How Amazon’s CEO leads strategic change in a culture obsessed with today’s customer.
Interviewed by Julia Kirby and Thomas A. Stewart
Since its founding, in 1995, Amazon.com’s bold moves have often left observers scratching their heads, if not predicting the company’s demise. Why open up an effective proprietary retail platform to competition from third-party sellers? Why make tools that Amazon developed for its own use available to other website developers? (Why, for that matter, post negative reviews of your products?) Two HBR editors interviewed Bezos, the founder and CEO, to learn what’s different about strategy formulation at Amazon. They came away with the sense that the company’s strategy and culture are rooted in a sturdy entrepreneurial optimism and rest on the single question of what’s better for the customer.
Bezos describes himself as “congenitally customer focused.” He knows that the buyers in Amazon’s consumer-facing business want selection, low prices, and fast delivery—and he’s confident that won’t change. “I can’t imagine,” he says, “that ten years from now [our customers] are going to say, ‘I love Amazon, but if only they could deliver my products a little more slowly.’”
Competitor-focused companies risk complacency when they become industry leaders, he maintains, but customer-focused companies must always keep improving. “Years from now,” Bezos says, “when people look back at Amazon, I want them to say that we uplifted customer-centricity across the entire business world.”
If Amazon has made strategic mistakes, he says, they have been errors of omission. So when something seems like an opportunity, Bezos asks the question, “Why not?” which leads to maximizing the number of experiments companywide: “People say, ‘We’re going to do this. We’re going to figure out a way.’” That’s the institutional yes.
