The world’s richest man. That’s Jeff Bezos. Net worth around US$200b. The stuff that dreams are made of. But how did he get there in 27 years? By sheer will, intellect and speed of course.
His unauthorised biographer, Brad Stone, has written two books about him. His article about the space cowboy (Bezos is retiring to embark on space exploration) surmises the techno-legend as one with “towering intellect, along with a notable deficit of empathy and fear of stasis.”
Brad describes Amazon as this: “Today, the company is a kind of corporate apeirogon - a shape with infinite sides - extending into new industries on a regular basis, terrifying potential competitors and sending blasts of anxiety across the antitrust establishment.”
With an apeirogon, you can never visionalise its shape because it is always expanding. It multiplies at all sides, and that is how Bezos worked his way up to the top of the human achievement pyramid, enjoying unrivalled wealth.
His work philosophy is simple. He once told journalist Walter Isaacson that “doing things at high speed, that’s the best defence against the future. If you are leaning away from the future, the future is going to win every time.”
Imagine that, you benchmark your growth not just against getting ahead of competitors, but against a future where things have yet to be invented. You therefore create a tomorrow, that is, a world you are the first to colonise and also the first to reap all the profits that comes with first-mover advantage.
That is Bezos’ philosophy, very much like that of Facebook’s Zuckerberg’s motto - “Move fast and break things.”
For Bezos, he has coined this term - “Day 2” company. This is what he wrote to his shareholders in 2016 explaining what he meant. “Day 2 is stasis, followed by irrelevance, followed by excruciating, painful decline, followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.”
Bezos’ Day 1 concept of growth and innovation is the rising of many new dawns, each one like the side of an apeirogon, forever-expanding to capture brave new lands and uncharted terrestrial terrains at the speed of creative light.
But alas, in chasing a future travelling at the breakneck speed, there is a cost attached to it. Brad wrote: -
“As the fortunes of the company and its founder have increased, their public images have taken a beating. As recent news reports show, Amazon’s workers are often pushed to the limit by arduous goals, arbitrarily changing rules and algorithmic masters, which seem to have little tolerance for human frailty.”
“”Colleagues new and old testify that he has many talents, including a superhuman ability to focus on disparate issues and get to the bottom of complex problems. But empathy was never one of them. "If you're not good, Jeff will chew you up and spit you out," a former executive once told me. "And if you're good, he will jump on your back and ride you into the ground."”
Lesson? Just one.
Bezos’ retirement plan to travel in his Blue Origin rocket into suborbital space is the perfect metaphor of his apeirogon-like success. While the world below looks on, Bezos is blasting his way to the unbounded universe.
First, he conquered the market. Second, he created the future. Now, he is exploring space, if not colonising planets; just in case the good old mother earth happens to heave her last breath from climate change.
On the jaded backs of many, but no doubt duly rewarded, Bezos has rode them all. Each one up to par was given six-impossible-things-to-do-before breakfast, and like one brick after another, each task assigned and completed goes to building a rocket empire ruled by one at the top.
At the end of the day, when the sun sets and a new dawn rises, Bezos is merely playing the game by its rules, even in uncharted territory. And all’s indeed fair in war and in love, in market and in picket.
His relentless zeal driven by an idea fully riped for its time has borne not just fruits, but a flourishing Eden garden where he roams with the gods, figure of speech of course.
But I guess history has seen enough of such glowing personalities from Solomon to Alexander the Great, from King Saladin to King Richard of England, and from the House of Windsor to the Rockefeller dynasty. They come and they go, each time with a bigger bang for the buck, creating endless economic and social ripples.
Ultimately, whatever decision they make in their life, the biggest one will still be the end-of-life decision. Unfailingly, it is still about leaving your mark in this world as you take your leave eventually. And Bezos has indeed left his, that is, a mark we will find whenever we need to order things online, business acumen and innovation notwithstanding.
Similarly, we all leave our mark on earth too, taking the same journey ending up not in a suborbital space capsule, but in one much smaller, that is, one that is just right for our body size, and no bigger.
And when that time comes, for each and everyone of us, let’s pray that we will be remembered for doing the best we can, with whatever we have, for as long as it takes, to make a difference in what matters in the end.
That in itself is a life worthy of its calling too, even if we don’t end up being the richest man in the world, or one of the richest.
No comments:
Post a Comment