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Jeff Bezos Leadership Style and Management Analysis 

Table of Contents

  • Introduction
  • Leadership & Management
  • Background
  • History of the Leader
  • Management or Leadership Style
  • Skills and Competencies
  • Ability to Adopt New Challenges
  • Persuading and Influencing Skills
  • An Individual with Human Skill
  • Challenges & Failures
  • Ways of dealing with Challenges
  • Moral
  • Works Cited

Introduction

Leadership & Management

(Institute, 2015) Nowadays, the use of the term ‘leadership style’ has become increasingly popular during the last couple of years. It has replaced the term management style, which is no more in use now in management and leadership in an organization. Usually, the difference between the two terms is not very evident. Henry Mintzberg, in his book named Managing, recommends a practical approach of differentiating the two terms that although leadership and management styles both are theoretically different, it is hard to differentiate them in daily situations. 

As per (Cherry, 2020), the leadership style discusses a leader’s characteristic traits and behaviors when managing, guiding, counseling, educating, and directing the team of individuals in an organization or any institution. It has been observed that great leaders are the ones who can motivate political activities and social movements. Not just this, but inspirational leaders also encourage others to create, innovate, develop, and perform well in their lives. Once you have started considering people who believe in great leaders, you can immediately observe major differences in how every other leader directs, motivates, and leads.

Jeff Bezos Leadership Style and Management Analysis 

(Bolden, 2005) Says that leader is an individual who is responsible for taking decisions and has the authority to execute their decisions or any change from their effective ways related to organization, individual or social methods of control for which the teams, groups, or companies can perform best to enhance their skills and abilities. The leader’s choice is determined not only by the individual traits of the person but also the cultural and social aspects along with their experience in life.

According to Lewyn’s theory, leadership styles are then classified according to their behavior and personal characteristics while leading the group. Lewyn’s 3 widely practiced leadership styles are Authoritarian (Autocratic), Participative (Democratic), and Delegated (Laissez-Faire)

Background

History of Jeff Bezos

One such inspirational leader and a successful business entrepreneur and all-time favorite are Jeff Bezos, the owner and founder of Amazon, Washington Post, and Blue Origin Company.

(Britannica, 2020) The pioneer of entrepreneurship and inventor of the online e-commerce ideation, Jeff Bezos is the initiator and founder of the famous e-commerce company named Amazon, CEO of The Washington Post, and the creator of Blue Origin, the astronomical investigation company. He became one of the world’s richest and wealthiest leaders from his popular and famous business ventures.

Bezos was born in New Mexico in 1964; he admired and loved computers from birth. Therefore, he studied Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Princeton University. After finishing his bachelor’s, he got employed in Wall Street. In 1990, he became the youngest senior vice president in D.E. Shaw, a well-known investment company.

After working there for 4 years, Bezos left his profitable job and created Amazon.com, an online bookstore. This e-commerce bookstore became one of the internet’s largest income sources and the most remarkable success story on the internet. In 2013, Bezos acquired The Washington Post, and later in 2017, Amazon acquired Whole Foods too under its name.

Amazon.com was launched by Bezos on July 16, 1995, keeping in mind the wavy South American river. Before launching the website, 300 acquaintances were initially tested to check its performance and effectiveness.

The company was on the heights of success at the start. With no advertising campaigns, Amazon successfully sold online books across the United States, along with the 45 other countries monthly. In 2 months, sales extended to $20,000 every week, increasing rapidly than Bezos had ever expected. 

In 1997, Amazon went viral, leading several market predictors to inquire whether the Company can hold on its own when previous sellers and retailers started their e-commerce websites. After 2 years, Amazon remains on the top and kicks off the competitors from the market, thus becoming a profound leader of e-commerce.

Bezos sustained to grow Amazon’s products and services by selling CDs and DVDs online in 1998 and later on diversified its offerings to apparel, electronics, toys, daily items, and much more through key selling partnerships of brands. Therefore, Amazon succeeded with annual sales that increased directly from $510,000 in 1995 to around $17 billion in 2011.

(Editors, 2014) As part of Bezos’s 2018 yearly shareholder notice, the press media businessperson claimed that the Company had exceeded more than 100 million paid subscribers and followers of Amazon Prime. Amazon’s worth was valued at more than $1 trillion by September 2018 as the second-largest Company after Apple, which crossed that record in a few weeks. 

By the end of 2018, Amazon announced that it would increase the minimum wage for its employees to $15 on an hourly basis. Till now, Company has been critiqued for its adverse and exhausting working conditions, with employees remonstrating in July 2019 in 2019.

Management or Leadership Style of Jeff Bezos

(Agarwal, 2020) If we consider Bezos’s leadership style, we will notice that his leadership styles are exceptional and distinctive. His leadership style depends on the Autocratic Leadership Style, as he controls and manages everything personally. He also owns a Strategic Leadership Style through which he provides remarkable tactics and unique approaches that make his Company prosperous and profitable. Sometimes, Team Leadership Style is also being followed by Jeff Bezos. From this leadership style, he can decide the future of the business and determine the standards and objectives. Ever since he has many workers to work with, he also follows a Cross-Cultural Leadership Style, where he motivates both by his charisma, personality, and aims and visions of his business. Therefore, his leadership styles vary as per the need of the circumstances and situations.

(People, 2020) Bezos is famous for the dual-personality that changes him from a generous individual into a rough and strict manager that possesses fear and distress in his employees. He thinks everyone should behave and work according to his set standards. Jeff Bezos seems to have no issue operating the Company while still considering and working on the customer feedback individually and personally. If any genuine issue arises, the penalties can be strict on the workers responsible for creating the problem. There is an authorized system within Amazon that levels the harshness of its fundamental problems.

Skills and Competencies of Jeff Bezos

(Sattar, 2017) His skills and competencies comprise of the following mentioned abilities;

Ability to Adopt New Challenges

Having the skill to accept different challenges let Jeff Bezos think differently and increase the skill for new experiences, exposures, and inventions. By taking the internet’s reference, he could examine the business tactics of delivering products and services. In this way, he created the most extensive online bookstore, Amazon.

Later he comes up with an innovative concept to convert it into realism. After Amazon became a successful and profitable bookselling online store, Bezos worked on developing big stores across the country. His innovative test results in a massive loss of the stock market, but later, he turned the situation immediately by once again making the Company one of the major virtual discounted bookselling stores of the world.

Influencing and Persuading Abilities

Jeff Bezos is one of the world’s diversified leaders, possessing the predetermined set of values, beliefs, cultures, and standards for his business. Later on, he guides his workers to follow these basic guidelines. Also, he inspires his employees to develop and create their abilities to enhance their performance. Bezos has the persuasive abilities to motivate his workers to develop innovative ideas & productive solutions for matters related to business. He depicts his ability to lead and motivating his workers to increase their awareness of the results.

An Individual with Social Skill

Jeff Bezos possesses public social proficiencies that let him work with his people effectively. This ability allows him to know the views and perceptions of individuals about various matters. In 2012, it was reported in Forbes that the CEO of Amazon tries to understand the individual customer needs and manages to satisfy them effectively. Being aware of customers’ preferences, Jeff Bezos became proficient in developing the company’s objectives and goals to fulfill customer needs.

Challenges & Failures of Jeff Bezos

Ways of Dealing With The Challenges

(Singh, 2019) There are many projects that Jeff Bezos tried and even started, which eventually failed dreadfully. But that’s the rule of progress. If you aren’t failing and making mistakes, you aren’t doing anything correctly.

Fire phone is one such example of Bezos’s experimentation. This idea caused a loss of $170 million. Despite all efforts, the fire phone failed to compete with Android and iPhone. Another major challenge was Amazon Local. It was an initiative to give a daily deal that did not perform well. Others on the list are Amazon local registers, Amazon wallet, Amazon WebPay, Askville, Music importer, Test Drive, Endless.com, and many more.

According to Bezos, experiments that work well like Amazon Kindle, Amazon Prime, AWS, and others are so fruitful that they pay for all his failures and challenges.

Moral

So it is now proved that Jeff Bezos has engraved his reputation and brand name as a successful business leader by producing continuous progress in his company. He will always be remembered for his idealistic and state-of-the-art leadership style. Bezos proved how leadership plays an important part in developing profitable, successful, and sustainable organizations. According to Jeff Bezos, “The best customer service is if the customer does not need to call you, does not need to talk to you, it just works.”

(Asghar, 2010) As a consequence, which we achieve under the light of articles, journals, and books about Jeff Bezos leadership style, we believe that organizational change which consists of the vision of a leader and then followed by their pioneering tactic to avail their aims and objectives, has a quite influential and stronger connection with the better organizational performance and results in the success of the company.

Works Cited
  • Agarwal, U., 2020. Jeff Bezos Biography: Success Story of Amazon CEO. [Online]
    Available at: https://www.vyapaarjagat.com/fortune-500/jeff-bezos/
    [Accessed 28 October 2020].
  • https://www.vyapaarjagat.com/fortune-500/jeff-bezos/
  • Asghar, W. A. a. I., 2010. The Role of Leadership in Organizational Change. Relating the Successful Organizational change to Visionary and Innovative Leadership.
  • https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:326289/FULLTEXT01.pdf&gt
  • Bolden, R., 2005. What is leadership development: purpose and practice?. Leadership South West Research Report 2.
  • https://www.researchgate.net/publication/29811807_What_is_leadership_development_purpose_and_practice
  • Britannica, T. E. o. E., 2020. Jeff Bezos. [Online]
    Available at: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jeff-Bezos
    [Accessed 28 October 2020].
  • https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jeff-Bezos
  • Cherry, K., 2020. Leadership Styles and Frameworks You Should Know. [Online]
    Available at: https://www.verywellmind.com/leadership-styles-2795312
    [Accessed 28 October 2020].
  • https://www.verywellmind.com/leadership-styles-2795312
  • Editors, B., 2014. Jeff Bezos, Biography. [Online]
    Available at: https://www.biography.com/business-figure/jeff-bezos#citation
    [Accessed 28 October 2020].
  • https://www.managers.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/CHK-256-Understanding_Management_and_Leadership_Styles.pdf
  • Institute, C. M., 2015. Understanding management and leadership styles checklist 256, Corby: s.n.
  • https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jeff-Bezos
  • People, A., 2020. Jeff Bezos Biography: Success Story of Amazon Founder and CEO.. [Online]
    Available at: https://astrumpeople.com/jeff-bezos-biography/
    [Accessed 28 October 2020].
  • https://astrumpeople.com/jeff-bezos-biography/
  • Sattar, S. B., 2017. Leadership qualities, skills, and style of Jeff Bezos. [Online]
    Available at: https://www.thestrategywatch.com/leadership-qualities-skills-style-jeff-bezos/
    [Accessed 28 October 2020].
  • https://www.thestrategywatch.com/leadership-qualities-skills-style-jeff-bezos/
  • Singh, A., 2019. The Success Story of Jeff Bezos. [Online]
    Available at: https://businessconnectindia.in/blogs/success-story-of-jeff-bezos/
    [Accessed 28 October 2020].
  • https://businessconnectindia.in/blogs/success-story-of-jeff-bezos/

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