"His Majesty" Bezos the First
The CEO of Amazon did things so that the company grew rapidly (and even, oddly enough, made a profit). Today, however, as Bezos delves into the affairs of the media and space enterprises belonging to him, he is gaining strength outside of Amazon. This encourages him to even better show their leadership qualities.
When Jason Rezayan, a correspondent for the Washington Post newspaper, was released from an Iranian prison in January 2016, where he was held for 18 months on vague accusations of espionage, he was flown by a Swiss military plane to a US base in Germany. Soon, the newspaperâs owner, Jeff Bezos (No. 1 among the world's biggest leaders), arrived there to deliver Rezayan home. âThis is an inevitable part of the mission of our newspaper: to send our correspondents to a hostile environment,â says Mr. Bezos of Resayan, who was detained while working in Iran. âAnd what happened to Jason and his wife, Edgie, is absolutely unfair and wrongful, simply outrageous. I thought it would be an honor to take him home.
I dined with them at night at the military base where I spent the night; then the next day, when Jason was released after a detailed account of what happened, I asked him: âWhere would you like to go?â I will take you to any place you wish. "And he said:" How about Key West? "I, of course, answered:" No problem! "And we flew away. I left them in Key West. Jason and Edgie had been married for just over a year when he went to prison. And now they have something like the second honeymoon. â
')
Correspondent Jason Rezayan (left) and the owner of the Washington Post newspaper Jeff Bezos aboard a private jet before flying to the USA, January 22, 2016
A photo of a smiling correspondent, Mr. Rezayan, and the owner of the newspaper, Mr. Bezos, taken on board the aircraft of the latter, quickly went around the whole world. When asked if he wanted to demonstrate something with his personal involvement in the situation with his employee, Bezos answered: âI did it at the moment for Jason. My motivation is extremely simple. But I would be happy if, as a result, people understand that we will never leave anyone. â
Unusually sunny in the morning for mid-March in Seattle; The financial situation of Mr. Bezos seems just as cloudless and rosy. Who can blame him? Amazonâs market value is $ 260 billion ( AMZN Î 0.82% ), Mr. Bezos âshare is $ 46 billion. The company continues to grow: sales increased by 20% last year, reaching $ 107 billion, and the company pleased investors with an operating profit of 2.2 billion dollars (12-fold increase compared with 2014). The Washington Post newspaper, an idol that slid down before Bezos bought it in 2013 for $ 250 million, is full of new ideas. Even Blue Origin, a secret rocket company founded personally by Bezos, gained fame after it promised to arrange a space tour in a few years.
To say that all this makes Bezos to worry would be an understatement. Dressed in jeans and a motley shirt with sleeves rolled up to the elbows, enjoying a certain fame thanks to its energy, this CEO is the embodiment of the ability to be content with what we have. He demonstrates his signature clucking - the sound equivalent of Steve Jobs' black turtleneck - without any complexes. Bezos says: âI dance as I enter the office every morning.â
He has all the reasons for the cha-cha-cha. Recently, Bezos has more rights on this than, perhaps, at any other time during two decades of his being under the scrutiny of the media. His company expands internationally and distributes its diverse product and service offerings in unexpected new directions. Bezos is also developing. Having a reputation as an always aggressive competitor and a decisive organizer, he began to show his other side. With the acquisition of the Washington Post, he found himself in the arena of public life, along with other leaders. And thanks to his various projects, Bezos is also becoming known as a businessman with strategic thinking on topics different from inventing new ways to tidy up the profits of many opponents of Amazon.
Bezos is strikingly consistent. He still preaches a customer orientation and a âperspectiveâ approach. Yet out of necessity, since Amazon became an extremely large business â and since Bezos did not deny himself the pleasure of doing his eclectic and time-consuming other things â he became the leader who empowers others. âHe was at the center of everything at the beginning. The leader was Jeff Bezos, âsays Patty Stonesiefer, formerly Microsoft Executive Director ( MSFT Î 0.62% ) and CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, who has been on the board of Amazon for 19 years.
âNow his activity cannot be displayed as the actions of the organizer, located in the center and issuing instructions in all directions to the performers. He has become an outstanding leader for leaders. âIndeed, his evolution foreshadows significant consequences everywhere: the possibilities of the less limited Jeff Bezos equally arouse interest (imagine what he will do) and scare (sorry for those he crushes).
âNow, the activity of Bezos cannot be displayed as an action of the organizer, located in the center and issuing instructions in all directions to the performers. He has become an outstanding leader for leaders. â
- Patty Stonesifer, one of the directors of Amazon for 19 years
Editor Marty Baron discusses how the Washington Post newspaper changed after Bezos became its owner. The conversation took place on a windy day in February in Washington, DC, a couple of days before Baron flew to Los Angeles to attend the Oscars. I must say that the film about the team of journalists fighting for truth and justice in the newspaper âBoston Globeâ, where Baron was then an editor, won the Oscar as the best film. Baron, by the way, is exactly the same as the actor Lev Schreiber, who played Baron in the film: a strict, serious and at the same time sharp-minded newspaperman.
Baron is sitting in the new Washington headquarters of the newspaper at a small table in his not very luxurious office, which, by its elegance, is more like a lobbyist's office than a harsh basement of a typographic typesetter. According to him, Bezosâs main editorial contribution was âto push us to the realization that life in the world of the Internet is different from life in the world of printing machines.â
Dissatisfaction, for example, with the fact that the sites of the âaggregatorsâ had more online traffic, summarizing the âWashington Postâ articles than the newspaper itself received for its original articles, the newspaper itself became a skillful aggregator itself, âlaying upâ, according to Baron, own reports. Bezos approved funding for the PostEverything website, similar to the Huffington Post, for experts to publish their opinions. (Some people write for free, others pay for the newspaper.) Then a new âtalent networkâ of the newspaper appeared - a highly automated web product linking the publication with 800 freelance journalists in the United States, which can be ordered in seconds articles.
Baron compares this network with information technology innovations like Mechanical Turk from Amazon, TaskRabbit and Uber. âWe are not in the condition that we can reconstruct the old model of our units across the country,â he says, âand itâs unclear whether it is the most practical and effective way to solve our tasks.â
Honestly, it is frustrating to listen to such a âmasterâ of American journalism, eloquently speaking of the superiority of the âHuffington Postâ, who disregards the need for a wide network of its own correspondents and tells how the Washington Post takes advantage of other sites. Is he, in fact, right with all this modern, journalistic dubious product offered to readers? Baron says: "I have no desire to die beautifully."
For his part, Bezos expresses his faith in the mission of the newspaper, aimed at supporting democracy, if not in its potential to increase its wealth. âI would not have bought the Washington Post if it was a financially unpromising salty snacks company,â he says. Bezos recalls how at 10 he lay on the floor at his grandfatherâs house and watched the Watergate Hearing on TV. The Washington Post, of course, peaked at the time of its glory, highlighting that political scandal. âWe need structures that have the resources, training, experience and expertise to find really worthwhile,â continues Bezos.
âIt is extremely important to know who we elect as president, and everything connected with this; we must investigate those people, try to understand them better. â(Bezos emphasizes that he does not intend to buy any other publications, although there are offers regularly received.)
Jeff Bezos, photographed at Amazon's Seattle main office, March 11, 2016.
The former owner of the Washington Post, Don Graham, whom Bezos had known for 15 years, came to him through an intermediary and said that Bezos could give the publication financial reliability and help thanks to his Internet experience. âThis is the first company I entered, by and large, not from scratch,â says Bezos. âI didnât show any due diligence in legal terms - there were no negotiations with Don. I simply agreed with the amount he offered. â(Mr. Graham, who was publicly silent in the newspaper after the sale, refused to be interviewed.)
By two parameters - the growth of Internet traffic and the number of new ideas - the Washington Post blossomed under Bezos. (Bezos, not Amazon, owns the newspaper. The Washington Post does not publish its financial data, but we can confidently say that the newspaper is now losing money, given the investments it makes.) The number of monthly web site visitors jumped from 30.5 million in October 2013 to 73.4 million in February of this year, which was the result of the vigorous development of a new product.
Bezos does not play any specific role in the current activities of the newspaper, but he closely follows it. He communicates by phone once in two weeks with top managers of the news service, incl. with Baron and publisher Fred Ryan (former president of Allbritton Communications), whom Bezos drew to replace Catherine Weimuth, Graham's niece. Twice a year, the team arrives in Seattle, where during the day there are several meetings with Bezos, which are completed with dinner.
When he bought the newspaper, there was speculation that Bezos wanted to manage the editorial product. Bezos says that he has no such interest, and Baron confirms that Bezos does not offer any of his own interpretation of the events. However, the owner affects the solution of some specific problems, such as, for example, the duration of loading a web page and the ease of registration with a subscription; Both examples relate to what Bezos likes to call âconsumer obsessionâ questions, which are related to his experience of becoming an Amazon. Shaylesh Prakash, director of technical development for the Washington Post, says Bezos is extremely âpushyâ in his field, and this statement may be considered a compliment.
For example, Bezos pushed the Prakash team to develop Arc, a set of publishing tools, despite the fact that there were similar commercially available products. Bezos told Prakash that Amazon, starting up, could get the software used at IBM ( IBM Î 0.35% ). But instead, the company developed its own by creating a business that led to Amazon Web Services (AWS) - a fantastic financial success. âHe thinks. He's very good at thinking, âsays Prakash, a former executive director for digital technology at Sears ( SHLD ď 1.08% ), which the newspaper took over even before it was acquired by Bezos. âMy specialists and I get great pleasure from communication. I guess Jeff, too. "
Sometimes the creativity of Bezos captures him. Prakash says that the owner has proposed a feature similar to the game that would allow the reader who does not want to indulge himself in paying for the article to remove vowels from it. Bezos called this âdiscarding,â and the concept was to enable another reader to pay and, thus, recover the missing letters. The idea did not find a serious development, Prakash says, noting that "our hero was not very keen." Bezos, an unrepentant believer in the power of brainstorming, says: "By communicating with other smart people in front of a blackboard, we can come up with a lot of very bad ideas."
The newspaperâs employees seem to appreciate most what Bezos provides them with âair coverâ while they are trying to find ways to survive the transition from âtypography to digitalâ.
Attracting new employees has grown significantly with Bezos, also providing more resources for serious journalism. Ryan, the publisher, assigns responsible risk taking to Bezos - without fear that failure will be punished. âIt gives rise to a feeling of confidence, especially when other publications are in the state ofâ If it doesnât work, how will we pay for the next quarter? â.â In other words, while Bezos enjoys, there is no longer âdeadline for the next quarterâ for the Washington Post âBut there are simply more opportunities to update journalism, preferably in a way that ultimately brings money.
To be continued.
I.
When Jason Rezayan, a correspondent for the Washington Post newspaper, was released from an Iranian prison in January 2016, where he was held for 18 months on vague accusations of espionage, he was flown by a Swiss military plane to a US base in Germany. Soon, the newspaperâs owner, Jeff Bezos (No. 1 among the world's biggest leaders), arrived there to deliver Rezayan home. âThis is an inevitable part of the mission of our newspaper: to send our correspondents to a hostile environment,â says Mr. Bezos of Resayan, who was detained while working in Iran. âAnd what happened to Jason and his wife, Edgie, is absolutely unfair and wrongful, simply outrageous. I thought it would be an honor to take him home.
I dined with them at night at the military base where I spent the night; then the next day, when Jason was released after a detailed account of what happened, I asked him: âWhere would you like to go?â I will take you to any place you wish. "And he said:" How about Key West? "I, of course, answered:" No problem! "And we flew away. I left them in Key West. Jason and Edgie had been married for just over a year when he went to prison. And now they have something like the second honeymoon. â
')
Correspondent Jason Rezayan (left) and the owner of the Washington Post newspaper Jeff Bezos aboard a private jet before flying to the USA, January 22, 2016
A photo of a smiling correspondent, Mr. Rezayan, and the owner of the newspaper, Mr. Bezos, taken on board the aircraft of the latter, quickly went around the whole world. When asked if he wanted to demonstrate something with his personal involvement in the situation with his employee, Bezos answered: âI did it at the moment for Jason. My motivation is extremely simple. But I would be happy if, as a result, people understand that we will never leave anyone. â
Unusually sunny in the morning for mid-March in Seattle; The financial situation of Mr. Bezos seems just as cloudless and rosy. Who can blame him? Amazonâs market value is $ 260 billion ( AMZN Î 0.82% ), Mr. Bezos âshare is $ 46 billion. The company continues to grow: sales increased by 20% last year, reaching $ 107 billion, and the company pleased investors with an operating profit of 2.2 billion dollars (12-fold increase compared with 2014). The Washington Post newspaper, an idol that slid down before Bezos bought it in 2013 for $ 250 million, is full of new ideas. Even Blue Origin, a secret rocket company founded personally by Bezos, gained fame after it promised to arrange a space tour in a few years.
To say that all this makes Bezos to worry would be an understatement. Dressed in jeans and a motley shirt with sleeves rolled up to the elbows, enjoying a certain fame thanks to its energy, this CEO is the embodiment of the ability to be content with what we have. He demonstrates his signature clucking - the sound equivalent of Steve Jobs' black turtleneck - without any complexes. Bezos says: âI dance as I enter the office every morning.â
He has all the reasons for the cha-cha-cha. Recently, Bezos has more rights on this than, perhaps, at any other time during two decades of his being under the scrutiny of the media. His company expands internationally and distributes its diverse product and service offerings in unexpected new directions. Bezos is also developing. Having a reputation as an always aggressive competitor and a decisive organizer, he began to show his other side. With the acquisition of the Washington Post, he found himself in the arena of public life, along with other leaders. And thanks to his various projects, Bezos is also becoming known as a businessman with strategic thinking on topics different from inventing new ways to tidy up the profits of many opponents of Amazon.
Bezos is strikingly consistent. He still preaches a customer orientation and a âperspectiveâ approach. Yet out of necessity, since Amazon became an extremely large business â and since Bezos did not deny himself the pleasure of doing his eclectic and time-consuming other things â he became the leader who empowers others. âHe was at the center of everything at the beginning. The leader was Jeff Bezos, âsays Patty Stonesiefer, formerly Microsoft Executive Director ( MSFT Î 0.62% ) and CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, who has been on the board of Amazon for 19 years.
âNow his activity cannot be displayed as the actions of the organizer, located in the center and issuing instructions in all directions to the performers. He has become an outstanding leader for leaders. âIndeed, his evolution foreshadows significant consequences everywhere: the possibilities of the less limited Jeff Bezos equally arouse interest (imagine what he will do) and scare (sorry for those he crushes).
âNow, the activity of Bezos cannot be displayed as an action of the organizer, located in the center and issuing instructions in all directions to the performers. He has become an outstanding leader for leaders. â
- Patty Stonesifer, one of the directors of Amazon for 19 years
Ii.
Editor Marty Baron discusses how the Washington Post newspaper changed after Bezos became its owner. The conversation took place on a windy day in February in Washington, DC, a couple of days before Baron flew to Los Angeles to attend the Oscars. I must say that the film about the team of journalists fighting for truth and justice in the newspaper âBoston Globeâ, where Baron was then an editor, won the Oscar as the best film. Baron, by the way, is exactly the same as the actor Lev Schreiber, who played Baron in the film: a strict, serious and at the same time sharp-minded newspaperman.
Baron is sitting in the new Washington headquarters of the newspaper at a small table in his not very luxurious office, which, by its elegance, is more like a lobbyist's office than a harsh basement of a typographic typesetter. According to him, Bezosâs main editorial contribution was âto push us to the realization that life in the world of the Internet is different from life in the world of printing machines.â
Dissatisfaction, for example, with the fact that the sites of the âaggregatorsâ had more online traffic, summarizing the âWashington Postâ articles than the newspaper itself received for its original articles, the newspaper itself became a skillful aggregator itself, âlaying upâ, according to Baron, own reports. Bezos approved funding for the PostEverything website, similar to the Huffington Post, for experts to publish their opinions. (Some people write for free, others pay for the newspaper.) Then a new âtalent networkâ of the newspaper appeared - a highly automated web product linking the publication with 800 freelance journalists in the United States, which can be ordered in seconds articles.
Baron compares this network with information technology innovations like Mechanical Turk from Amazon, TaskRabbit and Uber. âWe are not in the condition that we can reconstruct the old model of our units across the country,â he says, âand itâs unclear whether it is the most practical and effective way to solve our tasks.â
Honestly, it is frustrating to listen to such a âmasterâ of American journalism, eloquently speaking of the superiority of the âHuffington Postâ, who disregards the need for a wide network of its own correspondents and tells how the Washington Post takes advantage of other sites. Is he, in fact, right with all this modern, journalistic dubious product offered to readers? Baron says: "I have no desire to die beautifully."
For his part, Bezos expresses his faith in the mission of the newspaper, aimed at supporting democracy, if not in its potential to increase its wealth. âI would not have bought the Washington Post if it was a financially unpromising salty snacks company,â he says. Bezos recalls how at 10 he lay on the floor at his grandfatherâs house and watched the Watergate Hearing on TV. The Washington Post, of course, peaked at the time of its glory, highlighting that political scandal. âWe need structures that have the resources, training, experience and expertise to find really worthwhile,â continues Bezos.
âIt is extremely important to know who we elect as president, and everything connected with this; we must investigate those people, try to understand them better. â(Bezos emphasizes that he does not intend to buy any other publications, although there are offers regularly received.)
Jeff Bezos, photographed at Amazon's Seattle main office, March 11, 2016.
The former owner of the Washington Post, Don Graham, whom Bezos had known for 15 years, came to him through an intermediary and said that Bezos could give the publication financial reliability and help thanks to his Internet experience. âThis is the first company I entered, by and large, not from scratch,â says Bezos. âI didnât show any due diligence in legal terms - there were no negotiations with Don. I simply agreed with the amount he offered. â(Mr. Graham, who was publicly silent in the newspaper after the sale, refused to be interviewed.)
By two parameters - the growth of Internet traffic and the number of new ideas - the Washington Post blossomed under Bezos. (Bezos, not Amazon, owns the newspaper. The Washington Post does not publish its financial data, but we can confidently say that the newspaper is now losing money, given the investments it makes.) The number of monthly web site visitors jumped from 30.5 million in October 2013 to 73.4 million in February of this year, which was the result of the vigorous development of a new product.
Bezos does not play any specific role in the current activities of the newspaper, but he closely follows it. He communicates by phone once in two weeks with top managers of the news service, incl. with Baron and publisher Fred Ryan (former president of Allbritton Communications), whom Bezos drew to replace Catherine Weimuth, Graham's niece. Twice a year, the team arrives in Seattle, where during the day there are several meetings with Bezos, which are completed with dinner.
When he bought the newspaper, there was speculation that Bezos wanted to manage the editorial product. Bezos says that he has no such interest, and Baron confirms that Bezos does not offer any of his own interpretation of the events. However, the owner affects the solution of some specific problems, such as, for example, the duration of loading a web page and the ease of registration with a subscription; Both examples relate to what Bezos likes to call âconsumer obsessionâ questions, which are related to his experience of becoming an Amazon. Shaylesh Prakash, director of technical development for the Washington Post, says Bezos is extremely âpushyâ in his field, and this statement may be considered a compliment.
For example, Bezos pushed the Prakash team to develop Arc, a set of publishing tools, despite the fact that there were similar commercially available products. Bezos told Prakash that Amazon, starting up, could get the software used at IBM ( IBM Î 0.35% ). But instead, the company developed its own by creating a business that led to Amazon Web Services (AWS) - a fantastic financial success. âHe thinks. He's very good at thinking, âsays Prakash, a former executive director for digital technology at Sears ( SHLD ď 1.08% ), which the newspaper took over even before it was acquired by Bezos. âMy specialists and I get great pleasure from communication. I guess Jeff, too. "
Sometimes the creativity of Bezos captures him. Prakash says that the owner has proposed a feature similar to the game that would allow the reader who does not want to indulge himself in paying for the article to remove vowels from it. Bezos called this âdiscarding,â and the concept was to enable another reader to pay and, thus, recover the missing letters. The idea did not find a serious development, Prakash says, noting that "our hero was not very keen." Bezos, an unrepentant believer in the power of brainstorming, says: "By communicating with other smart people in front of a blackboard, we can come up with a lot of very bad ideas."
The newspaperâs employees seem to appreciate most what Bezos provides them with âair coverâ while they are trying to find ways to survive the transition from âtypography to digitalâ.
Attracting new employees has grown significantly with Bezos, also providing more resources for serious journalism. Ryan, the publisher, assigns responsible risk taking to Bezos - without fear that failure will be punished. âIt gives rise to a feeling of confidence, especially when other publications are in the state ofâ If it doesnât work, how will we pay for the next quarter? â.â In other words, while Bezos enjoys, there is no longer âdeadline for the next quarterâ for the Washington Post âBut there are simply more opportunities to update journalism, preferably in a way that ultimately brings money.
To be continued.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/299858/
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