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1-By Laksh, Doing Business, Etc., Leadership

Super interview with Amazon Jeff Bezos 0 (0)

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Interesting points

  1. Classic Amazon  Refund principle demonstrated at the beginning of the video by Jeff Bezos (Mentioned by a user below)
  2. Amazon model of Customer obsession, as opposed to Competition focus (imitiate the best in competition s etc), explained in detail. “Don’t just listen to customer, invent for them, as it is not the job of customers to invent for themselves or in most cases do not even know what they want ” (Steve Jobs used to say something very similar)
  3. “Invention is a result of experimentation and experiments are dotted with failures. But you should take the chance.”
  4. “Invention is not Disruptive, only customer adoption is.” Similar to Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point?
  5. “At Amazon we invented a lot of things, that customers did not care about.”
  6. “Good to have stellar quarterly results, but these are pre-decided about 2 years ago. Planning for future and putting in efforts for a few years ahead is the way to go. I am more interested in what could happen in 2020 than in my upcoming quarter.”
  7. “Rich get slowly isn’t a good theme for infomercials.”
  8. “Half of our sales is third-party sales, coming from a lot of small businesses we work with. There are many who make 100KUSD a year. With Kindle Direct, we created the environment and many authors have found a readership that otherwise didn’t exist for them. Same with AWS too.” Platform, services, eco-system.
  9. “I have noticed all overnight successes take about 10 years.”
  10. “Hope our approach doesn’t change–customer obsession, the willingness to invent, the patience in letting things develop, accepting failure as a path to getting success.”
  11. “Acceptable Failure should be out of an experiment, where you accept beforehand that you do not know the outcome. Not that results out of a poor execution, a result of bad operational excellence. For instance, it isn’t a failure if we botch up a new fulfillment center, as we have 134 worldwide and our tech is in Generation 8 maturity level.”
  12. “The main job of a senior leader is to identify 2 or 3 important, BIG ideas and then enforce great execution against those ideas. Good news is it is incredibly easy to identify these BIG ideas. For Amazon, the consumer business, the BIG ideas are low prices, fast delivery, and vast selection. The BIG ideas should be obvious. You need to steer away from distractions and get back to these. And they will be stable over a period of time. “
  13. “Basically there is no institution in the world that cannot be improved with machine learning.” Alexa, echo, drones, natural language understanding.
  14. “(On usage of machine learning beneath the surface) Improved search results, improved product recommendations for customers, improved forecasting for inventory management. Most exciting thing is making machine learning more accessible to a lot of companies that cannot afford, through developers etc of AWS.” AI to be easily deployable; Salesforce.com?
  15. “Last year we saved 55000 tonnes of waste as a result of this (internet packaging) program.”
  16. “3.6MN megawatt-hours per year (renewable energy).”
  17. “I love space a lot. I am investing my lottery (Amazon) winnings in Blue Origin which is the space company.”
  18. Internet Vs Space. Entry for admission in space very high. “When I started Amazon, the heavy lifting was in place.”
  19. “Some of you should go to a museum and see a dial-up modem.”
  20. At 80 I would like to be able to say that I created the heavy lifting for space entrepreneurs.
  21. I have won many lotteries, but the best one was with my parents. I got lucky.

Related links:

  1. Package Rage on Wikipedia
  2. Space camp
  3. The Everything Store
  4. LN’s first book on Amazon was a similar one to the interviewer.
Etc.

Leadership Lapses: When Is Firing the Right Response? 0 (0)

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While it may appear that it is public pressure forcing corporations to take action when there is a transgression, this may be something of a mirage, according to Jonathan A. Segal, partner of Duane Morris’ employment group and managing principal of the Duane Morris Institute. “There are times when, due to pressure from various stakeholders, it appears that a company was compelled to terminate, and that’s because the process takes some time,” he says. “It looks as if it was in response to public pressure, and it’s not. I can think of at least a couple of times when, because some things were being done internally, it appeared as if the employer wasn’t doing anything.”

Parting ways often seems like the only acceptable remedy, according to Wharton marketing professor Americus Reed. Keeping the transgressor around is a viable strategy that depends on several factors, he says, including: how egregious the transgression is and how much “goodwill” the company has banked previously; the “brand” of the transgressor — “Is he or she humble or contrite, or a sympathetic character?”; and the immediate impact on sales and the long-term impact on the brand. What companies don’t want to do is to keep the person around and risk being perceived as condoning the behavior. “Usually, it’s safer in the above conditions to just cut bait, and not risk the immoral halo to the brand,” he says. “The other aspect that is tricky is that these CEO types always ‘fall forward’ — they get fired and get tremendous severance package benefits, so sympathy is hard to generate.”

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