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Bezos: A CEO Who Can Write

• l33tbro 8y ago
  >In 2010, he penned a tribute to Amazon’s engineers ... The tone was just right, neither disingenuously geeky nor overtly tongue-in-cheek. I'd love to see a similarly graceful and well-penned tribute from Bezos to the workers who routinely collapse from exhaustion in his fulfilment warehouses (1), before they are swiftly replaced by another Oompa Loompa who will scrape just above minimum wage if they make their hourly dispatch target. (1) https://www.businessinsider.com.au/amazon-warehouse-like-prison-where-workers-used-pee-bottle-2018-4?r=UK&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com.au/amazon-warehouse-like-pri...
  • icebraining 8y ago
    I'm sure he did write such a tribute. Did you read the one mentioned in the article? It doesn't mention the engineers at all, it only says "we do complicated stuff to make you money". I'm sure he has similarly well-penned quotes about their efficient operations.
  • dingo_bat 8y ago
    > 'd love to see a similarly graceful and well-penned tribute from Bezos to the workers who routinely collapse from exhaustion in his fulfilment warehouses Why? Did they do anything noteworthy or exceptional?
    • l33tbro 8y ago
      So you really think that was my point? What I was getting at is what relevance the quality of a CEO's internal communication prowess has when his company perpetuates toxic practices and processes from the top down.
    • davidrm 8y ago
      > Why? Did they do anything noteworthy or exceptional? Yes, they are collapsing due to being overworked in one of the most valuable corporations in 21st century. The fact that a lot of people seems to be so dismissive about this fact is a very scary thought, and I happen to be pretty liberal when it comes to economics. This is an anomaly that should be addressed with a lot more attention.
      • SamReidHughes 8y ago
        Maybe they're collapsing because they didn't get enough sleep.
  • simonh 8y ago
    Massive warehouse operation with thousands of employees has one disgruntled ex-employee, news at 11. OK, I know there have been other complaints, but Business Insider is hardly the news source of record I'd base an opinion on.
    • l33tbro 8y ago
      It's based on 1 year's worth of investigative research. The guy is publishing a book. So, no, this isn't some yellow journalism hit piece.
      • adventured 8y ago
        Amazon has about 600,000 employees now. I'd be surprised if workers aren't routinely dying every day just from random chance given that scale. That's larger than US Army's active force. Even if 500 warehouse workers (one in a thousand) passed out in a given year from exhaustion, given the numbers we're talking about, that wouldn't imply anything. In an office setting, one in a thousand employees will pass out randomly in a given year from a problem derived from their own health. It takes a pretty epic data set and study to demonstrate a meaningful frequency when you're talking about hundreds of thousands of employees. I've seen no evidence in any of the articles spit out by the media that workers are regularly being worked to exhaustion. Skepticism is warranted, given there's a lot more money to be made by sensationalism, in selling books or driving clicks.
  • throw2016 8y ago
    Amazon employment practices are disturbing, there is exploitation of workers and the fact that employment is not a choice is not addressed in the capitalism narrative, there is coercion and there is an unequal playing field between capital and labor. And this kind of exploitation directly causes a race to the bottom as competitors cannot be competitive without it. Bezos is rich, difficult to understand what he gains by treating workers this way. It's seems more and more like an ideology, a culture. The only way this gets fixed is strong regulation, a social culture that abhors exploitation and consumer choice. For consumer choice to be effective you need to start an intense awareness campaign that will compel people to think twice before buying from Amazon. But its a long term and expensive process with uncertain results. It's incredibly difficult building something like Amazon, and Bezos deserves all the success and money, but a few billions less for him so we have a healthier treatment of workers and healthier society should be not require a debate and reveals something fundamentally broken in our society.
  • dv_dt 8y ago
    > One thing I love about customers is that they are divinely discontent. Their expectations are never static — they go up. It’s human nature. The way to a billionare's heart is through their profits, and in Bezos' case maybe that is his customers. If enough customers become unhappy, perhaps we would direct some focus onto the lowest tiers of his empire.
• jkuria 8y ago
  Good to hear from good ol' Gasse! whenever he is mentioned I can't help but remember this quote of his: "We must always give our users pure sex. It's like a rendezvous in the back seat of an automobile with a beautiful girl. One's experience with the personal computer should be better than the greatest orgasm you could have."
  • sudosteph 8y ago
    O_O That is a straight up terrible quote. First of all, hearing about some old dude's sex fantasy is a bit gross. Second of all, computer experiences should be predictable and efficient. I don't know many people who associate either of those qualities with (good) sex.
    • freyir 8y ago
      The quote is over the top, but this vision pushed Apple beyond merely "predictable and efficient" products. If they'd stuck to predictable and efficient, there's no way they'd be an $800+B company today, so it seems to have worked out for them.
• a_d 8y ago
  Business writing suffers from an epidemic of post-fact rationalization. Looking back, it is trivially easy to parse out whether something someone said was “insightful wisdom” or “useless”. I am continually amazed by the scope and depth of this hindsight bias disease. While this author tries to make a point that bezos is a good writer, I am afraid that this is just riding a wave of bezos worship (like Elon worship, Jobs worship, Buffett workship, [‘name successful business person, preferably, billionaire’] worship) — after bezos’ company is seeing good results. I wish more business writing was devoted to 1) suggesting ways so that people have their own original thoughts 2) Discussing merits of strategies before they become successful 3) Discussing problem solving frameworks 4) early days of companies when they weren’t successful etc. I believe learning about the first 100-300 days of companies would be very instructive. Someone should write a book about that :-)
  • tim333 8y ago
    Re post-fact rationalization, while Bezos and Buffett were successful before having a fan base they also remained successful for a long time after. It's going to be hard to find discussion of "merits of strategies before they become successful" as the people with brilliant strategies will probably already be successful to an extent. Though in Buffett's case he used to lose money in the stock market as a kid - he bought his first stock at age 11. He only really started winning there after reading The Intelligent Investor at 19. He kind of started writing his letters around 27.
    • michaelt 8y ago
      The issue isn't fan clubs. The issue is successful companies are riding such a tidal wave of money and good will you can never tell if they're successful _because_ of X, or successful _in spite_ of X. For example, the stock price of GE rose 4000% in the 1980s when Welch introduced Rank and Yank [1]. Does that mean it was a great policy - or was there some other change responsible for the rise, while Rank and Yank had a neutral or even negative effect? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve
      • 8y ago
• billbrown 8y ago
  Steven Sinofsky (formerly of Microsoft, now at Andreessen Horowitz) recently wrote something similar about Bezos and the power of writing: https://medium.learningbyshipping.com/writing-is-thinking-an-annotated-twitter-thread-2a75fe07fade https://medium.learningbyshipping.com/writing-is-thinking-an...
  • shadowtree 8y ago
    This triggered the article by Gassee. Follow a bunch of them on Twitter and you can see the think-piece triggering play out in real-time.
• nashashmi 8y ago
  A CEO who got his start from selling books, probably has more than average attention to literature and writing. Such people should typically be able to write. I'm not surprised at all by this. Further, such people also have more attention to philosophy. And have more grandiose visions of the world. But I find it surprising he was able to succeed so well, compared to your typical bookseller.
  • Regardsyjc 8y ago
    If you're interested in Amazon's story you should check out the book The Everything Store. Bezos started by selling books but his long-term plan was an online store that sells everything. He started with books because they were easy to ship, catalog, and that there were two major book distributors at the time that made creating an online bookstore easy. Not only that but he figured out how to game the system of one distributor so he could always order one book he needed, and 11 obscure books that were out of print, to avoid the 12 book minimum order requirement.
    • grigjd3 8y ago
      Books are also easy to choose to buy online at a time when online shopping wasn't fully trusted (or indeed, trustworthy). While I can see the condition of an item in a physical store, books basically just require not being completely soaked and keeping away from toddlers who might destroy the pages. Back in the 90's, it was a good step to establish trust with the customer.
      • macintux 8y ago
        Especially since there were (and are) vastly more available books than available shelf space. Online is the only way to get some books.
• timavr 8y ago
  I am just confused. Why can he write? It is not clear. How does the author know that this letter is not edited/approved by PR and legal? The culture of worshipping CEO sets very low bar on human ambition.
  • notahacker 8y ago
    Yeah, drafting and redrafting a few hundred words is easily delegated entirely to PR staff, and it says nothing about a CEO's ability if they take that route (nor will anyone outside certain circles ever know). The samples of writing are entirely unremarkable too. Thousands of CEOs or CEOs' PR teams writing shareholder letters or microbusiness blogs achieve a similar fairly informal style using formal language, deploy anecdotes and vanity metrics and make aspirational statements about the future. Some of those businesses succeed at different scales, some fail, few even attempt what Bezos did. "Divinely discontent" is a nice phrase, and props for giving the illusion of specificity by saying "trained random forests of decision trees" rather than the more buzzwordy "processing Big Data using Machine Learning". But that isn't even necessarily Bezos' personal stamp, never mind one of the qualities that actually made him one of the most successful business leaders of the internet era.
    • shanghaiaway 8y ago
      PR cannot write this type of stuff. They can edit it a but but they can never create it.
      • wastedhours 8y ago
        "Never" is a long time.
        • shanghaiaway 8y ago
          It's not a reference to time and not even to capability but license.
          • 8y ago
• a_imho 8y ago
  Our Leadership Principles aren't inspirational wall hanging... Admittedly I sympathize with the 501 programmer sentiment, nevertheless these corporate manifestos, principles, credos etc. make me gag a little. But probably that's their purpose anyway, so great writing there.
• Dowwie 8y ago
  The author assumes that Bezos doesn't have an editor helping him craft the letter going out to thousands of investors. While Bezos seems entirely capable of writing letters on his own, he's running Amazon. As someone who is known to optimize company time, he would probably write a draft and then have correspondence with an English-phd type for help.
  • superdimwit 8y ago
    Tangent, but English-PhD =/=> good writer..
  • adamlett 8y ago
    The author assumes… Speaking of making assumptions: As someone who is known to optimize company time, [Bezos] would probably write a draft and then have correspondence with an English-phd type for help. Being so busy running a company that one has no time to write, is like being so busy programming that ones has no time to type. Running a company – especially a large one – is all about communication. In most companies, much of that communication is verbal, in various meetings. Amazon is different from most companies in the high value they place in written communication, and the low value they place in ephemeral verbal communication. It would be very surprising if the CEO didn’t exemplify this ethos.
• laythea 8y ago
  It may be just me, but I spent about 3 minutes trying to see the outstanding writing, but nothing I read kept me past minute 3.
  • sumedh 8y ago
    Try reading Buffett's Annual reports, you might like them.
• motohagiography 8y ago
  Bezos' role is to get everyone working toward the same vision. Stories go a long way toward articulating that vision. If you can write well (in your native language), it is typically a sign you can reason well. Leaders who can't write well are also interesting. There is almost a cliche about dyslexic type-A personalities, where the adapted skill of misdirecting people from your reading and writing ability as a kid manifests as a glad handing sales and dealmaker personality later on. Just as someone who doesn't write well probably doesn't reason too abstractly either, someone who writes exceptionally well can often be considered too intellectual and theoretical to lead, or lacking in the required adaptability and spontaneity. It's great that this super-CEO can write, but it's also a signal that the company is still run by a technocrat, and that it is not mature and autonomous enough as a business to be operated by a mere chief dealmaker.
  • CharlesW 8y ago
    > Bezos' role is to get everyone working toward the same vision. Stories go a long way toward articulating that vision. Definitely. And maybe he's both, but Bezos seems like more of a "mandate" guy than a "story" guy, per Steve Yegge's infamous Google platforms post[1] and other anecdotes by people who know him. > So one day Jeff Bezos issued a mandate. He's doing that all the time, of course, and people scramble like ants being pounded with a rubber mallet whenever it happens. But on one occasion -- back around 2002 I think, plus or minus a year -- he issued a mandate that was so out there, so huge and eye-bulgingly ponderous, that it made all of his other mandates look like unsolicited peer bonuses. > His Big Mandate went something along these lines: > 1) All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces. > 2) Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces. > 3) There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team's data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network. > 4) It doesn't matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols -- doesn't matter. Bezos doesn't care. > > 5) All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions. > 6) Anyone who doesn't do this will be fired. > 7) Thank you; have a nice day! > Ha, ha! You 150-odd ex-Amazon folks here will of course realize immediately that #7 was a little joke I threw in, because Bezos most definitely does not give a shit about your day. [1] https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX
• slededit 8y ago
  The examples don't really show an exceptional writing ability. Is this one of those things where we're happy he's written at all? It's also important to be aware we give more slack to those we admire.
• Radle 8y ago
  A very smart gui indeed: This is from his year 1999 shareholder letter. Mobile was growing back then, too. But writing this at the end of 1999, shows that he indeed had a very good grasp of technology and his market. In closing, consider this most important point: the current online shopping experience is the worst it will ever be. It’s good enough today to attract 17 million customers, but it will get so much better. Increased bandwidth will result in faster page views and richer content. Further improvements will lead to “always-on access” (which I expect will be a strong boost to online shopping at home, as opposed to the office) and we’ll see significant growth in non-PC devices and wireless access. Moreover, it’s great to be participating in what is a multi-trillion dollar global market, in which we are so very, very tiny. We are doubly-blessed. We have a market-size unconstrained opportunity in an area where the underlying oundational technology we employ improves every day. That is not normal.
• heedlessly3 8y ago
  Bezos' writing is overrated.