Role of Entrepreneurship and Challenges Faced by Jeff Bezos

This report discusses the role of entrepreneurship in creating a strong economy and the challenges faced by Jeff Bezos. It covers the dark side of entrepreneurship, decisions undertaken by Bezos, ethical challenges faced, and legal disputes encountered by the entrepreneur. The report also highlights the importance of work-life balance, health, trust, vision, money, and scale in entrepreneurship.

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Contents
Introduction...........................................................................................................................................2
Dark side of Entrepreneurship...............................................................................................................2
Decisions undertaken by Jeff Bezos......................................................................................................3
Ethical challenge faced by Jeff Bezos...................................................................................................4
Legal dispute faced by Jeff Bezos.........................................................................................................5
Conclusion.............................................................................................................................................7
References.............................................................................................................................................8

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Introduction
The report will bring about the discussion on the aspects and role of entrepreneur and
entrepreneurship and the contribution towards creating a strong economy. Entrepreneurship
can be defined as the process or activity of setting up the business or businesses and taking
financial risks to generate profits in the long-run. The people who hold the responsibility of
creating these businesses are termed as entrepreneurs. To gain an understanding of the role of
entrepreneur within businesses and community, Jeff Bezos has been taken as the
entrepreneur. Jeffrey Preston Bezos has been an American technology entrepreneur, investor,
and philanthropist (Bezos, 2015). Jeff Bezos is the founder and CEO of Amazon, and has
been identified as one of the most intelligent Entrepreneur. Thus, the report in the later part
will include the discussion of the dark side of the process, challenges, ethical and legal issues
faced by the entrepreneur, and their contribution towards creating a better and strong
economy.
Dark side of Entrepreneurship
An entrepreneur is considered to be significant to be able to create successful businesses and
create strong economy. However, there are some negative aspects also which defines the
weaknesses of the entrepreneur, which leads to the ethical and legal issues due to the
challenges faced within organisations. In the process of entrepreneurship, it is important to
make effective decisions for the betterment of both, the organisation and the society. The
dark side of the entrepreneurship states that entrepreneurs deal with the stress and anxiety on
the daily basis. Thus, it is important for an entrepreneur to establish balance in their other
aspects of life, to avoid any situation of burnout (Spivack and McKelvie, 2018).
Few elements are there which forms the base of dark side of entrepreneurship and defines the
pathway to overcome them effectively.
 Balance – The element of work-life balance is one of the most important factors as
being an entrepreneur it is essential to keep their minds refresh to work with high
productivity.
 Health – Maintaining one’s own health is essential to avoid any issues in work.

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 Trust – Under this element, the benefit of doubt works the most which states that the
entrepreneur need to trust and maintain faith in people irrespective of the outcomes.
Thus, he should stay real and ensure a high level of confidence (Taylor, 2018).
 Vision – The vision is most important element which an entrepreneur needs to carry
to work towards attainment of the organisational goals.
 Money- It is most important element, along with the others therefore an entrepreneur
must focus on paying self along with other employees working in the organisation.
 Scale- It states about the factor of generating 60% of the profits out of their business
services, and the failure to do so determines the negative aspect or dark side of their
role as entrepreneur (Klotz and Neubaum, 2016).
In context to the chosen entrepreneur in this case, ‘Jeff Bezos’ it has been found that he has
been an impressive entrepreneur and performed various responsibilities well. In addition, he
valued the aspect of putting the customers first, as the vision of the company is to become a
customer-centric company. Successful entrepreneurships and their innovations improve the
standard of living and create jobs for prosperous society. Thus, the entrepreneurs play a vital
role in creating a strong economy determining their success (Edwards-Schachter et al., 2015).
Decisions undertaken by Jeff Bezos
Amazon chief executive and intelligent entrepreneur Jeff Bezos stated about his decision-
making that it was mainly based upon his intuitions rather an analysis. It means he assumed
to take the decisions for the company, employees, and society on the basis of gut feelings,
rather conducting an assessment.
To define and discuss the decision-making of Jeff Bezos, it has been understood that there are
two types of decisions as they relate to different consequences, Type 1 decisions are not
reversible, and require great care. On the other hand, Type 2 decisions can be easily reversed,
which Bezos also called as “two-way doors”, which was considered better for leading to the
creation of strong economy. He analysed the important aspect of focusing on the use of Type
2 decision-making in running the company effectively. The reason behind this was that, Type
1 decisions results in slowness, unthoughtful risk, failure in experiments, and diminished
inventions. Thus, he stated that one must focus more on making type 2 decisions, as they are
easily reversible, also under this process, one can acquire more skills and gain higher
experience (Kantor and Streitfeld, 2015).

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One of the significant decisions was made include the announcement made for the location of
the new HQ2 headquarters. Under this, he focused on the aspect of choosing new homes for
the 50,000 people, who were their future employees. In addition, one of the major decision
stated by Bezos mentioned that the company, Amazon rests on three pillars, of Amazon
prime, Amazon web services, and the marketplace and also the acquisition strategy of the
company, which is a major support. Another critical decision which was taken by the
company stated about the largest acquisition, i.e. Whole foods in the year 2017. Jeff Bezos
mentioned that the company Amazon is on the hunt for various underserved market areas
with their high transaction volumes, and undifferentiated channels which aim at delivering
the margin growth (Brooks et al., 2016).
Jeff Bezos was also recognised for the major change in the pay for their American workers,
as the workers who were previously paid low, are now given increased wages, i.e. $15 per
hour. Moreover, to push forward Amazon, Bezos has initiated and developed the mantra “Get
Big Fast” which stated about the company’s need to scale their operations and attain high
market dominance. For this purpose, the entrepreneur took one major decision to divert back
the profits achieved by Amazon instead of allocating them in consideration amongst their
shareholders in the form of dividends. Jeff Bezos has been identified as an intelligent
entrepreneur and thus, undertaken the decisions effectively considering the betterment of
their employees. Therefore, the discussion has revealed about the major decisions undertaken
by Bezos in the company towards leading a better organisation, and serving people (Song et
al., 2018).
Ethical challenge faced by Jeff Bezos
The above discussion has revealed about the strategy of decision-making of Bezos in the
company Amazon therefore, there will be a discussion of the ethical challenges faced or
encountered by the entrepreneur. Ethical challenge describes about the information and
activities which helps the individuals or groups to think through the basic ethical concepts
and considerations.
One of the major ethical challenges the entrepreneur has encountered relates to the aspect of
treatment of the workers. In this context, it has been found that the company has encountered
an issue on the abusive treatment of all the blue collar and white collar workers across many
media. The complaints were received from both, current and former employees of Amazon

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which is one of the major ethical issues. Thus, the mistreatment of the employees was one big
ethical challenge encountered by Bezos being an entrepreneur (Ross and Blumenstein, 2015).
Jeff Bezos has mainly identified that their British staff has been facing the problem of being
physically and mentally ill. The fact of the ill-health of their employees or staff within
organisation was the issue of the bad working environment, as it was brutal and highly
pressurised. In addition, the managers or supervisors at amazon did not give importance to
the aspect of work-life balance of their employees. This has been considered inappropriate
from the perspective of public policy and was often termed as unethical disturbing the culture
of the organisation (Yazdanmehr and Wang, 2016).
In addition, it has been found through research that the Amazon has been accused of many
unethical practices, in which the most documented case of Pennsylvania, where the issue was
about the mistreatment of workers in the warehouse owned and operated by the company.
The employees or workers were regularly passed out through ambulances due to the
strenuous workloads in the heat and the other health issues of the workers (Ethical unicorn,
2019).
Exploitation of the Chinese workers – It states that the company also has some factories,
along with their warehouses with similar issues. The Chinese factories often included
some of the temporary people, often called as dispatch workers, and according to the law in
China, no workplace can have more than 10% of their workforce as dispatch workers. In this
case, the company did not follow the law. The company differentiated both the workers, in
terms of the training provided to them, and regarding their leaves, and compensation. Thus,
these were some of the ethical challenges or practices encountered by the entrepreneur (Crane
and Matten, 2016).
Legal dispute faced by Jeff Bezos
As an entrepreneur, an individual faces many legal issues or challenges in running their
business operations in a successful manner. There are some of the common legal issues,
which are faced by any company such as copyright and patent issues, dissatisfied customers,
discrimination/harassment cases and other legal issues. The CEO and the entrepreneur have
also faced some of the legal disputes or issues within the company Amazon. These cases
defines about the company facing multiple lawsuits from different brands does not do enough
to prevent counterfeits from the aspect of getting listed on the website. For an instance, the

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entrepreneur has encountered one of the major legal disputes as in the year 2016 Daimler AG
the parent company of Mercedes-Benz filed a lawsuit against the company Amazon. The
lawsuit was filed against the company in the district court in the Washington state, and the
company was sued due to the reason that it gained profits through selling wheels which
violated the Daimler’s patents. In the earlier years, of the operation the company in 2011 has
been named in four new patent-infringement lawsuits. One of the most prominent lawsuits
amongst these was the trademark-infringement lawsuit which was brought about the
company Apple, because of the use of the App store name in the app store of Amazon for
android (Naranjo-Valencia et al., 2018).
Tax avoidance- The legal aspect of tax, was considered one significant dispute in the
company Amazon, as it was found that the company has built their profit maximization
strategy by avoiding taxes at various levels (Bird and Davis-Nozemack, 2018).
Taxes are considered important as they redistribute the money in a way which facilitates
citizens gaining the advantage of services as per their requirement. Amazon has been
considered as a serial tax avoider, as the company did not pay the sales tax in the US as it was
revealed through some of the calculations. Moreover, in US Amazon barely focused upon
paying the federal income taxes. The company was involved in these activities through
avoiding booking of any profits for years instead they were focused towards investing
everything back into the business, and also through the use of aggressive tax planning. In the
October, 2017 it has been found that European commission also ruled stating that
Luxembourg had improperly permitted the company to evade the taxes on approximately
75% of the European profits earned by Amazon (Kantor and Streitfeld, 2015).
Therefore, in precise it can be stated that the company has faced some of the legal issues
which consists, failure to pay minimum wages to the employees, failure to compensate the
overtime to their workers, the company’s irresponsible attitude towards providing meal
periods. The lawsuits also included the cases for employee misclassification, and violating
the laws of unfair competition. Thus, the entrepreneur Bezos encountered these aspects as
some of the major legal disputes which required the company to focus and improve to avoid
any further legal issues (Greenbaum et al., 2018).

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Conclusion
To conclude the above discussion it has been analysed that Amazon has been recognised as
one of the largest online shopping websites in the world. The assignment above has
illustrated well about the role of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship in the organisations for
their growth and success in the future years. Jeff Bezos has been found as one of the
innovative and intelligent entrepreneur who highlighted the skills of undertaking crucial
decisions for the betterment of the company. Through the specific characteristics of the
entrepreneur, Bezos such as innovation/creativity, effective customer service, and outstanding
performance the company has achieved greater success leading to a strong economy. Hence,
the report provided a brief about the ethical, and some legal issues encountered by the
entrepreneur within company.

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References
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of Business Ethics, 151(4), pp.1009-1025.
Brooks, C., Godfrey, C., Hillenbrand, C. and Money, K. (2016) Do investors care about
corporate taxes? Journal of Corporate Finance, 38, pp. 218-248.
Crane, A. and Matten, D. (2016) Business ethics: Managing corporate citizenship and
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Edwards-Schachter, M., García-Granero, A., Sánchez-Barrioluengo, M., Quesada-Pineda, H.
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