Jeff Bezos’ tips on how to run a company and manage your team

• Jeff Bezos spent nearly three decades at the helm of Amazon.
• His successor, Andy Jassy, has called him the “most unusual business leader of our era.”
• Here’s some of Bezos’ most famous principles for running a team and business.

Andy Jassy has called him “arguably the most unusual business leader of our era.”

In his 27 years at the helm of Amazon, Jeff Bezos taught his successor, Jassy, and others a lot about how to run one of the world’s biggest businesses.

Here’s some of the advice he’s shared over the years about managing a team and company:

Think big picture

Bezos “always had a way of getting teams to think bigger,” Jassy said at a 2017 talk.

“It was amazing to watch how many ideas came to him from teams — that I thought were really good ideas, and they were really good ideas — where Jeff kind of listened to them, thought about them and then really looked around corners and helped figure it out and said: ‘Well, shouldn’t we extend this idea? Shouldn’t we look around this corner naturally to advance the idea beyond what we are thinking just now to really change the shape of what we’ve built?'” Jassy said.

“Big things start small. The biggest oak starts from an acorn,” Bezos said in 2017.

Have high standards

Bezos’ had high expectations that extended throughout the organization.

“”When you run a big organization and you can’t attend all of the meetings, you can set reasonably high standards — I’ll say maybe even unreasonably high standards, reasonably high standards that people stretch to — it gives you a lot of leverage across the organization where you are not in all of those meetings,” Jassy said.

Be “strategically patient and tactically impatient”

Bezos put an emphasis on speed while sticking to his long-term vision for the company.

“His conviction about long-term vision and where he wants to take something — and even when people tell him it is not possible, which by the way, all of the time people tell him it is not possible — he has a conviction about it and believes it is possible and is stubborn about that vision,” Jassy said. “But, in the interim, even though it may take us a long time to get to where we want to go, he understands that speed disproportionately matters.”

Determine meeting head count by 2 pizzas

Bezos famously employs a “two-pizza rule” for meetings: He limits them to only the number of people that could be fed with two pizzas.

He credits this with helping with productivity, speed, and collaboration.

Create narratives, not PowerPoints

Bezos has said Amazon has “the weirdest meeting culture you ever encounter.” One of Bezos’ meeting no-nos is PowerPoints, which he has banned in company meetings.

“For every meeting, someone from the meeting has prepared a six-page, narratively structured memo that has real sentences and topic sentences and verbs,” he’s said. “It’s not just bullet points. It’s supposed to create the context for the discussion we’re about to have.”

He’s said his perfect meeting has days of prep and involves “a crisp document and a messy meeting.”

In a 2004 email to his senior team, Bezos explained why he doesn’t like PowerPoints.

“Powerpoint-style presentations somehow give permission to gloss over ideas, flatten out any sense of relative importance, and ignore the innerconnectedness of ideas,” he wrote.

Bezos makes sure meeting attendees read through the memos.

“We read in the room. Just like high-school kids, executives will bluff their way through the meeting as if they’ve read the memo. So you have to carve out time so everyone has actually read the memo — they are not just pretending,” he said.

Bezos has also assigned summer reading to top executives before.

Get customer input

Bezos’ email is public, and while it’s hard to imagine the jet-setting centibillionaire responded to any customers, he says he sometimes forwarded their concerns or feedback to the relevant departments.

“I see most of those emails. I see them and I forward them to the executives in charge of the area with a question mark. It’s shorthand [for], ‘Can you look into this?’ ‘Why is this happening?'” he said in 2018.

Bezos made a big point at Amazon of being focused on “customer obsession, as opposed to competitor obsession.”

“Often companies say they are focused on customers, but they really spend most of their energy reacting to and talking about competitors,” he said.

In fact, much of Amazon’s success can be traced back to Bezos soliciting customer input in the company’s early days.

In 1997, Bezos emailed 1,000 customers asking what they’d like to see the company sell. One customer said they wished Bezos sold windshield wiper blades because they needed new ones.

“I thought to myself, ‘We can sell anything this way,'” Bezos said.

“Disagree and commit”

In his 2016 letter to shareholders, Bezos talked about the importance of the “disagree and commit” strategy in decision-making.

“If you have conviction on a particular direction even though there’s no consensus, it’s helpful to say, ‘Look, I know we disagree on this but will you gamble with me on it? Disagree and commit?’ By the time you’re at this point, no one can know the answer for sure, and you’ll probably get a quick yes,” he wrote.

Categorize decisions, and make them sooner than you think

Bezos wrote in his 2015 shareholder letter that he distinguishes Type 1 and Type 2 decisions. Type 1 decisions are high-impact and have a big influence on the company’s strategy, while Type 2 decisions have lower stakes and can be more easily reversed if necessary.

Bezos says Type 1 decisions take up most of your time, while Type 2 decisions should be delegated or grouped with other smaller decisions for later.

Bezos believes you should make decisions with 70% of the information you wish you had, and iterate from there. He says he does this because if you waited for all of the data you wanted, you’d be acting too slowly.

In addition, Bezos likes to make decisions in the mornings.

“He said, ‘Normally, I make important decisions around 10:30 a.m. I’ll discuss it the day before, I’ll sleep on it, and in the morning I’ll actually make the decision,'” Italian fashion designer Brunello Cucinelli told The Wall Street Journal’s Lane Florsheim in 2020.