The management principles that forged a global empire.
Though Jobs may be more visionary and Musk more technologically adventurous, when it comes to sheer gameplaying and the pure strategy of innovation, Bezos may be the best of all. Over the past 31 years, the former D.E. Shaw vice president progressively transformed a fledgling online book-selling business into a category-busting behemoth spanning e-commerce, logistics, cloud computing, consumer hardware, publishing, grocery, robotics, and entertainment. Remarkably, the business that powers your EC2 instance is the same one that delivers your artisanal kefir and produced The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Bezos has also added businesses to his personal conglomerate, launching SpaceX rival Blue Origin and buying the then-embattled publisher, The Washington Post. This is a concoction that looks insensible to the layperson but, in fact, follows the deep logic of a strategic genius.
Business obsessives may believe they know this tale. But in studying Bezos over the past couple of months, I’ve been consistently surprised by how the most frequently repeated lessons (“be customer-obsessed, not competitor-obsessed”) often tell less than half the story. The story of Amazon and Bezos’s management is not just of “two pizza teams” and “working backwards,” though these are important. It is a tale of grand strategy – e-commerce entrepreneurship by way of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. Principles are immutable until they are not; rivals are friends until they are crushed; misdirection shields the best opportunities from competitors.
Our piece will cover these examples and many others. It is part of The Generalist’s ongoing series of managerial “playbooks” – the first version of which analyzed Elon Musk. As with that piece, our aim is to reveal the real strategies great founders use to build their businesses. These are often uncomfortable and in direct conflict with traditional managerial advice. However, if you believe progress depends on innovation, as we do, then understanding these principles, foibles included, is not only interesting but essential.
