Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

by Jeff Bezos

Smart people are a dime a dozen and often don’t amount to much. What counts is being creative and imaginative. That’s what makes someone a true innovator. And that’s why my answer to the question is Jeff Bezos.

“I have no special talent,” Einstein once said. “I am only passionately curious.” That’s not fully true (he certainly did have special talent), but he was right when he said, “Curiosity is more important than knowledge.” A second key trait is to love and to connect the arts and sciences. Whenever Steve Jobs launched a new product such as the iPod or iPhone, his presentation ended with street signs that showed an intersection of Liberal Arts Street and Technology Street. “It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough,” he said at one of these presentations. “We believe that it’s technology married with the humanities that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.”

In 1974, when he was ten, his passion for Star Trek led him to computers. He discovered that he could play a space video game on the terminal in the computer room of his elementary school in Houston, where his father was working for Exxon. This was in the days before personal computers, and a dial-up modem connected the school’s computer terminal to the mainframe of a company that had donated its excess computer time. “We had a teletype that was connected by an old acoustic modem,” Bezos says. “You literally dialed a regular phone and picked up the handset and put it in this little cradle. And nobody—none of the teachers knew how to operate this computer, nobody did. But there was a stack of manuals, and me and a couple of other kids stayed after class and learned how to program this thing.… And then, we learned that the mainframe programmers in some central location somewhere in Houston had already programmed this computer to play Star Trek. And from that day forward all we did was play Star Trek.”

You do not want to make one-way-door decisions quickly. You want to get consensus or at least drive a lot of thought and debate. What can also really speed up decision making, in addition to asking whether a decision involves a one-way or two-way door, is teaching the principle of disagreeing and committing. So you’ve got passionate missionaries, which you need to have. Everybody cares, and if you’re not careful, the decision process can basically become a war of attrition. Whoever has the most stamina will win; eventually the other party, with the opposite opinion, will just capitulate: “Okay, I’m exhausted. We’ll do it your way.” That is the worst decision-making process in the world. It leaves everybody demoralized, and you also get a kind of random result. A much better approach is for the more senior person to escalate to even more senior leaders. Controversial decisions need to be escalated quickly. You can’t let two junior people argue for a year and exhaust themselves. You have to teach those junior people.

When your team is really at loggerheads, escalate—and escalate fast. And then you, as the more senior person, hear the various points of view, and you say, “Look, none of us knows what the right decision is here, but I want you to gamble with me. I want you to disagree and commit. We’re going to do it this way. But I really want you to disagree and commit.” And here’s the important part: Sometimes this disagreement happens between the more senior person and a subordinate. The subordinate really wants to do it one way, and the senior person really thinks it should be done a different way. And it’s often the case that the more senior person should disagree and commit. I disagree and commit all the time. I’ll debate something for an hour or a day or a week. And I’ll say, “You know what? I really disagree with this, but you have more ground truth than I do. We’re going to do it your way. And I promise I will never tell you I told you so.”

To sustain it you need the right people; you need innovative people. Innovative people will flee an organization if they can’t make decisions and take risks. You might recruit them initially, but they won’t stay long. Builders like to build. A lot of this stuff is very simple, really. It’s just hard to do. And the other thing about competition is that you do not want to play on a level playing field. This is why you need innovation, especially in domains like space and cyber.

Professor O’Neill once appeared on television with the famous science-fiction author Isaac Asimov. The host asked Asimov a very good question: “Did anybody in science fiction ever predict [O’Neill colonies,] and if not, why not?” Asimov had a very good answer: “Nobody did, really, because we’ve all been planet chauvinists. We’ve all believed people should live on the surface of a planet, of a world. In my writing I’ve had colonies on the moon. So have a hundred other science fiction writers. The closest I came to a manufactured world in free space was to suggest that we go out to the asteroid belt and hollow out the asteroids and make ships out of them. It never occurred to me to bring the material from the asteroids in towards the earth where conditions are pleasanter and build the worlds there.”

Let me close by saying that I believe Amazon should be scrutinized. We should scrutinize all large institutions, whether they’re companies, government agencies, or non-profits. Our responsibility is to make sure we pass such scrutiny with flying colors. It’s not a coincidence that Amazon was born in this country. More than any other place on Earth, new companies can start, grow, and thrive here in the US. Our country embraces resourcefulness and self-reliance, and it embraces builders who start from scratch. We nurture entrepreneurs and start-ups with stable rule of law, the finest university system in the world, the freedom of democracy, and a deeply accepted culture of risk-taking. Of course, this great nation of ours is far from perfect. Even as we remember Congressman John Lewis and honor his legacy, we’re in the middle of a much-needed race reckoning. We also face the challenges of climate change and income inequality, and we’re stumbling through the crisis of a global pandemic. Still, the rest of the world would love even the tiniest sip of the elixir we have here in the US. Immigrants like my dad see what a treasure this country is—they have perspective and can often see it even more clearly than those of us who were lucky enough to be born here. It’s still Day One for this country, and even in the face of today’s humbling challenges, I have never been more optimistic about our future. I appreciate the opportunity to appear before you today and am happy to take your...