Sunday 18 November 2012
Fortune names Amazon's Jeff Bezos 'Businessperson of the Year'
Posted on 01:41 by Maria Scott
Amazon head honcho Jeff Bezos is Fortune's Businessperson of the Year, the magazine announced Friday.
Fortune singled out Bezos for a number of accomplishments in
the past year, as well as for a dedication to promoting innovation and
for long-standing management techniques like his "S-team" meetings of
senior executives which begin with participants reading printed memos
called "narratives, sitting "in total silence for as long as 30
minutes."
"The three big ideas at Amazon are long-term thinking, customer obsession, and a willingness to invent," Bezos told Fortune, adding, "We innovate by starting with the customer and working backwards. That becomes the touchstone for how we invent."
Amazon
under Bezos has also diversified in ways that go far beyond the
company's origins as an online book retailer that emerged as one of the
great success stories of the dot.com era in the late 1990s. The
Seattle-based company now sells enough kinds of merchandise to
legitimately compete with Walmart and other brick-and-mortar retail
giants.
The world's biggest online retailer is also a top global purveyor of
global technology services, thanks to Amazon's clever leveraging of its
sprawling cloud-based infrastructure and enviable software development
platform—building a single, company-wide software structure has been a
Bezos obsession in recent years.
Then there are the Kindles. Bezos essentially jump-started the
e-reader market a few years back with the introduction of the Kindle,
thought by many industry watchers to be a foolish move at the time.
Last year, Amazon rolled out its first tablet, the Kindle Fire,
offering a cheap, Android-based alternative to Apple's dominant
iPad—and where various computer and mobile device makers like
Hewlett-Packard and Research in Motion had failed spectacularly with
similar attempts to unseat the iPad, Bezos and Amazon's slate was a big
success.
Bezos's peers and competitors, such as Netflix CEO Reed Hastings,
were quick to praise the man. "Jeff is a manic competitor, a delightful
human being, and a trusted supplier," Hastings told Fortune.
In a long profile of Bezos listing his recent accomplishments, Fortune
compared the Amazon founder and CEO favorably to the late Steve Jobs,
the Apple co-founder considered to have been the gold standard for
artfully navigating the fast-paced world of consumer technology and
reinventing his company to meet ever-changing challenges.
"With Steve's passing, Bezos is the epitome of the venture-backed
CEO," venture capitalist Bill Gurley told the magazine, adding that "if
you were to ask 100 startup entrepreneurs who the CEO is they admire
most, he would show up on 95 of the ballots."
But if Bezos is the new Jobs—to be fair, Fortune also went to
great lengths to talk up certain differences between the two tech
icons—where does that leave Jobs' successor as Apple CEO, Tim Cook? As
runner-up on the magazine's list of top execs, it turns out.
The 2012 list also turns out to be dominated at the top by leaders in
the technology and telecommunications sectors. Among those following
Bezos and Cook on Fortune's list of top business figures for the
past year are Comcast CEO Brian Roberts, eBay CEO John Donahoe, Samsung
CEO Oh-Hyun Kwon, and Google CEO Larry Page,
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