Amazon shows it’s inner strength

There’s a really interesting article about Amazon in Fortune.com – you can see it here. Whether you like it or not, Jeff Bezos is the keystone in Amazon’s success. His drive, his clarity of thought and his vision have carried Amazon along. There are some great insights from him including –

“The trouble with most corporations is that they make judgement-based decisions when data-based decisions could be made… [I often close debates by saying] ‘We don’t need to debate this, because this is data we can get.'”

“I’ve not seen an effective manager or leader who can’t spend some fraction of time down in the trenches. If they don’t do that, they get out of touch with reality, and their whole thought and management processes becomes abstract and disconnected…”

“In the physical world it’s the old saw: location, location, location. The three most important things for us are technology, technology, technology.”

(On selling used books alongside new books on the main page)“Giving people the choice to buy new and used side by side is good for customers. Give them the choice. They’re not going to hurt themselves with that choice. The data that we have tell us that customers who buy used books from us go on to buy more new books than they have ever bought before. They may not want to plunk down $25 for a brand new author they’ve never tried. This lets them experiment.”

The article also identifies the way Amazon runs it’s own warehouses as key to it’s success – the warehouses “are so high tech that they require as many lines of code to run as Amazon’s website does.”

Bezos gets my vote.