Jeff Bezos, the six words that constitute a great truth that nobody learns and final advice as CEO of Amazon
The founder of the largest company on the planet wrote his latest “Letter to Shareholders.” Why it is important to “create” and the key to “be a little more normal” but not “typical.”
Jeff Bezos showed in his annual message to shareholders – published in the last hours of Thursday on the corporate digital platform – a letter sent by a family where they told him – and thanked him – how Amazon had benefited them throughout their lives. In it, Mary and Larry recounted how they stimulated their children’s savings by buying shares in the company three years after it was created in 1994 and how the first two titles acquired that year had a “beautiful” influence at its core.
The epistle, dated March 5, acted as a great kick-off of the “2020 Letter to Shareholders” written by the founder of Amazon. Along the process, we have produced $ 1.6 trillion of wealth for stockholders. Who are they? Bezos said They are pension funds, universities and they are Mary and Larry. They sent me this note from somewhere as I sat down to write this letter to the shareholders.
I keep getting stories like this all the time. I know people who have used their Amazon money for college, emergencies, homes, vacations, to start their own business, for charities, and the list goes on. I am happy with the wealth we have produced for shareholders. It is important and improves their lives. But I also know something else: it is not most of the value we have created, according to the Forbes index, said the richest man in the world whose fortune is estimated at 197 billion dollars.
In his latest 5,600-word letter, Bezos lays out the ideas that made Amazon the highest-priced company today. But above all stops in six of them challenge and truth so obvious that few, very few, end up learning: “It creates more of what you eat” ( Create More Than You Consume ). For the entrepreneur, the concept applies both to business and to everyday life, every day. That is, to everyone.
The CEO of the digital commerce company – passionate about reading but also (good) writing – explained the idea clearly and precisely. If you want to be successful in business, you have to create more than you consume. Your aim should be to build value for everyone you communicate with. Any business that does not create value for those it touches, even if it seems successful on the surface, is not left behind in this world. It is coming out of him.
Remember, stock prices are not regarding the past. These current forecasts predict future cash flows. The stock market is anticipating. I’m going to change gears for a moment and talk about the past. How much value do we create for shareholders in 2020? This is a comparatively simple question to answer because there are accounting systems in place to explain it. In 2020, our net revenue was $ 21.3 billion. If instead of being a publicly-traded company with thousands of owners, Amazon were a sole proprietorship with only one owner, that is what the owner would have earned in 2020, ″ he described.
Bezos, 57, exposed the incredible numbers of earnings that the company had during 2020. According to him, they represent part of the reason for the success accompanied by the value continuously generated by its employees. Again: create more than you consume. These numbers are part of why people serve for us, why retailers sell by us, and why consumers purchase from us. We create value for them. And this value work is not a zero-sum contest. It is not just about moving money from one pocket to another. Take a big picture around society, and you will know that invention is the root of all true value creation. And the value created is best viewed as a metric for innovation.” Analyzed the man who in the year of the pandemic alone employed more than half a million people around the world.
In another section of the letter, Bezos explained to his shareholders how they work at Amazon and how the returns of employees are evaluated, the same ones who days ago rejected the union presence in the firm. We do not set biased performance objectives. We produced possible performance objectives that take into account status and real employee performance data. Performance is evaluated over a long period of time, as we know that a variety of things can affect performance in any given week, day or hour,” he stressed.
Although the results were disproportionate and our direct relationship with employees is strong, it is clear to me that we need to improve our approach to creating value for our workers, which is a key to their success. The man who created the company said in the letter—company in Seattle in 1994.
To conclude, Bezos gave a tip considering that this was his final message as CEO of the corporation that led up to this year: “This is my last annual letter to shareholders as CEO of Amazon, and I have one endpoint to continue. importance that I feel compelled to teach. I hope that all Amazonians take it seriously”.
I know happily married couples who reproduce a joke in their relationship. Not infrequently, the husband looks at the wife with false anguish and says: ‘Can’t you be normal?’ They both smile and laugh, and the deep truth is that her special character is something she likes about herself. But at the same time, it is also true that things would often be easier (consume less energy) if we were a little more normal. This phenomenon occurs at all levels. Democracies are not normal. Tyranny is the historical norm. If we stopped doing all the hard and continuous work that it takes to maintain our distinctive character in that regard, we would quickly come into equilibrium with tyranny. We all know that distinctiveness, originality is valuable. We are all taught to ‘be yourself. What I’m really asking you to do is accept and be realistic about how much energy is needed to maintain this difference. The world wants you to be typical, and in a thousand ways, that draws you in. Don’t let it happen. You have to pay the price for your distinctiveness, and it isIt’spay the price worth being yourself, but don’t expect it to be easy or free. You will have to continuously put energy into it”, He concluded.