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Bezos: A CEO Who Can Write (2018)
- sadmann1 7y agoHow can you make sure its not ghostwriting
- known 7y agoand many proof readings
- unixhero 7y agoYou can, by using the benefit of the doubt.
- 1337biz 7y agoThis is Jeff Bezos
- rohan_shah 7y agoHi Jeff, how you doing?
- unixhero 7y agoI'm great Rohan. I guess I have been spotted.
- zaat 7y agoIn 1997? when he was still riding his old battered Toyota?
- coldtea 7y agoYeah, don't believe the hype. He studied at Princeton, worked for years at fintech, became Project Manager at a bank, and then V.P of a hedge fund, and he also got $300,000 from his parents to invest in his new company. This wasn't a rags to riches story...
- bin0 7y ago300k -> 125b is still staggering growth. All though, Andrew Carnegie still has him beat (in terms of inflation-adkusted wealth and starting position).
- majjam 7y agoI think its likely that his professional writer wife will have had some input.
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- solidasparagus 7y agoLinks to all letters: https://medium.com/@hooda/every-jeff-bezos-letter-to-shareholders-since-1997-b3cb57914cab https://medium.com/@hooda/every-jeff-bezos-letter-to-shareho...
- panic 7y agoIt may seem surprising that a corporate executive is able to read and write, but research shows that literacy among CEOs is rapidly increasing. According to the IMF, executive literacy rates are on target to pass 50% by as early as 2022. Of course, there are still many challenges to overcome, but I think we can agree that Jeff's story here is an inspiration to many around the world.
- Bombthecat 7y agoWhat the.... Wow. This is really really crazy...
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- mattkevan 7y agoJust £5 can provide a Fortune 500 CEO with a months’ supply of writing materials. Text WORD to 089343 to donate today.
- maxerickson 7y agoYou joke, but the thing we call literacy is a pretty low bar.
- Rainymood 7y ago>There was no centralized repository of all the letters, so I decided to collect all of them here. I’ll keep updating this list every year. Let me know your feedback/ideas regarding this collection. This is bullshit, there are many sites hosting the letters. Literally the first google hit [1]. [1] https://www.cbinsights.com/research/bezos-amazon-shareholder-letters/ https://www.cbinsights.com/research/bezos-amazon-shareholder...
- arikr 7y agoThere's also a Kindle book compilation of many of them.
- pixelmonkey 7y agoI wish one of Amazon's "Principles" were openness/transparency, because I think it'd be great to see some of the internal memos Bezos writes to colleagues and how they debate their thinking in writing. Amazon has always been a "skate where the puck is going" kind of company, unrivaled for customer obsession, and I think it'd be great to see their thinking on things like the Whole Foods acquisition, the Fire flop, the surprising growth of AWS, the future of UPS/FedEx, Kindles in a multi-device world, last mile drone delivery, surprising stickiness of Prime, entry into display ad server market, among any number of other topics. I imagine internal Amazon mailing lists for execs are like a rich archive of Stratechery posts but written by hundreds of smart thinkers/writers (and perhaps moderated by Bezos himself!)
- rock_hard 7y agoAgree! Also add any other meaningful company to that list What I miss the most about not being in big tech anymore are these great conversations People on the outside don’t appreciate how challenging the problems are and how the compromise they land on and ship is remarkably good!
- jayd16 7y agoI'm told that Amazon meetings are focused around a prepared white paper on the subject at hand with 10 minutes of document reading at the start of the meeting. I find this idea fairly provocative and I'd love to see some of the documents in question.
- milesward 7y agoWorks good :)
- 1000units 7y agoHis texts to his mistress were much worse than each of these examples which I find hard to explain. Is Jeff going senile? Serious question.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- checktheorder 7y ago...clear directives to upper management that workers' attempts to secure living wages and humane workplaces will not be tolerated, and that Rule of Acquisition number 211 must be rigorously adhered to at all times.
- wardbradt 7y agoThanks. I had not heard of these before. For anyone else interested: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Rules_of_Acquisition https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Rules_of_Acquisition
- DSingularity 7y ago“The diversity of products demands that we employ modern regression techniques like trained random forests of decision trees to flexibly incorporate thousands of product attributes at rank time….Now, if the eyes of some shareowners dutifully reading this letter are by this point glazing over, I will awaken you by pointing out that, in my opinion, these techniques are not idly pursued — they lead directly to free cash flow.” I often myself hating Amazon for what I see as a potentially cancerous machine of economic consolidation. Still, can't help but appreciate this mans vision. Very prescient of him. I find stepping back to get a systematic view of things extremely difficult. The box really does trap you. Bezos should be praised for his ability to do this with a company and product as large and deep as Amazon. His attention to detail and his ability to synthesize has clearly paid off big for Amazon.
- JohnJamesRambo 7y agoWish I hadn’t read that Prime is going to $119 from $99. Maybe I’ll start doing the free shipping thing instead.
- hoorayimhelping 7y agoIt already has. This article came out last August.
- ChrisSD 7y ago> Amazon Prime subscriptions have topped 100M I'm not surprised. I had trouble stopping them giving me free subscriptions for a week or a month at a time. The kicker is it automatically rolls over into a paid subscription so I need to keep my wits about me in case I've been signed up. I wrote to them many times saying I don't want to be signed up to Prime. They always apologise and cancel my subscription but then it happens again. The only thing that seems to have worked is removing my credit card.
- elliekelly 7y ago> The kicker is it automatically rolls over into a paid subscription This is how I wound up an Audible subscriber for two years without knowing. I only found out when the card I had on file with Audible (& Amazon) expired and they charged my sister's card that she had used once on my Amazon Prime account and had since been deleted as a payment method. I happened to be in the middle of a year-long backpacking trip at the time otherwise I'm sure I would have needed to update my card info with Amazon for one reason or another and then I wonder if I ever would have noticed the Audible charges at all.
- b_tterc_p 7y agoIt always shocked me how bad most people were at writing having completed a university degree. Just a simple ability to state a claim and then explain why it is true is often out of reach.
- chubot 7y agoI agree -- it seems like it's easy to get a degree without being challenged in writing. I remember 3 writing teachers that challenged me, giving me mediocre/bad grades, and in retrospect I appreciate that. But I think good writing requires a bit of empathy, and that's something that's hard to teach. Most bad technical writing I see fails to define the terms it uses (or uses them sloppily). That's a failure of empathy -- I know this word so I assume everyone else does. I know what I mean by "design" so I assume everyone else does. Another way to phrase it is the "curse of knowledge". Once people have some knowledge, it's hard for them to imagine that somebody else doesn't have it. Without that imagination, you can't write about clearly. And a lot of the times people don't believe a claim is true because of "reasoning". They believe it because they heard someone they trust say it, or it was repeated on TV or online until it stuck. (I don't claim to be exempt from that, but I can reflect on whether I have direct experience or it’s hearsay.)
- jseliger 7y agoLikewise. I do grant writing for nonprofits, public agencies, and some R&D-based businesses, and I've been talking about this post: http://seliger.com/2019/04/29/how-jeff-bezos-turned-narrative-into-amazons-competitive-advantage/ http://seliger.com/2019/04/29/how-jeff-bezos-turned-narrativ... with some clients, as it addresses another one of those Amazon-as-writing-machine essays. Reading and writing skills remain strangely underrated.
- BurningFrog 7y agoWriting was never part of my physics/CS degree, and I wouldn't have expected it to be. I did learn to write later by participating in internet forums like this one.
- jsty 7y ago
- pikapikamtf 7y agoi think it is best not to idolise anyone, especially a figurehead like the subject of this article. This company's behaviour towards its employees is notorious, how did the style of writing help those people?
- pankajdoharey 7y agoThe article was written by the founder of BeBOX and BeOS
- emit_time 7y agoOne thing Tim Ferriss likes to talk about is how a difficult writing class he took lead to improved grades in all of his other classes, and he think it's attributed to the clarity in which he cultivated, and evaluated thoughts.
- yura 7y agoDid he ever mention the name of the class?
- emit_time 7y agoI don't remember the name, but the teacher for the class was a famous nonfiction author John McPhee[0], and I believe you needed to apply, or win a lottery to get in the class. John McPhee wrote "Levels of the Game" [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McPhee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McPhee
- dang 7y agoDiscussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16955035 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16955035