
Bezos: A CEO Who Can Write - donmcc
https://mondaynote.com/bezos-a-ceo-who-can-write-2f368ee36599
======
a_d
Business writing suffers from an epidemic of post-fact rationalization.
Looking back, it is trivially easy to parse out whether something someone said
was “insightful wisdom” or “useless”. I am continually amazed by the scope and
depth of this hindsight bias disease.

While this author tries to make a point that bezos is a good writer, I am
afraid that this is just riding a wave of bezos worship (like Elon worship,
Jobs worship, Buffett workship, [‘name successful business person, preferably,
billionaire’] worship) — _after_ bezos’ company is seeing good results.

I wish more business writing was devoted to 1) suggesting ways so that people
have their own original thoughts 2) Discussing merits of strategies _before_
they become successful 3) Discussing problem solving frameworks 4) early days
of companies when they weren’t successful etc. I believe learning about the
first 100-300 days of companies would be very instructive. Someone should
write a book about that :-)

~~~
Regardsyjc
If you read the stories of self-made billionaires they strikingly have a lot
in common. Also all the following billionaires had troubled times and if you
read their stories, you will see how they overcame them.

From the books I've read about the following self-made billionaires so far
(Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Yvon Chouinard, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and
Charlie Munger) the most important things I've found they have in common are
that:

They avoid competition, think long-term, and don't copy others foolishly.

Longer explanation:

-They break down the world to the fundamentals, the essential, the Feynman method. When Musk wanted to build SpaceX everyone thought he was crazy. But when he broke it down to the raw costs for space shuttle manufacturing, the typical costs were too high and he saw opportunity. Many people tend to learn complex abstract concepts without truly understanding the building blocks or learning trees that it took to get there. There can be times when someone calculated incorrectly but everyone took it for granted and it became the status quo of knowledge. I believe these are one way to access the secrets in plain sight. Question everything.

\- They focus on the long game like the power of compound interest. They
operate with a vision of what the future might look like 10 years down the
road, and then they work backwards to create that vision. Did they see the
future, did they just build it before anyone else, or both?

\- Most of the billionaires I've read about had humble beginnings. Yvon
Chouinard used to sleep in his van. Elon Musk couch surfed during his worst
times. Jeff Bezos started out in his garage and made tables from doors.

\- All of them have very strong beliefs. They are not swayed by what everyone
else is doing which is how most, even big companies fail. Peter Thiel mentions
mimetic theory, basically that people copy each other, even companies, and
that's how you get competition. Buffett indirectly talks about it too.
ExxonMobil hires a fertilizer expert and then all the other oil companies
start hiring a fertilizer expert even if they don't really know why Exxon
hired one in the first place. Or how big companies (GEICO) can lose focus of
their circle of competence by getting distracted by what everyone else is
doing and creating inferior copycat products - which eventually leads to value
loss of their core competency and what actually drives value for their
customers.

I think that's one thing that makes them all special. They all took different
routes to get where they are. To be tacky, they didn't follow someone else's
road, they created their own.

\- They didn't do it alone. All those people knew how to build and lead a
great team. If they didn't, they found someone who could.

Books I'm getting this info from:

Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger by Peter Bevelin

Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman by Yvon
Chouinard

Zero to One by Peter Thiel Conspiracy by Ryan Holiday

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone

~~~
wilsonnb
> Jeff Bezos started out in his garage and made tables from doors.

I was under the impression that Bezos founded Amazon after he graduated from
Princeton and had worked for a hedge fund for a few years. Wikipedia also says
that his parents invested an estimated $300,000 into Amazon. I would hardly
call that humble beginnings.

The list of the 15 richest people in America also include the two Koch
brothers (inherited their wealth), three Waltons (inherited their wealth), and
plenty of people with Ivy League educations who earned their wealth but did
not have humble beginnings.

You seem to have drunk a little bit of the kool-aid the comment you're
responding to is talking about. I suggest spending some time reading about
people who are NOT billionaires (and some less high profile billionaires) and
you will see that there are plenty of poor people with the traits you describe
and plenty of rich people without them.

~~~
Regardsyjc
1\. Humble and humility, more as a mindset. Even if it wasn't, according to
the book, Bezos was very frugal in the beginning.

2\. My list was for self-made billionaires.

3\. I like reading about self-made billionaires because as an entrepreneur-
why wouldn't you want to learn from the best? At the same time, I don't want
to be a billionaire if that's the kool-aid you're referencing.

I grew up in poverty and love reading about poverty because I want to learn
more about the circumstances that affect my reality today. Why can some people
like my mom work 60 hours a week at $10/hr and never become a millionaire or
even afford to retire? While others can? I wish I knew. Poor decisions? Poor
environment? Or both?

I haven't met any billionaires but I've met many self-made millionaires who
literally built their way from nothing. In my experience, most of them built
their wealth over years or decades. It's very hard to build something from
nothing overnight.

If there's anything I learned from reading self-made billionaire stories- it's
simply better decision-making. Can't do much about a poor environment but at
least you do have control over the decisions you make.

------
motohagiography
Bezos' role is to get everyone working toward the same vision. Stories go a
long way toward articulating that vision. If you can write well (in your
native language), it is typically a sign you can reason well.

Leaders who can't write well are also interesting. There is almost a cliche
about dyslexic type-A personalities, where the adapted skill of misdirecting
people from your reading and writing ability as a kid manifests as a glad
handing sales and dealmaker personality later on.

Just as someone who doesn't write well probably doesn't reason too abstractly
either, someone who writes exceptionally well can often be considered too
intellectual and theoretical to lead, or lacking in the required adaptability
and spontaneity.

It's great that this super-CEO can write, but it's also a signal that the
company is still run by a technocrat, and that it is not mature and autonomous
enough as a business to be operated by a mere chief dealmaker.

~~~
CharlesW
> _Bezos ' role is to get everyone working toward the same vision. Stories go
> a long way toward articulating that vision._

Definitely. And maybe he's both, but Bezos seems like more of a "mandate" guy
than a "story" guy, per Steve Yegge's infamous Google platforms post[1] and
other anecdotes by people who know him.

> _So one day Jeff Bezos issued a mandate. He 's doing that all the time, of
> course, and people scramble like ants being pounded with a rubber mallet
> whenever it happens. But on one occasion -- back around 2002 I think, plus
> or minus a year -- he issued a mandate that was so out there, so huge and
> eye-bulgingly ponderous, that it made all of his other mandates look like
> unsolicited peer bonuses.

> His Big Mandate went something along these lines:

> 1) All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through
> service interfaces.

> 2) Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.

> 3) There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no
> direct linking, no direct reads of another team's data store, no shared-
> memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is
> via service interface calls over the network.

> 4) It doesn't matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom
> protocols -- doesn't matter. Bezos doesn't care. > > 5) All service
> interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be
> externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to
> expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.

> 6) Anyone who doesn't do this will be fired.

> 7) Thank you; have a nice day!

> Ha, ha! You 150-odd ex-Amazon folks here will of course realize immediately
> that #7 was a little joke I threw in, because Bezos most definitely does not
> give a shit about your day._

[1]
[https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX](https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX)

------
nashashmi
A CEO who got his start from selling books, probably has more than average
attention to literature and writing. Such people should typically be able to
write. I'm not surprised at all by this.

Further, such people also have more attention to philosophy. And have more
grandiose visions of the world.

But I find it surprising he was able to succeed so well, compared to your
typical bookseller.

~~~
Regardsyjc
If you're interested in Amazon's story you should check out the book The
Everything Store. Bezos started by selling books but his long-term plan was an
online store that sells everything. He started with books because they were
easy to ship, catalog, and that there were two major book distributors at the
time that made creating an online bookstore easy. Not only that but he figured
out how to game the system of one distributor so he could always order one
book he needed, and 11 obscure books that were out of print, to avoid the 12
book minimum order requirement.

~~~
grigjd3
Books are also easy to choose to buy online at a time when online shopping
wasn't fully trusted (or indeed, trustworthy). While I can see the condition
of an item in a physical store, books basically just require not being
completely soaked and keeping away from toddlers who might destroy the pages.
Back in the 90's, it was a good step to establish trust with the customer.

~~~
macintux
Especially since there were (and are) vastly more available books than
available shelf space. Online is the only way to get some books.

------
Radle
A very smart gui indeed: This is from his year 1999 shareholder letter. Mobile
was growing back then, too. But writing this at the end of 1999, shows that he
indeed had a very good grasp of technology and his market.

 _In closing, consider this most important point: the current online shopping
experience is the worst it will ever be. It’s good enough today to attract 17
million customers, but it will get so much better. Increased bandwidth will
result in faster page views and richer content. Further improvements will lead
to “always-on access” (which I expect will be a strong boost to online
shopping at home, as opposed to the office) and

we’ll see significant growth in non-PC devices and wireless access.

Moreover, it’s great to be participating in what is a multi-trillion dollar
global market, in which we are so very, very tiny. We are doubly-blessed. We
have a market-size unconstrained opportunity in an area where the underlying
oundational technology we employ improves every day. That is not normal._

------
Dowwie
The author assumes that Bezos doesn't have an editor helping him craft the
letter going out to thousands of investors. While Bezos seems entirely capable
of writing letters on his own, he's running Amazon. As someone who is known to
optimize company time, he would probably write a draft and then have
correspondence with an English-phd type for help.

~~~
adamlett
_The author assumes_ …

Speaking of making assumptions:

 _As someone who is known to optimize company time, [Bezos] would probably
write a draft and then have correspondence with an English-phd type for help._

Being so busy running a company that one has no time to write, is like being
so busy programming that ones has no time to type.

Running a company – especially a large one – is all about communication. In
most companies, much of that communication is verbal, in various meetings.
Amazon is different from most companies in the high value they place in
written communication, and the low value they place in ephemeral verbal
communication. It would be very surprising if the CEO didn’t exemplify this
ethos.

------
billbrown
Steven Sinofsky (formerly of Microsoft, now at Andreessen Horowitz) recently
wrote something similar about Bezos and the power of writing:

[https://medium.learningbyshipping.com/writing-is-thinking-
an...](https://medium.learningbyshipping.com/writing-is-thinking-an-annotated-
twitter-thread-2a75fe07fade)

~~~
shadowtree
This triggered the article by Gassee.

Follow a bunch of them on Twitter and you can see the think-piece triggering
play out in real-time.

------
timavr
I am just confused.

Why can he write? It is not clear.

How does the author know that this letter is not edited/approved by PR and
legal?

The culture of worshipping CEO sets very low bar on human ambition.

~~~
notahacker
Yeah, drafting and redrafting a few hundred words is easily delegated
_entirely_ to PR staff, and it says nothing about a CEO's ability if they take
that route (nor will anyone outside certain circles ever know).

The samples of writing are entirely unremarkable too. Thousands of CEOs or
CEOs' PR teams writing shareholder letters or microbusiness blogs achieve a
similar fairly informal style using formal language, deploy anecdotes and
vanity metrics and make aspirational statements about the future. Some of
those businesses succeed at different scales, some fail, few even attempt what
Bezos did.

"Divinely discontent" is a nice phrase, and props for giving the illusion of
specificity by saying "trained random forests of decision trees" rather than
the more buzzwordy "processing Big Data using Machine Learning". But that
isn't even necessarily Bezos' personal stamp, never mind one of the qualities
that actually made him one of the most successful business leaders of the
internet era.

~~~
shanghaiaway
PR cannot write this type of stuff. They can edit it a but but they can never
create it.

~~~
wastedhours
"Never" is a long time.

~~~
shanghaiaway
It's not a reference to time and not even to capability but license.

~~~
wastedhours
Why not? PRs ghostwrite things for CEOs all of the time, speechwriters have
written some of the greatest talks by the most famous people of all time.

I don't understand the notion that these kinds of work can never be the
product of a PR.

------
jkuria
Good to hear from good ol' Gasse! whenever he is mentioned I can't help but
remember this quote of his:

"We must always give our users pure sex. It's like a rendezvous in the back
seat of an automobile with a beautiful girl. One's experience with the
personal computer should be better than the greatest orgasm you could have."

~~~
sudosteph
O_O

That is a straight up terrible quote. First of all, hearing about some old
dude's sex fantasy is a bit gross. Second of all, computer experiences should
be predictable and efficient. I don't know many people who associate either of
those qualities with (good) sex.

~~~
freyir
The quote is over the top, but this vision pushed Apple beyond merely
"predictable and efficient" products. If they'd stuck to predictable and
efficient, there's no way they'd be an $800+B company today, so it seems to
have worked out for them.

------
a_imho
_Our Leadership Principles aren 't inspirational wall hanging..._

Admittedly I sympathize with the 501 programmer sentiment, nevertheless these
corporate manifestos, principles, credos etc. make me gag a little. But
probably that's their purpose anyway, so great writing there.

------
slededit
The examples don't really show an exceptional writing ability. Is this one of
those things where we're happy he's written at all?

It's also important to be aware we give more slack to those we admire.

------
laythea
It may be just me, but I spent about 3 minutes trying to see the outstanding
writing, but nothing I read kept me past minute 3.

~~~
sumedh
Try reading Buffett's Annual reports, you might like them.

------
l33tbro
>In 2010, he penned a tribute to Amazon’s engineers ... The tone was just
right, neither disingenuously geeky nor overtly tongue-in-cheek.

I'd love to see a similarly graceful and well-penned tribute from Bezos to the
workers who routinely collapse from exhaustion in his fulfilment warehouses
(1), before they are swiftly replaced by another Oompa Loompa who will scrape
just above minimum wage if they make their hourly dispatch target.

(1) [https://www.businessinsider.com.au/amazon-warehouse-like-
pri...](https://www.businessinsider.com.au/amazon-warehouse-like-prison-where-
workers-used-pee-bottle-2018-4?r=UK&IR=T)

~~~
dingo_bat
> 'd love to see a similarly graceful and well-penned tribute from Bezos to
> the workers who routinely collapse from exhaustion in his fulfilment
> warehouses

Why? Did they do anything noteworthy or exceptional?

~~~
davidrm
> Why? Did they do anything noteworthy or exceptional?

Yes, they are collapsing due to being overworked in one of the most valuable
corporations in 21st century. The fact that a lot of people seems to be so
dismissive about this fact is a very scary thought, and I happen to be pretty
liberal when it comes to economics. This is an anomaly that should be
addressed with a lot more attention.

~~~
SamReidHughes
Maybe they're collapsing because they didn't get enough sleep.

