Inside Amazon's Idea Machine: How Bezos Decodes The Customer
Found via My Investing Notebook.
A few months ago Amazon reached what its founder and CEO Jeff Bezos demurely tells me was “an interesting milestone.” The retailing giant, so ubiquitously associated with books, then music and video, now has tens of millions of products in stock—and a majority are nonmedia goods: drills, dress shoes, tennis rackets and almost anything else that a human can ship. Adults may still mentally link Amazon with Barnes & Noble, but to teenage customers, Amazon is now synonymous with store.
That turning point might be Bezos’ greatest accomplishment. In officially transforming Amazon from an online bookstore that sells other stuff to a retailer—and business services provider—that once sold mostly books, he has taken one of the original Internet bonanzas and created a success story all over again. Its stock is up 397% in the last five years.
With a net worth of some $19 billion, the 48-year-old is one of the 30 richest men in the world. Yet he still dashes around Amazon with the intensity of a startup boss trying to make his first payroll, as well as the glee of a teenager discovering all the fun you can have at overnight camp. “I’m a legitimately happy person,” Bezos explains on a recent, rainy Friday morning at Amazon’s Seattle headquarters. “My wife says: ‘If Jeff is unhappy, just wait five minutes.’”
What’s not to be happy about? He’s the number one CEO in America. The passing of Steve Jobs has left him, without question, as the corporate chief that others most want to meet, emulate and deify. And his primacy can be proven with numbers: FORBES’ ranking of top CEOs—using a bang-for-the-buck methodology that factors in sustained performance, modest compensation and the ability to pull ahead of one’s peers—has Bezos comfortably in the top spot. Indeed, he’s in the highest 5% in every single metric.
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Related previous posts:
Talking the long view
Jeff Bezos Owns the Web in More Ways Than You Think - By Steven Levy
Jeff Bezos on innovation
Jeff Bezos on Charlie Rose
"We are What We Choose"
Upfront and Unscripted with Jeff Bezos (Audio)
Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos – Interviews
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