Brief
Amazon.com was founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos and launched in 1995 as an online bookstore. What was started as “Earth's biggest bookstore” has soon grown into the Earth's biggest anything store. Amazon’s main Web site offers millions of books, CDs, DVDs, computer software, video games, auto parts, electronics, apparel, home furnishings and housewares, health and beauty goods, groceries, toys, services including film processing, and more. Amazon has established separate websites in Canada, the UK, Germany, Austria, France, China, and Japan. The number of company’s employees exceeds 12 000. Jeff Bezos is still the CEO, chairman and president of the company he has founded.
Interesting to note that Amazon's initial business plan was not to expect to turn a profit for four to five years. Although it caused a number of stockholders to complain, the plan finally turned out to be very effective. After the dot-com bubble burst of the late 1990s, many e-companies went out of business, but Amazon persevered and turned its first profit in the fourth quarter of 2002. Since then the company’s revenue is steadily growing ($8.5 billion in 2005).
Culture
The standards for Amazon.com, the fundamental principles that make it work, have been formulated by Jeff Bezos as the company’s six core values: customer obsession, ownership, bias for action, frugality, high hiring bar, and innovation. The walls of every Amazon building are plastered with posters reminding employees about these values. And even bigger than core principles Amazon’s vision is posted: To be the world’s most customer-centric company.
Amazon is striving to attract the most talented and creative people because innovation is the part of what the company is. Jeff Bezos has promoted innovative efforts among his employees through the Just Do It program, which rewards those who come up with and execute ideas that help the company without first obtaining permission from their bosses. Jeff is famous by always looking for intelligent and innovative individuals. "I'd rather interview 50 people and not hire anyone than hire the wrong person," he told a colleague in the company's early days. “Cultures aren't so much planned as they evolve from that early set of people."
One more remarkable feature of Amazon’s corporate culture is fun, cultivated and cherished by Bezos himself. Fun is a good way to keep everyone’s enthusiasm and make people really love their work. For example, before the very launch of the Amazon Web site the team expected a slow start. To cheer people up the computers were rigged to give a bell sound when an order came in. At first, the bell went off 5 or 6 times a day. Every time they heard it the staff cheered immediately. Before the first week ended, however, the bell rang so often its sound had to be shut off.
Leadership
Amazon.com is one of the Web pioneers - along with eBay, Yahoo, and Google, but Jeff Bezos is the only founder in that row who's still running his company as CEO. Coworkers characterize him as a visionary who on the surface is easygoing but keeps his employees on demanding schedules. He sets weekly management meetings with managers reporting on new products and pricing and taking on questions from the CEO.
His personality is decidedly noncorporate. So are some of his ideas about running a large company. One of Bezos's more memorable behind-the-scenes moments came during an off-site retreat. People said that groups needed to communicate more. Jeff answered, “No, communication is terrible!” His managers were shocked. But Bezos pursued his idea of a decentralized company where small groups can innovate and test their visions independently of everyone else. He came up with the idea of the "two-pizza team": If you can't feed a team with two pizzas, it's too large.
Jeff Bezos himself explains his modus operandi this way: "For every leader in the company, not just for me, there are decisions that can be made by analysis. These are the best kinds of decisions! They’re fact-based decisions. The great thing about fact-based decisions is that they overrule the hierarchy. The most junior person in the company can win an argument with the most senior person with a fact-based decision. Unfortunately, there's this whole other set of decisions that you can't ultimately boil down to a math problem." For those judgments, Bezos relies on his most senior executives, whom he regularly recruits from larger companies.
Background Links
Jeff Bezos: The Founder of Amazon.com, Ann Byers, (Internet career biographies), 2007
Inside the Mind of Jeff Bezos, Fast Company
