Introduction
The list of Contemporary Business Leaders presents information about some of the greatest business leaders of the 21st Century. What they had in common is that they developed a vision and a mission and implemented it in order to establish their businesses and steer the businesses through different situations as they provided value to consumers.
This paper will conduct an in-depth study into a major business leader of our time and review some of the elements and features unique to his leadership and governance styles. This individual will be reviewed is Jeff Bezos, co-founder of Amazon one of the most innovative and effective tech businesses in our times.
Reasons for Choosing Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos is a world renowned leader and is the world’s greatest retailer. Jeff Bezos took a pioneering role in the world of e-commerce when he incorporated Amazon to sell books at large volumes to consumers around the world in 1995. And this led him to make a lot of profits. As the sales grew, Bezos added different products and became the world’s biggest retailer.
Jeff Bezos is known for his ability to understand and appreciate innovation. This is because he is able to forecast the needs of consumers and organize people in order to provide these needs in an effective and efficient manner in order to solve real problems. His inspiration and control over the members of his team makes him one of the greatest leaders in the world.
Amazon has a market value of $260 billion and Jeff Bezos is worth $46 billion. This puts him ahead of many wealthy persons and makes him at number five of the list of the richest people in the world just behind Mexico’s Carlo Slim who is the fourth and America’s Warren Buffet who is at number three.
His wealth is mainly from innovative products and services. And that is mainly based on the use of the Worldwide Web as a means for sales. He is currently growing his investments in Blue Origin which focuses on his aerospace business interests and newspapers. These provide him with an opportunity to offer services at premium prices or at large volumes to meet the demand and expectations of a wide array of consumers.
Jeff Bezos has been the CEO of Amazon since its founding in 1994. He has maintained his position as the highest shareholder and this has made him one of the wealthiest persons in the world because the shares of the company continues to rise. Jeff Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000. This was to focus on space travel and aimed at making it amusing and offer the opportunity for ordinary people to take trips to space. This is something that is fascinating and many people what to be part of it due to its successful nature and enticing features.
He studied Computer Science at Princeton and graduated in 1986. Jeff Bezos got some experience in banking and from there, he developed the idea of building a startup in order to provide e-commerce services to consumers in different parts of the world. This idea was grown and income was consolidated in order to achieve results and gain major ends and goals.
Leadership Theory that Best Describes Jeff Bezos’ Approach to Leading
Jeff Bezos started Amazon in a garage. This is because no one could identify with his business idea and he was left to do things alone by himself. However, he was able to lead and promote better results through improved measures and processes. Jeff Bezos is a visionary. He provides a strong vision and mission and guides people to move from one point to another.
He can be seen as a charismatic leader who has various skills and abilities to inspire his workers and followers. However, he institutes a bureaucratic model to ensure that rules and due processes are followed in his company. In cases where the need arises, he is able to leave the workers to do things on their own and encourages innovation and the injection of new ideas and views.
Jeff Bezos can be seen as a transformational leader. This is because he is able to understand and appreciate the needs of all people – from consumers to his workers. And he works tirelessly to meet these needs and goals through his production. He is said to listen to the needs of workers and complaints of consumers, prints reviews and then analyzes them in order to move the organization in a direction that meets the needs of all these stakeholders. Therefore, in this area, he has a genuine concern for people as opposed to a concern for results only.
The main challenges in Amazon came in the early years when Amazon did not have any results to show for their hard work and vision. In this process, Jeff Bezos did not give in. he formulated a strategy that he knew would win. And this came by concentrating on markets that would always have demand e-commerce.
Jeff Bezos uses a leadership model as opposed to a management model to run Amazon. The leadership model means he has a vision of satisfying a genuine need of people. And he commits resources to things that matter. He gives room for innovation and views the consumer’s satisfaction as the main end of Amazon’s existence. Due to this, he is able to work with a relaxed atmosphere and promote better measures and processes of doing things.
Leadership and Competitive Advantage of Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos could identify that the need to buy and sell was something that would always exist in the human race. People wanted to buy products and at the same time, wanted a better quality of life. It was better to get products shipped to consumers through machines. And from the Industrial Revolution in Britain in the 1700s to the mechanization of the United States in the late 1800s, it was clear that capital intensive methods always defeated labor oriented production.
Thus, in 1994, many companies had programs where they sold products to consumers by independently posting these products and hoping consumers would get them. However, it was cumbersome and things were extremely difficult. This meant that companies struggled to build relationships with just a few people. This bred elitism and there were many people who were excluded from gaining numerous services.
The leadership approach Jeff Bezos used was to streamline technology and he recognized that programing and other systems could be used to make it easy to make orders and receive them. To Jeff Bezos, there could be an agreement with post offices and other delivery entities to deliver products quickly and computers could take information instantly, aggregate it and process an action in order to move products to consumers who want it at a considerably lower rate than they would endure if there was no such system of ordering online.
The leadership style of Jeff Bezos made it convenient for book sellers to pay Amazon to link them to more clients rather than consider getting more complicated traditional methods that could not compete with Amazon’s systems.
The main difference in leadership style that Jeff Bezos took was a transformational leadership that embraced technology and innovation to make life better. Post offices and book sellers in the 1990s were using a transactional approach where labor was the main method of delivering. This failed to meet results and there were major shortfalls that made Amazon the leaders and Jeff Bezos stood out as a better manager.
Personal Reflection
I notice that the people at the top of organizations can be viewed in two angles – rigid managers and flexible leaders. Rigid managers set airtight targets and they want to use old systems that have been known to work in the past to achieve results. They view resources as limited and as such, they do everything possible to ensure the put rigid checks on others and are very judgmental and are concerned only with results.
On the other hand, we have the leaders like Jeff Bezos who use three main things I want to emulate – vision, innovation and concern for people. This is because every organization creates solutions. As a leader, one has to define a vision and work to achieve it. In the process sensitivity to people is key and there is the need to pursue innovation and technology to optimize resources and maximize returns.
The lesson I learn from Jeff Bezos is that human beings are an end in itself. Every business must be formed to meet specific needs of different people. Therefore, it is necessary and important to ensure that a business has its fundamental goals and objectives clearly outlined. There should be solutions that would be prescribed for a firm and this must be pursued in a way that does not prejudice or harm any stakeholder.
References
Anders, G. (2012, April 4). Jeff Bezos Reveals His No. 1 Leadership Secret. Retrieved from Forbes: http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2012/0423/ceo-compensation-12-amazon-technology-jeff-bezos-gets-it.html
Lashinsky, A. (2016, April 1). Jeff Bezos Prime. Retrieved from Fortune Magazine: http://fortune.com/amazon-jeff-bezos-prime/
