Leaders are celebrated for getting more done with less, and there are no prizes for rising headcounts or budgets.įinally, although Amazon told its customers that their books would be sent via first-class post, in fact, each book was sent via priority mail. This embodied the principle of Frugality that still exists at Amazon.

Instead of proper desks, they used old doors nailed to four-by-fours. When Bezos started his online bookstore, the company’s first offices were in a cramped basement in Seattle. Instead, the people at Amazon envision a bright, bold future, and it’s this vision that inspires their incredible results. This is a key principle for Amazon’s leaders, who understand that dreaming small only leads to small achievements. Rather than spending a lot of time studying your options, it’s better to take a calculated risk, like Bezos did when he left the hedge fund.Īdditionally, by daring to be part of the Internet revolution, Bezos wasn’t afraid to Think Big. Even if you make a mistake by acting too hastily, you can usually recover. Amazon leaders believe that speed is crucial to business success. Amazon leaders are always searching for new and innovative ways to get things done.īy quitting his job, Bezos also demonstrated another principle: a Bias for Action. The key message here is: Amazon’s leadership principles are the foundations of its success.īezos’ visionary thinking exemplified Amazon’s Invent and Simplify principle. By offering an online bookstore, Bezos would be able to offer almost every book that was available. Even the biggest bookshops could only carry tens of thousands of titles at a time, whereas over a million books were in print in the United States alone. Soon after, he made a bold decision that embodied the leadership principles that would come to define Amazon’s philosophy: he quit his hedge fund job and made plans to start his own Internet-based business.īezos realized that books were the perfect product for an e-commerce business. That year, Bezos learned that in the coming years, the user base of the internet was predicted to grow by over two thousand percent annually. In 1994, Jeff Bezos worked for a New York hedge fund.

Book working backwards