I read the portrait in a Cicero edition in German and wondered if the article is also available in the original. Yes, it was written for the magazine The Atlantic (approx. 15-20 minutes reading time). The original version is even more precise, because for the Cicero edition something was slimmed down. Absolutely worth reading, this is a character portrait, which shows already with the graduation speech of Bezos how great he thought. It doesn’t make sense to summarize the article, but at most to show a few quotes in extracts here. FOR EXAMPLE „Today, Bezos controls nearly 40 percent of all e-commerce in the United States. More product searches are conducted on Amazon than on Google, which has allowed Bezos to build an advertising business as valuable as the entirety of IBM.“
„To the U.S. president, he is a nemesis. To many Americans, he is a beneficent wizard of convenience and abundance. „
„Bezos’s ventures are by now so large and varied that it is difficult to truly comprehend the nature of his empire, much less the end point of his ambitions. What exactly does Jeff Bezos want?“
„Before bezos settled on Amazon.com, he toyed with naming his unlaunched store MakeItSo.com. He entertained using the phrase because he couldn’t contain a long-standing enthusiasm. The rejected moniker was a favored utterance of a man Bezos idolizes: the captain of the starship USS Enterprise-D, Jean-Luc Picard.“
„When reporters tracked down Bezos’s high-school girlfriend, she said, “The reason he’s earning so much money is to get to outer space.” This assessment hardly required a leap of imagination. As the valedictorian of Miami Palmetto Senior High School’s class of 1982, Bezos used his graduation speech to unfurl his vision for humanity. He dreamed aloud of the day when millions of his fellow earthlings would relocate to colonies in space. „
„What makes Amazon so fearsome to its critics isn’t purely its size but its trajectory. Amazon’s cache of knowledge gives it the capacity to build its own winning version of an astonishing array of businesses. „
„In 2002, Amazon distilled Bezos’s sensibility into a set of Leadership Principles, a collection of maxims including “Invent and Simplify,” “Bias for Action,” and “Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit.” To an outside ear, these sound too hokey to be the basis for fervent belief. But Amazonians, as employees call themselves, swear by them. The principles, now 14 in number, are the subject of questions asked in job interviews; they are taught in orientations; they are the qualities on which employees are judged in performance reviews. Of all the principles, perhaps the most sacrosanct is “Customer Obsession”“ More information can be found here, in the area of Amazon.com, where the classic buyer rarely visits. These are just a few highlights of the article. It is certainly better to read the whole article in peace and quiet. Another recommendation for reading is the report about David Marquet and his book “Turn the Ship around“. Picture source: Amazon.com Note: This is a machine translation. It is neither 100% complete nor 100% correct. We can therefore not guarantee the result.
