Jeff Bezos says one of the best decisions he made while building Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) was to hire people smarter than him and treat them like tutors.
Learning From Hires Became Jeff Bezos’ Secret Edge
Speaking at Italian Tech Week in Turin, the Amazon founder said he learned to temper his torrent of ideas so the company could actually execute, a lesson he credits with helping Amazon avoid self-inflicted chaos.
“As a founder, I had the great luxury of always being able to hire my tutors. I would hire these experienced, senior executives . . . And I would listen to them and they would teach me,” Bezos said, speaking to Ferrari, Stellantis Chairman and Exor CEO John Elkann.
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Amazon Exec’s Warning To Jeff Bezos
One of those “tutors” was Jeff Wilke, the former CEO of Amazon Worldwide Consumer. Bezos recalled that his own creativity could become a liability. “Put me in front of a whiteboard and I can come up with 100 ideas in half an hour,” said Bezos.
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But Wilke’s response to an over-enthusiastic Bezos was blunt. “Jeff, you have enough ideas to destroy Amazon,” Wilke told Bezos. When Bezos asked what he meant, Wilke told him, “You have to release the work at the right rate so that the organization can accept it.”
Bezos said the feedback changed how he led. “Every time I released an idea, I was creating a backlog of work in process. And because it was just stacking up, it was adding no value. In fact, it was creating a distraction… This sounds so obvious, but it was not obvious to me at the time, and this was a profound insight for me. So I started prioritizing the ideas better, keeping lists of them, and keeping ideas to myself until the organization was ready for the ideas,” he added.
AI Bets And Amazon’s Expanding Media Ambitions
His comments came during a wider discussion in Turin, where Bezos argued today’s AI surge may resemble past “good” industrial bubbles and even floated the prospect of space-based data centers within two decades.
Amazon looks far different from the company Wilke joined in 1999. Through Amazon Web Services, it has become a pillar of enterprise computing, even as investors debate the pace of AWS growth, and Prime Video has evolved into a studio pushing deeper into live sports and advertising.
Benzinga’s Edge Stock Rankings rank Amazon’s growth in the 92nd percentile, highlighting its strong performance relative to its AI peers like Meta Platforms Inc.
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Jeff Bezos Was Once Told By An Amazon Executive That He Had Enough Ideas To ‘Destroy’ The Company: Here’s How He Reacted originally appeared on Benzinga.com.