By Laura Stevens
WASHINGTON -- Amazon.com Inc. Chief Executive Jeff Bezos tries
never to schedule a meeting before 10 a.m.
"I go to bed early, I get up early, I like to putter in the
morning" reading the newspaper, drinking a cup of coffee and eating
breakfast with his children, he said. Mr. Bezos schedules "high IQ"
meetings before lunch, and tries to head home by 5 p.m.
Mr. Bezos said his primary job each day as a senior executive is
to make a small number of high-quality decisions. That means
getting eight hours of sleep, too. "I think better, I have more
energy, my mood's better," he said.
If he slept less, he could make more decisions. But it wouldn't
be worth it. "If I have three good decisions a day, that's enough,"
he said. "They should just be as high quality as I can make
them."
The insight into Mr. Bezos' philosophy on time management came
as the Amazon founder Thursday addressed a crowd of roughly 1,400
at an event held by the Economic Club of Washington, D.C.
He reminisced on the early days of Amazon and the lessons he has
learned during decades of rapid change as he went from founding the
online bookstore in his garage to overseeing a massive company with
several business lines and offices around the world.
That explosive growth helped push Amazon last week to briefly
become the second U.S. company to reach a $1 trillion market value,
after Apple Inc., and has made Mr. Bezos the richest person in the
world.
It is a title Mr. Bezos said he has never sought. "I would much
rather if they said like, 'inventor Jeff Bezos' or 'entrepreneur
Jeff Bezos' or 'father Jeff Bezos.' Those kinds of things are much
more meaningful to me," he told the audience.
While Amazon's stock is currently near record levels, he said he
continues to tell employees the same thing he has told them in more
than two decades of all-hands meetings.
"When the stock is up 30% in a month, don't feel 30% smarter,
because when the stock is down 30% in a month, it's not going to
feel so good to feel 30% dumber -- and that's what happens," Mr.
Bezos said.
He pointed to a quote by legendary investor Benjamin Graham, who
said in the short term the stock market is a voting machine. In the
long term, it is a weighing machine.
"What you need to do is operate your company in such a way,
knowing that you will be weighed one day," he said. "Never spend
any time thinking about the daily stock price. I never do."
He also learned the importance of clarity when choosing a name
for his company. He initially wanted to name his online startup
Cadabra, as in the old magician's term abracadabra.
When he called to speak with a lawyer about incorporating the
company, the attorney misunderstood the name as cadaver. "I was
like, OK, that's not going to work."
About three months later, he changed it to Amazon: "Earth's
biggest river, earth's biggest selection," he said.
Mr. Bezos spent time talking about one of his favorite topics:
the customer.
When he considered how to expand Amazon beyond its initial book,
music and video businesses, he emailed a random group of 1,000
customers, asking them what they wanted to buy on his site. Most
responded with whatever they needed to purchase in the moment, like
windshield wipers.
"I thought to myself, 'We can sell anything this way,'" he
said.
Mr. Bezos said he would bring many of his business-leadership
lessons to his new Bezos Day One Fund, which he announced Thursday
and said would be funded with an initial $2 billion to help
homeless families and to form a new network of preschools in
low-income areas.
Day One refers to one of Mr. Bezos's most fundamental lessons:
how to keep a company in startup mode.
"Everything I've ever done has started small. Amazon started
with a couple of people," he said. "It's hard to remember for you
guys, but for me it was like yesterday that I was driving the
packages to the post office myself and hoping one day we could
afford a forklift."
He has tried to maintain that spirit even as the company has
sprawled to more than a half million employees. "Even though it's a
large company, I want it to have the heart and spirit of a small
one," he said.
Mr. Bezos now will bring his legendary customer focus to a new
group -- in this case, preschoolers.
"The No. 1 thing that has made us successful by far is
obsessive, compulsive focus on the customer as opposed to obsession
over the competitor," he said. "We're going to be obsessively,
compulsively focused on the child. We're going to be scientific
when we can be. And we're going to use heart and intuition."
Write to Laura Stevens at laura.stevens@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
September 14, 2018 11:31 ET (15:31 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2018 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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