Invent and Wander: The Top Thoughts of Jeff Bezos
The collected writings of renowned businessman and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Over the past 25 years, tracing the growth of Amazon is nothing short of remarkable. This book delves into this path, including Jeff’s annual letters to Amazon shareholders, interviews, and other written forms that help to articulate how the grand vision for Amazon played out.
What does Bezos think makes for great founders?
- Not just being smart, but being creative and imaginative. Curiosity is more important than knowledge.
- To love and connect to the arts and sciences. Apple as Steve Jobs said was the marriage of technology and humanities. Those who spread their knowledge base across all fields are able to best spot the patterns that exist.
- Possess a reality-distortion field. Having intense focus and persistence to believe in an idea and execute.
- Retain a childlike sense of wonder.
On Decision Making and Choices
As part of his risk calculation process, Bezos employs a mental exercise called a “regret minimization framework”. The ability to think ahead and say if you did not do this project, what would be the level of regret of it.
High level executives are paid to make a small number of high-quality decisions. The speed of decision making can drive great people away, even with a great mission. What can speed up decision making is asking if its a one-way door or a two-way door. You can also teach the principle of disagreeing and committing. Decision making speed is the most important factor for nimbleness.
Difference between gifts and choices: Gifts are easy, choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts and they can be the detriment of your choices.
The telling that will be most compact and meaningful at the end of your life will be the series of choices you have made.
The most important decisions to be made in life should be made with instinct, intuition, taste, and heart. All of Jeff’s best decisions were made this way, as opposed to analysis.
On Hiring
3 Questions to Consider For Managers:
- Will you admire this person?
- Will this person raise the average level of effectiveness of the group he or she is entering?
- Along what dimension might this person be a superstar?
- You want missionaries, not mercenaries. You want people to stay for the mission, something that has real purpose and meaning. The number one thing, Bezos says, that has made Amazon successful is obsessive, compulsive focus on the customer (vs. the competitor).
On Work and Operations
- No PowerPoint presentations. Instead at Amazon it is narratively structured six page memos that are read silently at the beginning of a meeting.
- Puttering time in the morning for Bezos is important. First meeting is set for 10AM. High IQ meetings before lunch.
- Way you earn trust and a reputation is by doing hard things well over and over and over.
- Work-life harmony vs. balance — If you work is generating energy for you it makes you better at home too.
