The success of many organizations is commonly attributed to management strategies of its founders. Amazon’s success as the leader in E-commerce is widely attributed to Jeff Bezos business strategies when he founded the company in 1994. Since then, Bezos has managed to spearhead Amazon to become a market leader in the E-commerce business segment with an average annual revenue of more than $45 billion dollars.
The first key strategy used by Bezos to grow the company is being stubborn and flexible. Bezos argues that, successful business entrepreneurs should be stubborn and flexible. According to Landau (2012), Bezos stated that,
“If you’re not stubborn, you’ll give up on experiments too soon. And if you’re not flexible, you’ll pound your head against the wall and you won’t see a different solution to a problem you’re trying to solve.” (Landau, 2012)
The second key strategy is that Bezos believed in small and autonomous groups better known as the “two pizza rule,” which implies that a team should be larger that it cannot be fed with two large pizzas (Landau, 2012). Bezos suggested that the task forces should be restricted to just between five and seven individuals enabling teams to carry out test on their ideas without involving too many onlookers, hence guarding against groupthink.
The third strategy is diversification. Bezos believed on the idea of diversifying its products Originally, Amazon began selling books. However, Bezos spearheaded the diversification of the company and it is now delivering a wide range of consumer products such as movies, electronics, among others (Landau, 2012). Moreover, Bezos oversaw the development of Amazon’s first hardware product, Kindle which is a future business idea of safeguarding the company market share in the competition wave of other upcoming e-commerce companies.
Another key strategy employed by Bezos is talking less and doing more. According to Bezos, talking too much can be a problem especially a cross team communication which restricts team independence and results in people giving in with too much. As estimated by Bezos, this goes against the creative conflict defining the culture at Amazon.