex mathematical problems as easily as another bright student on his campus. He then turned to computer science.

These qualities are coupled with an uncommon work ethic and motivation.

So, at his first job at an investment fund as a computer and financial analyst, he came in every day with a sleeping bag. He can then stay at night if he hasn't made enough progress in his work for his taste.

For Jeff Bezos, work is a ion. Only sleep can temporarily force him to turn away from it. In the future, he will demand the same dedication and creativity from his teams at Amazon.

In short, Jeff Bezos has qualities worthy of the greatest inventors and entrepreneurs. In addition to his rare intelligence, he is capable of questioning himself and knows how to work hard to succeed!

In 1995, the launch of Amazon was a bet on the future

The launch of Amazon is the starting point of Jeff Bezos' career as an entrepreneur. His success is based on two main factors. What are they?

In order to succeed, Jeff Bezos knew how to take important risks and bet on the sale of books.

In 1994, he was faced with a dilemma. He realized that the Internet was growing by 2,300% per year and wanted to take advantage of this development to launch a company and jump on the bandwagon.

But how do you know if it's wise to embark on a more than uncertain adventure and give up a stable and well-paid job as a computer analyst? At that time, the Internet was not yet the globalized market it has become today.

To answer this question, Jeff Bezos uses a technique he calls "regret minimization framework".

It consists of imagining himself at the age of 80 and imagining his life to understand which choice causes the least regrets.

He then realizes that he will have far more regrets if he tries nothing than if he tries to create something, even if he fails.

Armed with this conviction, he asked his parents to help him participate in the capital of the future company. They used almost all of their savings, i.e. 100,000 dollars, to take the gamble. They have faith in their son and his talents even if what he proposes seems risky.

But Jeff would not it to them that he estimated his chances of success at only 30%!

Thanks to this first financing, he decides to create an internet platform to sell books, and this for four reasons:

He loves to read; Books never go out of date; The titles are endless; He can easily find them at the publishers and ship them out.

After some hesitation, he decided to name the company "Amazon", after the largest river in the world.

On July 16, 1995, his company went online and he set up his headquarters in his own garage.

The success is immediate. Accompanied by his wife and a few employees, he soon realized that the demand was beyond them. They were tearing their knees

out on the concrete packing packages and couldn't keep up.

Later, Jeff emails 1,000 customers to find out what they need. He decided that the company would not only sell books, but absolutely anything customers wanted.

The rocket of success was ready to take off. Today, his company is worth $233 billion and employs over 647,000 people.

All in all, there was nothing obvious about Amazon's success in the beginning. Jeff Bezos' success required risk-taking and good intuition. His ability to question himself earned him his fortune!

Focus on the long term

The sustainability of Jeff Bezos' business is based on a few simple principles, which can probably inspire many other entrepreneurs. One of them is as important as it is easy to lose sight of. What is it?

To succeed, focus on the long term. In the euphoria of your company's growth, your shareholders and investors may want their profits quickly. They may force you to focus on short-term profits rather than investing in growing your business.

This approach is harmful to your business. Indeed, aiming for short-term profits :

prevents innovation. Investors don't like mistakes, which can sometimes be costly, yet they are inseparable from creation; does not take into consumer satisfaction. This can work against you in time because they will turn to other companies; makes your company more fragile in the face of unforeseen events. You will not have anticipated a possible market downturn.

On the contrary, adopting a long-term vision allows you to protect yourself against its pitfalls, even if you become less popular with your financial partners.

For example, shareholders have often asked Jeff Bezos why he allowed negative reviews of products sold by Amazon. According to them, this was causing a

decrease in sales and therefore profits.

Jeff replied that Amazon is not just a sales platform. It is above all a service for the consumer, it is about helping him to decide and choose what he really needs.

This transparent approach builds customer loyalty and ultimately has a positive impact on shareholders.

Also, mathematical models allow to optimize several parameters such as the ideal size of the stock, the hangars, the delivery times or the most relevant price for each product. They are therefore very useful but should not be followed blindly by the manager because they have a short term vision.

For example, mathematical calculations will always tell you that it is economically preferable to increase a price rather than lower it. Indeed, volume gains do not compensate for price decreases. However, this reasoning is only valid in the short term; it says nothing about the overall impact of this increase over five or ten years.

Jeff Bezos was able to keep his customers by offering them a service rather than focusing on profit. His vision was right: when the speculative bubble that affected the computer industry burst in the 2000s, Amazon's share value dropped from $106 to $6! That didn't stop the entrepreneur from bouncing back, unlike a myriad of digital companies that simply disappeared.

His obsession with the long term is even reflected in the details, for example:

he has a habit of reserving a seat for the customer at important meetings to remind attendees that the customer should be the focus; every customer can send him an e-mail directly to [email protected]; he calls the help desk himself to see how long it takes to get a caller.

He also had a monumental clock built on a mountain in Texas. It has a hand that marks the hundreds of years. It rings every 1,000 years.

Finally, it is thanks to his long-term vision that Jeff Bezos was able to resist the pressure of shareholders for profit and grow his company. To succeed, don't focus on immediate profits but ask yourself about the future of your business!

Focus on the consumer rather than on your competitors

Jeff Bezos scrupulously respects his customers, to the point of making it an obsession. This principle is inseparable from Amazon's business model. How is this a guarantee of success?

To make your business work, it's far more important to focus on your consumers than on your competitors. There is a natural tendency for business leaders to focus on their competitors in order to outperform them and be in a dominant position.

This is problematic, however, because you will tend to rest on your laurels if you become the leader in your market. This can hamper your ability to innovate and you will be overtaken by a start-up that you did not see coming.

What you should do, on the contrary, is to always care about the consumer and his needs, to the point of being afraid of him every morning.

Indeed, the consumer :

is intelligent ; is never totally satisfied; always wants more.

By satisfying their interests rather than trying to beat your competitors, you are forced to constantly sur yourself. This encourages innovation and continuous improvement, which Japanese manufacturers call "kaizen" and which Amazon has adopted in all its processes.

To achieve this, Jeff Bezos has always worked to improve :

product diversity. If the consumer finds everything he needs, he will come back on his own, which will reduce the costs and energy needed to bring him back; experience. Everything must be seamless and immediate; its prices. Prices are low all the time, not just during sales periods; the service provided to the customer, by offering innovative tools. For example, the "instant order update" function alerts you if you are buying the same product twice.

In addition, Jeff Bezos has resisted the temptation to open physical Amazon stores. However, he could have beaten his competitors on the spot, for example in the household appliances market.

He did not see the real added value for the consumer, who was already used to this type of business. On the other hand, once he has sufficiently developed Amazon Go, he may implement many of them. The idea is to create a store where customers don't have to go to the cash but where billing is done through smartphones, without having to think about it.

In addition, Amazon is always looking to acquire young, innovative companies with high development potential. Even if Amazon invests a lot of time to make them grow, their capacity for innovation ultimately brings added value to the consumer.

Jeff Bezos, for example, acquired joyo.com in 2006 to understand the Chinese market and break into it.

In short, make consumer satisfaction your only leitmotiv and do not worry about your competitors. Adopting such an approach will allow you to focus on the needs of your customers so that they appreciate you and remain loyal to you!

Your role as a leader is to make the big decisions

Given Amazon's exponential growth, Jeff Bezos has had to learn to lead hundreds, then thousands of employees. That means making a lot of strategic decisions. How does he do this?

For Jeff Bezos, the role of a business leader is to make the big decisions and delegate everything else.

So a leader, especially of a multinational company, is not paid to make thousands of decisions every day as it might seem at first sight.

On the contrary, you are paid to make a small number of decisions, but they must be of high quality.

How do you know if a decision is your responsibility?

For the founder of Amazon, if the decision can be corrected after the fact, then you can delegate it. If it is irrevocable, then you must take responsibility for it, preferably in a bold and non-conformist way.

For example, Jeff Bezos had to step in when thinking about the introduction of Amazon Prime, a subscription that gives you free shipping on all your orders.

The projected costs were so high that only Jeff Bezos could decide. There was effectively no turning back, because of the amount of expense involved, but also because the consumer wouldn't want to give up the benefit once they had acquired it.

Jeff gave the green light, trusting his instincts. More than 50% of Americans now subscribe to the service. So they tend to do all their shopping on the site!

To help you make these kinds of tough decisions, Jeff Bezos has some advice:

your decision must be risky, because no one will make it for you; decide when you reach 70% of the information you would like to have. Waiting for the 90% would delay you too much; use your instinct; decide by listening to the group's ideas, but decide, even if they don't agree; be humble so as not to distort your judgment; decide important issues at 10 a.m., because that's when your mind is sharpest; three good decisions a day, or even a year, is enough to do a great job.

If you make a mistake, which will happen from time to time, get up and move on.

For example, just because the Fire Phone, launched in 2014 by Amazon, was a huge failure doesn't mean Jeff didn't keep taking risks!

Ultimately, your role as a leader is to decide when no turning back is possible. This means taking risks for your business and listening to your instincts. That's how you'll stand out!

Hire talented and motivated people

With hundreds of thousands of employees, Jeff Bezos knows better than anyone the importance of building quality teams. What criteria does he use to choose his employees?

In an environment as dynamic and changing as the Internet, it's impossible to succeed without great people.

To find them, Jeff Bezos advises asking the following questions:

Do you ire this person? Can they teach you something or set an example? Will this person increase the effectiveness of the group? In what area is or can this person be a superstar? These are often interests and skills that have nothing to do with work. For example, one of Amazon's employees won a national contest to spell words. So he was much more fun to work with.

These high standards make working for Amazon notoriously difficult.

Like Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos has a reputation for being sometimes tough and always extremely demanding. He believes that what Amazon produces is unique and that it is a chance to work for the company.

For example, Bezos has a habit of telling new hires, "you can work hard, long, or smart, but here you can only pick two out of the three."

To ensure their motivation, he prefers to pay his employees largely in stock rather than cash.

In addition, he implements the "pay to quit" program each year, which means he offers $1,000 to $5,000 to each employee to leave the company. If one of them leaves, it is because he or she was not motivated enough to stay, and therefore inevitably less efficient!

To make a company the size of Amazon work, team meetings are frequent and necessary. On this subject, Jeff Bezos is known to have a whim: he can't stand presentations and talks made with PowerPoint or slides.

Instead, he requires his employees to write six-page memos, one of which is read at each meeting. According to the manager, this forces his collaborator to think more clearly and to assert his personal style.

To conclude, be very demanding on the quality of your employees. It is by making good choices in of recruitment that you will be able to surround yourself with people who are useful to the development of your company. Your pleasure of working together and the success of your business depend on it!

Always be innovative

Jeff Bezos' constant concern to serve the best interests of the consumer naturally leads him to innovate regularly. This has become, over the years, an integral part of Amazon's DNA. What are the benefits of continuous innovation?

To make sure you always please your consumers, you need to be continuously innovative.

It is indeed innovation that opens new perspectives and creates profit opportunities. It requires the permanent search for a win-win relationship with the customer.

Here are some examples of what Amazon has put in place with this in mind:

Kindle Direct Publishing allows authors to publish books directly on the platform, without going through a publishing house. Many titles have become best sellers, making Amazon a lot of money and a portion of the book price; Fulfillment by Amazon offers businesses the ability to use Amazon's impressive delivery logistics to deliver their own products; Amazon Web Services (AWS) is Amazon's cloud. It is available to businesses and has become Amazon's primary source of profit since 2006, away from merchandise sales; The Frustration-Free Packaging program brings together new ways of packaging products. It avoids injuries as well as plastic materials, and facilitates their recycling;

The "mayday button" is an emergency button that allows s to speak to an expert in less than nine seconds, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This service helps s who can't use Amazon's features; Fire TV offers the ability to watch streaming services directly on your TV; Alexa artificial intelligence with its Echo interface is intended to control by voice almost all tasks performed by smartphone; Amazon is working on the possibility of making deliveries by drones; Other projects are under consideration, including new initiatives to fight global warming. This is the case of zero carbon, planned for 2040, for deliveries or the Bezos Earth Fund to help scientists find solutions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

In reality, seeing Amazon as a simple commerce company is a mistake: Jeff Bezos uses commerce to innovate, that's his real goal.

It is important to innovate before you are forced to, even if you are the leader in your niche.

It is this willingness to be proactive at all times that allows you to go beyond and find unknown solutions. This will impact consumer loyalty in the long run.

For Bezos, your innovation is successful when, a few years later, no one is interested in it when they hear its name.

However, expect to fail often and to hit dead ends. You might even have your invention stolen by a competitor who will exploit it better than you.

The road to innovation is difficult and full of pitfalls, but it is important to follow it with a constant ion and determination to improve the world.

To recap, never stop innovating. That is the nature of being an entrepreneur. It's by continually looking for new things to bring to the table that you'll be able to keep your consumers coming back!

Jeff Bezos is a true explorer

During his childhood, Jeff Bezos devoured books, especially science fiction novels. His ion for the Star Trek universe reinforced his obsession with space and exploration in general. How does he translate this into his choices and actions?

For Jeff Bezos, having goals, plans and being perfectly efficient are the most important things. However, this is only one part of the elements that lead to success.

The other, lesser known but equally important element is the need to keep an inquisitive mind. You have to be willing to explore and discover new horizons.

If you ask a consumer what they want and adapt to their needs and desires, you will be successful.

To go further, discover a need that the consumer does not yet know. You will then go beyond the known limits and transform the world!

The success of Amazon served as a springboard for Jeff Bezos to focus on his aspiration for exploration and space.

He created Blue Origin in 2000, an aerospace company, to realize his hopes of sending people into space and to Mars.

Indeed, for Jeff Bezos, there are two possibilities regarding the future of humanity:

Men will stay on Earth. In this case, resources will be reduced and then stagnate, which will necessarily limit the growth of humanity; Humans will colonize the solar system. In this case, to use his expression, "humanity will be able to give birth to hundreds of Einsteins and thousands of Mozarts."

One of Bezos' fondest dreams is to go into space himself. This aspiration is well on its way as he now has the means to fulfill his childhood dream.

Obviously, conquering space will be more difficult than conquering internet commerce. To get there, he likes to the Latin maxim "Gradatim Ferociter" which means "step by step, but fiercely".

All in all, the explorer Jeff Bezos will never stop pursuing the unknown. After conquering the Internet market, the richest man in the world now wants to conquer space and is giving himself the means to succeed!

Conclusion

If Jeff Bezos knew how to take advantage of the beginnings of the Internet, Amazon is for him only the beginning of the adventure. His wealth is simply a means to go further. He sees the present moment as the dawn of a new era, in which he will be able to bring his talents as an inventor and explorer and make the world a better place. His recent departure from the position of CEO of Amazon to focus on his other projects is a clear proof of this. No doubt the world will soon hear from him again!

What to from this summary:

take risks by using your intuition; focus on the long term rather than immediate profits to develop your business; employ great people because you can't succeed alone; focus on your customers rather than your competitors, they are the basis of your success; always be innovative and invent needs that consumers don't know yet; never stop exploring new horizons, everything is still to be discovered; make irreversible decisions yourself and delegate others.