Robert Bruce Shaw - All In : How Obsessive Leaders Achieve the Extraordinary

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Copyright 2020 by Robert Bruce Shaw

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ISBN 978-1-4002-1223-1 (eBook)

ISBN 978-1-4002-1220-0 (HC)

Epub Edition April 2020 9781400212231

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019956821

Printed in the United States of America

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CONTENTS

Good requires motivation.

Great requires obsession.

M. Cobanli

Try this. Go to relentless.com on your phone or computer. Now ask yourself why the homepage for Amazon is filling your screen. It may seem strange that relentless takes you to a website that sells everything from tea to televisionsuntil you delve into the history of the company. Amazons founder, Jeff Bezos, is arguably the most influential business leader in America today. His firm has transformed the way we shop and has forced competitors, large and small, to adapt to the digital economy that Amazon helped create. Bezos also disrupted the technology industry through Amazon Web Services and is now pushing into areas such as logistics, advertising, media, and health care. It is a rare person who alters the competitive landscape of just one industrybut it is almost unheard of for someone to do so in several.

Bezos started his company thinking that the internet, small at the time but growing at a dramatic rate, would enable people to shop in a new way. This seems obvious today when we buy goods with a single click and they appear outside our door in days, if not hours. However, what we now take for granted was much less certain when Bezos founded Amazon.

The internet was initially an emergency communication tool for the military. It evolved into a platform for academic and scientific researchers to share information and findings. Bezos saw its commercial potential and analyzed start-up possibilities based on the best-selling mail-order businesses of the dayincluding books, music, videos, and computers. He decided that books offered the most upside because the web would allow him to offer a vast selection of titles from among the millions of books in printusing technology to allow customers to quickly find, review, and buy titles of interest.

These potential advantages were compelling because they couldnt be replicated by conventional bookstores, no matter how large. The largest bookstore stocked only 150,000 titles and couldnt match the search-and-review capabilities of the web. Bezos still thought what he called his crazy idea had only a 30 percent chance of success and told friends and family who invested with him that they would most likely lose their money. At the age of thirty, Bezos quit his high-paying job at a financial services firm in New York and took an entrepreneurial leap of faith. Driving across the country with his wife to their new home in Seattle, Bezos outlined his business plan and considered potential names for his new venture.

One that he liked was relentless.com, believing that good things came to those with the ability to focus intensely. This was certainly true in his own life. Bezos applied himself with a rigor that those who knew him viewed as exceptional. A story from his youth gives some insight into his personality. His Montessori teachers told his mother that her young son was unique in being completely engrossed in school activities. At times they had no choice but to pick up Jeffs chair, with Jeff still in it, to get him away from what he was doing and on to the next classroom activity. Childhood stories, when told by famous individuals and their parents, are prone to exaggeration. However, those who have worked with Bezos over the years describe him as being exceptionally intense and methodical in just about everything he does.

Bezos registered the relentless.com domain name soon after arriving in Seattle.

Over the next twenty-five years, Bezos built one of the fastest-growing firms in history. More than 200 million people visit its websites each month, Amazons success, of course, is not simply the result of Bezoss relentless nature. Many relentless people dont build a successful firm, let alone one that can compare to Amazon. Bezos is a leader with the strategic ability to see around cornersnoting patterns, trends, and possibilities that elude most people. He anticipated the potential of e-commerce when others thought the internet was little more than a research tool. He saw, despite resistance from his board of directors, that Amazons technology platform would be useful to a wide variety of firms. He pushed the development of the Kindle e-reader and the Echo smart-device when few, if any, customers were asking for them. Amazon is now investing in a range of other innovative initiatives, such as drone technology for deliveries, to provide customers with products even faster and cheaper. Time and again, Bezos spotted opportunities that others missed and made long-term investments to capitalize on his insights.

Bezos is also operationally savvy. He has a deep understanding of the gritty details that are critical to his companys success. Bezos gets into the specifics of his business, how it is executing, and what is needed to enhance its performance moving forward. He knows, for instance, the intricacies of supply chain management and what is required to achieve ever-decreasing delivery times for customers. Watch him describe how Amazon manages its logical challenges and how the firms fulfillment centers operateincluding the intricacies of order-processing software and product-picking robotsand you might think he is a mid-level engineer responsible for operations management.

A colleague who worked with Bezos suggested, with only a hint of sarcasm, that others should view him as a super-intelligent alienone requiring special handling particularly if you find yourself making a recommendation to him. At Amazon, this often comes in the form of a short written proposal that is reviewed and then discussed by the firms senior leadership team. When presenting, one of Bezoss former colleague recommends that others

assume he already knows everything about it. Assume he knows more than you do about it. Even if you have groundbreaking original ideas in your material, just pretend its old hat for him. Write your prose in the succinct, direct, no-explanations way that you would write for a world-leading expert on the material... tearing out whole paragraphs, or even pages, to make it interesting for him. He will fill in the gaps himself without missing a beat. And his brain will have less time to get annoyed with the slow pace of your brain.

Bezos, however, is more than strategically and operationally smarthe is also lucky. He describes this as the planets aligning to support his newly launched firm. Bezos at times calls his success and enormous wealth as him winning the lottery. This phrase may be an attempt to appear humble in the eyes of the public but, even if so, Bezos seems to truly believe that luck was his partner in propelling Amazon forward.