What is Jeff Bezos like as a manager?

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is making major plans for India. / Screengrab from Code Conference video

The following is an edited excerpt taken from Richard M. Brandt’s One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com. The excerpt was provided by Portfolio Publishing. You can buy a copy of the book here.

Different executives who have worked with Bezos in the past have strongly different views of his strengths and weaknesses as a manager. He’s not always a “nice” CEO. He can inspire and cajole, but can also irritate and berate. He can see the big picture, and micromanage to distraction. He’s quirky, brilliant, and demanding. Some of his former employees adore him. Some have found him to have serious shortcomings. All seem to feel that he’s a great visionary who knows how to build a lasting company.

“There is no doubt that Jeff is a brilliant businessman with a strong vision for where he wants to take his company,” wrote Shel Kaphan, the company’s first employee, in an email to me. “However, he is also a demanding micromanager who is extremely hard to work for. This is one reason there are very few people from the early days of Amazon still at the company. He is also very temperamental, and has (or at least had, when I was there) a bad habit of severely chewing out his subordinates in front of others.”

Another former executive, for example, said Bezos had an annoying habit of waving his hand in front of subordinates’ noses when he didn’t want to hear any more of their conversations. That’s part of the hyperactive side of Bezos’s personality, one that he sometimes displayed in his previous jobs as well.

Although Graciela Chichilnisky, his first employer, considered him an excellent manager, he has always had an enormous amount of energy that might intrude on most associates’ comfort zone. “He jumped out at you, his eyes practically jumped out of his sockets,” recalls Chichilnisky. He has always been an unorthodox manager. One former executive recalled that, at an offsite retreat where other managers said the company employees should start communicating more, Bezos stood up and declared, “No, communication is terrible!”

He wanted a decentralized, even disorganized company where people could come up with independent ideas rather than subscribe to groupthink. He ruled the company with the “two-pizza team” concept, that dictated any team should be small enough to feed with two pizzas.

He has no empathy for employees who complain about working long hours in pursuit of his quest. Bezos often pushed his people with the finesse of a galley slave driver. One customer service manager recalled that, when the staff got a week and a half behind answering emails despite putting in twelve hour days, seven days a week, Bezos called her to complain about the lapse. When she told him they couldn’t work any harder, he came up with a solution. They dedicated one weekend competing with each other to see who could get through the most emails in the backlogs.

During that 48-hour period, everyone worked at least ten hours past their regular shifts. Each person was given a cash bonus of US$200 for every thousand messages he or she could answer. It cleared off the backlog.

At other times, Bezos also had a rather geeky way of showing his appreciation for his programmers’ hard work, which was often done on their own time. Rather than a raise, he started rewarding exceptional accomplishments with awards named after the Nike slogan “Just Do It.” The prize? An old, used Nike shoe.

Greg Linden, for example, a programmer who joined Amazon in February 1997, found a better way to parse out similar tastes in books in order to make recommendations to customers. Amazon would recommend books to a customer that were bought by other customers with similar buying patterns.

On his blog about his days at Amazon, he recalls that when his program went live on the site, “Jeff Bezos walked into my office and literally bowed before me. On his knees, he chanted, ‘I am not worthy, I am not worthy.’” Linden won “Just Do It” awards for this and other accomplishments, and long after losing the shoes, he wrote on his blog, “What was not lost was the sense of pride. I was proud to have gotten that crappy old shoe.”

Some former employees also say that Bezos’s reputation as a ruthless business executive is wrong. In an email correspondence with me, Linden describes Bezos as a “geeky, ambitious tinkerer with a focus on doing right for customers (and people in general).” Linden adds that the public perception of Bezos as a hard-charging, take-no-prisoners CEO are incorrect. “I’d disagree with the characterizations of him as competitive (which I think was just misinterpretation of his ambition) or secretive (which I think is more about wanting to protect his team and his customers). Jeff could much more accurately be described as a naively optimistic geek than a calculating megalomaniac.”