Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Why Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos is a leader

In the current issue of Fast Company, Amazon.com's CEO Jeff Bezos is asked how he justifies his company's big investment in its Kindle portable e-book reader even though it accounted for only $136 million of the company's $19 billion revenues last year. Bezos replies: "We want to plant seeds that grow into big trees, and that may take five to seven years. You also have to be willing to repeatedly fail -- and to be misunderstood for long periods of time."

At a time when so many major companies and even entire industries are collapsing because of the failure of their so-called leaders to invest in the long run, Amazon stands out as a rare exception.

1 comment:

  1. "We want to plant seeds that grow into big trees, and that may take five to seven years"

    - very helpful for my leadership project

    When Jeff started amazon in his garage in 1994 and sold his first book in 1995, the seed amazon which he planted grew faster and gave him fruits in less than 5 years... he is not stopping there, very confident.... still trying to give us some thing new... i think his next seed to give a new fruit is blue origin...

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