On December 11, 2021, Blue Origin, the space business founded by Bezos, successfully carried 6 passengers into space, plus this time, this is already a total of 14 people sent by Blue Origin to space. Musk, another billionaire obsessed with space, teased: "Bezos is very talented in space, but spend more time on it and take a bath less." "These two billionaires, who are about the future development of the world, compete with each other to affect the pattern of the future world."
When it comes to the Bezos news, it seems that we will only be particularly impressed by the sky-high divorce breakup fee. Many Chinese the frequency of contact with Amazon's services, may only be kindle and cross-border e-commerce, unlike Buffett's high standard; nor if Musk loves to talk on online social media to cause heated discussions, Bezos appears serious and low-key, and even many people mention him, thinking of Amazon's iron-blooded and ruthless management.
In the eyes of the media, Bezos is not only an eccentric genius billionaire, he is also called a "tyrant with a poisonous tongue", and even laughter will be described by employees as "chilling". "Are you stupid or lazy?" "I don't want to waste time looking at reports that don't have a degree. "If I ever hear such a stupid proposal again, I will kill myself." This kind of harsh and angry "golden sentence" constructs our understanding of Bezos's "madman" in management.
But we also have to admit that Bezos is really a genius. In the book market, there are more than 10 related business books titled Bezos and Amazon. Everyone engaged in e-commerce and entrepreneurship wants to understand how Bezos built the world's largest e-commerce empire, and behind the madness, what makes him successful.
Breakout of Adversity: "Stock price is not equal to our value"
Amazon was first just a blog-like online bookstore, and today, it is not only an e-commerce empire, but also developed many trends-leading products and businesses, from voice-activated intelligent assistant Alexa, unmanned store Amazon Go, cloud computing platform AWS, chain fresh supermarket Whole Food, to music and film and television business and so on.
It all started 27 years ago, when Bezos, 30, gave up his high-paying job on Wall Street to start a humble online bookstore in an old residential garage in suburban Seattle. After experiencing the first wave of the Internet era, Amazon was founded in 1995 and could be said to be smooth sailing, and after its inception, it grew by leaps and bounds with a 50% increase in orders per week, which also allowed Amazon to grow rapidly and become publicly listed two years later.
However, with the bursting of the dot-com bubble, Amazon nearly went bankrupt, and even when it was investigated by the U.S. government in 2001, its stock price fell into single digits. While employees were panicking, Bezos calmly said: "The stock price is not equal to our value." In the end, Amazon survived this wave and turned a profit in 2003.
How Amazon succeeds has been the subject of many people's research, and Bezos has often made unexpected decisions from the beginning of Amazon's inception, which may seem difficult to understand at first glance, but have become the driving force behind Amazon's growth. For example, in the past, Amazon's online auction business was not as good as eBay, and the price was not as cheap as that of physical retailer Walmart, and Google's rapid growth took away many online consumers.
Bezos's decision is to simply not use the traditional way to compete with competitors, he directly opened Amazon to third-party practitioners, so that merchants can put their own products on the shelves, sell with Amazon's own products, and give consumers their own choices. In the middle, the commission is sold, and the commission is invested in subsidies and logistics services, creating a unique model and enhancing its competitiveness.
Corporate Innovation: "Always the First Day"
Although Bezos has stepped down as CEO of Amazon, Amazon is still full of strong Bezos flavor, which can be seen from the 14 business principles of Bezos that every employee must remember. How did Bezos grow from an online bookstore to sell everything you could think of, change the ecosystem of many industries, and rise in the turbulent 10 years, how did he grow wildly through the innovation engine to bring cash proceeds? "It's always the first day." It's Bezos's business philosophy, and he also requires all Amazon employees to comply. This also makes innovation the most core value of Amazon. While the development of e-commerce is sound and colorful, Bezos believes that in science fiction movies, voice-controlled AI intelligent assistants will be the future trend. In 2012, he said, "We're going to build a smart speaker for $20, with his hub processed in the cloud and full voice-activated." Eventually, the idea became amazon speakers with 100 million units sold worldwide and equipped with alexa, a smart assistant. Although today we already have Xiaomi's small love speaker, Apple's Siri and other intelligent assistants, when Bezos proposed such a concept, it was still an unprecedented innovation.
Anticipate the future while "growing through mistakes"
Earlier, when Apple's iPod became popular and occupied the digital music market in a big way, Bezos did not think of imitation, but began to think about his old business, book sales, would also be affected by digitalization, and then took the lead in launching the e-book Kindle, even if Amazon was facing losses at the time, but Bezos still gambled heavily, of course, this gamble was also successful. The Kindle is still the leader of e-books to this day.
Before 2006, the website has been based on Amazon oracle cloud services, because of dissatisfaction with the instability at the peak of traffic, but also foresaw the importance of cloud infrastructure, and invested a lot of resources in the development of AWS Amazon cloud services, which at that time fell through everyone's glasses, by the e-commerce platform reverse integration of the industrial value chain initiative, has now become the most profitable part of the Amazon empire.
Every decision of Bezos is often questioned at the moment, such as when Amazon is ready to enter the film and television industry, most employees are not expecting. But in the end, it turns out that Bezos is like having a crystal ball that foresees the future, and Bezos does see the future trend. However, Bezos is not a god who does everything, and he also admits that he has "grown up in many mistakes". Amazon's spirit is also to encourage employees to try and be willing to take responsibility for it. Bezos made several major mistakes in his career, the most representative of which is the Fire phone.
After the success of the Kindle, Bezos began to think about the future of the mobile phone. What comes to mind is that people don't need to slide around on a board, but a futuristic product that can project 3D images and track the trajectory of your eyes. This bold and innovative idea may indeed be the trend of the future. However, in the early 2010s, technology still could not reach this level, and the ambitious Bezos was looking forward to making a new ecosystem independent of Apple's IOS and Google's Android. This leads this tragedy of failure to an irreparable path. In the end, the Fire mobile phone, which took several years to develop, did not reach the 3D interface of Bezos's rhapsody, but a chicken rib function with four or five lenses installed only to present a "micro-3D" feeling. In the end, the Fire failed, selling less than 50,000 units.
The legend and controversy of "genius"
It seems that the legend of Bezos will not end with stepping down as Amazon's CEO, and it is also worth discussing many of Amazon's controversies. Many of Bezos's overly rational decisions have also made "sweat and blood" a key word in Amazon. According to reports, in an old warehouse on Amazon, the room temperature is very high because it is too old, but based on cost considerations, Bezos refused to install central air conditioning in the warehouse until many workers fainted at work and was exposed by the media. In Stone's New Biography of Bezos, many reflections behind Amazon's success are also presented. In reading Bezos's anecdotes, you wonder if this man has a trace of human emotion, and whether the Amazon empire, driven by this, will also become a cold business machine. Coincidentally, third-party manufacturers have repeatedly accused Amazon of obtaining merchant data and then launching its own brand products and integrating a set of "raising, set, and killing" strategies for merchants.
Amazon has risen as a model of innovation under Bezos, ruthlessly chasing profits, but it has also sparked many discussions at the social level. How do you see the two sides of such a successful person?