Jeffrey Preston Bezos

This paper discusses the life and achievements of Jeffrey Preston Bezos, the CEO and founder of Amazon and owner of The Washington Post. It elaborates on the important decisions he has made, his vision for the organization, challenges faced, and leadership qualities. Bezos is an unconventional entrepreneur with a Midas touch who has proved that everything is possible in this world.

Running head: JEFFREY PRESTON BEZOS
Jeffrey Preston Bezos
Name of the Student:
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Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................2
Discussion..................................................................................................................................2
a. Important decision that Jeffrey Preston Bezos has made...................................................2
b. Vision that Jeffrey Preston Bezos has for the organisation................................................4
c. Challenges that Jeffrey Preston Bezos has faced...............................................................4
d. Lessons we can learn about Jeffrey Preston Bezos as a leader..........................................5
Conclusion..................................................................................................................................6
References:.................................................................................................................................8

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Introduction
Life turns to be exciting when one follows the road that is less travelled. People think
that a bird in the hand in worth the two in the bush but this is not something that is always
correct. The success story of Jeffrey Preston Bezos has proved so. He is always known for his
quality of thinking outside the box and reshaping it. Right from revolutionising the manner a
person buy and read a book to creating a private spaceflight firm that is aimed wholly for the
people, this man has always challenged the norms (Turza 2014). He is the one who believes
in breaking away from the pack and making extraordinary decisions and these is what that
truly lead to growth and innovation (Kriger and Zhovtobryukh 2016). This paper is going to
elaborate on one of the most significant leader of this time and a role model to many young
entrepreneur- Jeffrey Preston Bezos, the Chief Executive Officer and the founder of Amazon
as well as the owner of ‘The Washington Post’. This shall shed light on the numerous
important decisions that this leader has made all over his life time in regard to his business
and career. With the same, it has also elaborated on the vision that he has for his organisation
and the challenges that he has faced to reach this position. With the same, it shall also the
leadership style and qualities that he possess as a global leader and the lessons one can learn
about the person as a leader.
Discussion
a. Important decision that Jeffrey Preston Bezos has made
Bezos was born in the year 1964 in a place called Albuquerque in New Mexico
(Araoz 2014). It was his grandfather named Lawrence Gise whom he considered to be his
role model. He had great interest towards science and technologies since his early age. The
very first significant decision that he has made in his life towards achieving his dream and
following his heart is that of quitting his lucrative job of being the vice president of a high-

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level placement company and working hard towards being an entrepreneur. It is to note that
Jeffrey Preston Bezos has always been considered by the public as one of the needlessly data
driven and quantitative person. In the year 1993, Jeffrey Preston Bezos took a decision of
starting an online bookstore. He even left the job that he was doing at D.E. Shaw and he then
founded “Amazon” in his garage in the year 1994 on 5th of July. It was then when we
complete writing the business plan for Amazon on a trip from the New York City to Seattle.
He named the business so after the name of river Amazon of South America as it is the name
that starts with the letter “A”, the very first English Alphabet. However, three years later, i.e.
in the year 1996, he took Amazon public along with an IPO (Initial Public Offering)
(Aggarwal and Conroy 2015). As a reply to the critical reports of from Barron’s and Fortune,
two of the multinational business magazines, Bezos had maintain that the development and
development of the world of internet overtake the competition from the rest other popular
retailers of books like the ‘Barnes & Noble’ and the ‘Borders’ (Grant and Jordan 2015).
Furthermore, in the year 1998, Jeffrey Preston Bezos decided to diversify his business into
online sales of video and music and he actually did so. He also expanded the products of the
company in order to include a wide range of consumer goods. Again, in the year 2000, he
founded Blue Origin, a human spaceflight start-up company as he was long been interested in
the field of science, particularly in space travel as well as the development of the life of
human in solar system (Klerkx 2017). Moreover in the year 2002, he led Amazon to launch
web services named as Amazon Web Services. It was something that compiled the data from
the website traffics and weather channels. Again, in the year 2007, Bezos launched his
Amazon Kindle over many of the states and finally people got an access of it all over the
world (Ritala, Golnam and Wegmann). It is also to note that in 2013, the company that he
started just 10 years ago was recognised as the biggest online shopping retailer in the globe.
Furthermore, one of the very significant decisions that he has made very recently in the year

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2018 was of dispatching Amit Agarwal, the current global senior vice president of Amazon to
India with about 5.5 billion dollars in order to localise the operations all over the supply chain
routes of the company.
b. Vision that Jeffrey Preston Bezos has for the organisation
Bezos’ vision was to make Amazon the most customer centric company present in the
world (Mellahi and Johnson 2015). He wants it to become a place where people could come
for finding and discovering anything that they might to buy online. One of his most famous
sayings state that “Be stubborn on vision but flexible on details”. Jeffrey has always been
determined towards his goal and vision to make Amazon the greater and the largest and he
have already proved himself doing so. The organisation is now considered to be the world’s
largest organisation in the world and Jeffery Preston Bezos is now regarded as the new
richest person in the world after Bill Gates (Kennedy 2018). His determination and hard work
has lead him up to this very position where he and his company is standing tall and shining.
With the same, he also seeks his customers to remove the requirement or the need to purchase
the goods from the manufactures by making use of the technologies of 3D printer in order to
manufacture their own.
c. Challenges that Jeffrey Preston Bezos has faced
Jeffrey Bezos has faced several challenges throughout his life for attaining the
position that he possess today. After the completion of his studies, a very bright and lucrative
careers was waiting for him but Bezos chose to follow his dream career. He left his job as a
vice president at D.E. Shaw in order to follow his heart and passion and chose to pursue
entrepreneurship.
With the same, when he first thought of starting Amazon, most of the people did not
understood the idea and the importance of internet then. It was very hard for him to convince

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people for the business. He struggled a lot to raise 1 million dollars in order to get the
company off the ground but he never quitted (Weinstein and McFarlane 2017). Since his
childhood, Jeffrey was interested in science and computers and this made him enter into the
business of e-commerce, which was regarded to be a very risky move in those days.
d. Lessons we can learn about Jeffrey Preston Bezos as a leader
Bezos is one of those business leaders who always has his customers in his mind, no
matter what is happening, what he is working on and what he is going through. He gave up
his lucrative and remunerative career and kept on following his heart in order to pursue
entrepreneurship. He took risks and he learnt lessons from not only the successes but also
from the failures. He never followed the paths that were conventional but have always
created unconventional ideas and followed them unsparingly. He was never a trend followers
but is in fact a trend setter. Furthermore, it is also to note that Bezos has a very strong team of
experts who keeps on advising him regarding developments (Kennedy 2018). He always
ensures that he is taking their suggestions and views into consideration while making his
decisions. This helps him in minimising the mistakes and maximising the effectiveness.
Furthermore, he always believes in exploring and experimenting rather than taking on his
competitors. According to him, “What’s dangerous is not to evolve.” He believes in adding
value to his customers and keeping them satisfied and happy because the happier the
customers are, the more customers they would bring through word-of-mouth. This in turn
would help in improving the bottom lines of the company. With the same, it is also to note
that he constantly invests all his efforts on exploring ideas for making innovative products
and services for his customers. He always makes sure to finish what he starts. When he finds
that the things are going wrong, he makes sure to learn from them and explore more and
experiment further instead of quitting.

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His top most priority has always been making it as available and as easily available
and accessible to the customers as possible. He is a hyper intelligent and an ultra-driven
person who expects each and every one around himself to be the likewise. He is of a dual-
personality as well and this personality of his helps him turning from a very compassionate
and kind individual to a rough executive one within few seconds. He is an extra ordinarily
ambitious individual and as a businessman, he has always taught his followers to be customer
centric, determined and ambitious towards their goal of achieving a target. In fact after being
appreciated and popular worldwide, Bezos still seeks to push all the possibilities of the
modern technology beyond the imaginable (Kriger and Zhovtobryukh 2016). It is also to note
that Jeffrey Preston Bezos had no issue running Amazon while he was still personally reading
the feedbacks from the customers. As according to Jeff Wilke, the senior vice president of
Amazon- “Bezos research each of them because they tell him something about our processes.
It’s an audit that is done for us by our customers (Mullaney 2014). He treat them as precious
sources of information”. Furthermore, it is also to mention that Bezos always moves faster
and always ensures that his employees are working harder. He pursue both significant and
small innovations. He expects the mass expansion of Amazon to as many of the nations as
possible.
Hence, the lessons that one could learn from this great leader is of following your
heart, being a risk taker, being a trend settler, building a strong team, being an explorer
instead of conqueror, emphasising more on the customer satisfaction rather than on making
money, striving for excellence and emphasising on efforts instead of on the results. Bezos is
one of the unconventional entrepreneurs and he has successfully proved that through hard
work and determination one could achieve anything in this world (Wanasika and Krahnke
2018). Everything is possible. He is a living example for the leaders and the CEOs and they

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should learn lessons from the innovative and exemplary leadership style of this individual in
order to take their organisations from a mere good to a great one.
Conclusion
Hence from the above discussion it is to be concluded that Jeffrey Preston Bezos has
achieved all his success because of his very strong desire and determination towards learning
new technologies. He really is a very hard working person and has some really distinctive
leadership qualities. All his successful business ventures are the ones that have made him one
among the richest persons in the world today. He is an amazing global entrepreneur.
However, it is also to note that Bezos has not gained adequate attention that he actually
deserves globally for the achievements of his. The lesser successful CEOs on the other hand
have got much more attention than him in reality. The media all over the world highlights the
inspiring stories of Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs etc. Hence, it
is believed that Bezos is one of the underrated CEOS in the world despite of contributing his
best. Jeff Bezos is an amazing unconventional entrepreneur with a Midas touch and he is the
one who has proved that everything is possible in this world. The thing that is essential for
the same is just to think, to dream big and to do big so that one can leave a mark behind for
the others to follow.

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References:
Aggarwal, R. and Conroy, P., 2015. Price discovery in initial public offerings and the role of
the lead underwriter. The Journal of Finance, 55(6), pp.2903-2922.
Araoz, C.F., 2014. It's Not the how Or the what But the who: Succeed by Surrounding
Yourself with the Best. Harvard Business Press.
Grant, R.M. and Jordan, J.J., 2015. Foundations of strategy. John Wiley & Sons.
Kennedy, D., 2018. The Return of the Moguls: How Jeff Bezos and John Henry Are
Remaking Newspapers for the Twenty-First Century. University Press of New England.
Klerkx, G., 2017. The alt. space race. New Scientist, 195(2620), pp.55-58.
Kriger, M. and Zhovtobryukh, Y., 2016. Generic Approaches to Strategic Leadership: Stars,
Teams, Clans, and Networks. In Strategic Leadership for Turbulent Times (pp. 17-29).
Palgrave Macmillan, New York.
Mellahi, K. and Johnson, M., 2015. Does it pay to be a first mover in e. commerce? The case
of Amazon. com. Management Decision, 38(7), pp.445-452.
Mullaney, T.J., 2014. E-Biz Strikes Again!. Business Week, 3882, pp.80-82.
Ritala, P., Golnam, A. and Wegmann, A., 2014. Coopetition-based business models: The case
of Amazon. com. Industrial Marketing Management, 43(2), pp.236-249.
Turza, N.R., 2014. Dr. Dronelove: How We Should All Learn to Stop Worrying and Love
Commercial Drones. NCJL & TECH., 15, pp.319-321.

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Wanasika, I. and Krahnke, K., 2018. Reexamining Transformational Leadership in Complex
Systems. In Engaged Leadership (pp. 199-210). Springer, Cham.
Weinstein, A.T. and McFarlane, D.A., 2017. How libraries can enhance customer service by
implementing a customer value mindset. International Journal of Nonprofit and Voluntary
Sector Marketing, 22(1), p.e1571.