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Jeff Bezos To Employees: 'One Day, Amazon Will Fail' But Our Job is To Delay it as Long as Possible (cnbc.com)
Days before Amazon announced the cities it had picked for its HQ2, CEO Jeff Bezos had to address a separate but related concern among employees: Where is all this headed? At an all-hands meeting last Thursday in Seattle, an employee asked Bezos about Amazon's future. Specifically, the questioner wanted to know what lessons Bezos has learned from the recent bankruptcies of Sears and other big retailers. From a report: "Amazon is not too big to fail," Bezos said, in a recording of the meeting that CNBC has heard. "In fact, I predict one day Amazon will fail. Amazon will go bankrupt. If you look at large companies, their lifespans tend to be 30-plus years, not a hundred-plus years." The key to prolonging that demise, Bezos continued, is for the company to "obsess over customers" and to avoid looking inward, worrying about itself. "If we start to focus on ourselves, instead of focusing on our customers, that will be the beginning of the end," he said. "We have to try and delay that day for as long as possible." Bezos' comments come at a time of unprecedented success at Amazon, with its core retail business continuing to grow while the company is winning the massive cloud-computing market and gaining rapid adoption of its Alexa voice assistant in the home.
Not having had my coffee yet, I read "One day Amazon will be fair."
The people who care are the evangelists. Either the old style religious evangelists and the new breed of nature, vegetarianism, environmentalism evangelists.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I'd imagine that even after he dies/retires, the company will continue to be a behemoth for another decade or so until finally getting out innovated and eventually becoming the next Sears.
I mean, look at Apple... almost nothing new or really innovative has come out of that company since Steve Jobs died, but they're are still printing money selling products with slightly better specs than last year's model.
The larger Amazon becomes and the more businesses it buys or gets into, the harder it will be to see when it starts to fail at its core business. The company will be able to continue to report record revenues while hiding that certain portions of its business may be stagnating or even failing, but are propped up by the other portions. This was the case of GE, where for the longest time it was in everything from biomedical devices to airplane engines to locomotives to power generation to financing to you name it. Under Welch all was well because of his obsession with performance, but under subsequent leaders, these lines began to fail at different rates and weren't addressed early enough to stop the bleeding. GE is now like a deflating balloon, shedding business divisions left and right as it tries to right itself. Amazon may be successful in everything from cloud computing to groceries to electronic devices to selling just about everything under Bezos, but one has to wonder if the next leader can keep it all going without cracks forming.
If you have seen the Pixar movie Wall-e made just 10 years ago. It showed a future with the Big Unstoppable Buy n Large (In essence a parity of Walmart) just got so big and influential that it took over and destroyed the world.
Now today Amazon is bigger then Walmart and they are struggling to fight for competition with Amazon. Just as these big box stores dominated the last decade, are now their former self. There are plenty of other forces ready to unseat Amazons spot.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
like Sears. Or Toys R Us. Or Yellow Front (anyone on West cost remember them?).
Oh, and while we're on the subject treating your employees like crap non stop doesn't help. Even Walmart had to raise pay and decrease workload a bit because they were losing money with unstocked shelves.
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Every company should know that this is the truth. Every people should know that this is the truth. In fact, the same basic truth exists in regards to life too. Because one day we will die, but it's the job of our entire system to keep from dying as long as possible.
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If you look at large companies, their lifespans tend to be 30-plus years, not a hundred-plus years.
That's not quite true unless you are using a rather narrow definition of corporate lifespan. They might only be at the top of their game for 20-30 years but once they get to a certain size they rarely actually die completely in the sense of bankruptcy. They just tend to get absorbed into other companies or shift to a less prominent place in the market. Go look at any company in the Fortune 500. Most of them have been around a LOT longer than 30 years. Apple and Microsoft are already older than 30 years and are unlikely to go away any time soon. Yahoo is/was close to 25 years old as a standalone company but it isn't actually gone, it just got absorbed into another company and that's fairly normal. Amazon has reached sufficient scale that they'd have to do something remarkably stupid to go bankrupt or there would have to be some sort of techtonic shift in the marketplace. Also please recall that Amazon was founded in 1994 so it's already 25 years old and most of that time could properly be described as a large company.
You have to remember that large companies are the ones that survived. The companies that go away before 30 years are the ones that didn't so there is something of a surviviorship bias in play here. It's entirely plausible that Amazon won't be a standalone company 20 years from now but it's pretty unlikely the company will disappear completely.
Obviously the author of the article meant to catch eyeballs with that title but he did a huge disservice to Bezos and all the readers by choosing such a title.
Because the title says the exact opposite of what Bezos said. He didn't say we need to delay the demise of Amazon. Read the 2 simple quotes in the article & submission. Bezos is saying they need to delay the onset of focusing on their survival and stay focused on the customer as long as possible. This will keep Amazon alive. Once Amazon starts focusing on itself, the beginning of the end starts.
The article's title implies that Amazon is already looking at itself and thus is well on its way to its end. Bezos is saying they need to delay getting to the start of such a day.
This is a case of the reporter not understanding wisdom and passing on their misunderstanding to those they are supposed to educate.
Most I know generally try to make the world a better place...
Minor correction: ... so long as the steps needed to do that don't interfere with their personal life styles or personal business interests.
Most I know generally try to make the world a better place...
While it's true that many of the world's oldest companies are in Japan and go back hundreds of years, my guess is that if you filter the list to include only those with billions of dollars as turnover (to be comparable with Amazon) then what's left might be chemical and engineering companies dating from the latter part of the 19th century (or later) and might be in Germany as well as Japan.
Different companies in different lines of business, but all of their bankruptcies have the same cause:
Massive debt, resulting from leveraged buyouts. Most of them led by Bain Capital (you may remember their former CEO, Mitt Romney).
Mitt Romney stopped being involved in day-to-day operations of Bain Capital in February 1999 so he could work on the SLC Winter Olympics. He officially left Bain Capital in early 2002.
Bain Capital's relationship with Toys-R-Us began in 2004 - 2 years after Mitt Romney left.
"On 20 July 2008, iHeartRadio "announced the completion of a merger with an indirect wholly owned subsidiary of CC Media holdings, Inc., a corporation formed by a private equity group co-lead by Bain Capital Partners, LLC and Thomas H. Lee Partners, L.P." source. Roughly 6 years after Romney officially left Bain.
In 2005 Vornado Realty Trust bought 7.5 million shares of Sears Canada. Vornado was also involved with Bain Capital in taking over Toys “R” Us, which took over KB Toys resulting in 3,400 jobs lost." source. Note this source is extremely anti-Romney and places the date of acquisition as 2005 - years after Romny left Bain.
The June 2008 issue of SF Guitar Tech includes the sentence: "Bain Capital, an equity fund that was founded by 3 people, including Mitt Romney (take that in whatever way you want), recently bought Guitar Center for 2.1 Billion dollars." Again, years after Romney left Bain.
There is a lot of irony in the history of Sears. Sears was the original Amazon. Sears aggressively made use of a new technology as it was rolled out throughout the country to reach a massive customer base and flourish - modern transportation. As roads, and especially rail, began to be built and improved across the country Sears capitalized on it to create a massive mail order business. Rural areas might only have a few small stores, but if they had a train depot, then they had access to the entire Sears catalog. You could buy any part for your tractor from Sears, or even an entire set of materials needed to build a house (literally).
Then Sears began to roll out brick and mortar stores - a natural progression for a large retail business with lots of money. Store fronts are like bragging rights - a tangible, physical way to show off the power and size of your business. Eventually mail order declined significantly, and their catalogs were primary an advertising tool to get people into stores.
Then came the internet, and Sears did not capitalize on it as they could have. That opened the door for Amazon to beat Sears at its original game. It's so ironic that one of the things forcing Sears out of business is being undercut by mail-order shopping.
Less than two months ago Amazon opened its first brick and mortar store in New York - Amazon 4-Star. Bragging rights.
What will be the demise of Amazon? Maybe 3D printing purchases regionally and then using drones to handle last-mile delivery? It will be some technology that Amazon fails to embrace, letting a new competitor get a leg up on them.
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When I read "Amazon is not too big to fail," I immediately thought that was simply a seed to plant in people's minds as they get bigger and bigger, to prevent the idea that Amazon is too big to fail and needs to be broken up or regulated.
They can't be too big to fail, Bezos himself said so!
I do agree that Amazon is the best at managing their customers, and as long as they continue to do that, it will be much harder for them to fail.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
1. One day our company will die.
2. That will happen sooner if we focus on ourselves instead of our customers. So let's focus on our customers.
What's so unreasonable about that?
I'm far from being rich, but I do feel largely this way.
I don't go out of my way to waste or hurt the world, but on the other hand, I don't put myself out to do otherwise either.
I like my lifestyle....and I don't see myself as frantically running through the house to turn off this or that to save electricity. I've got a job and can easily afford my power bills. So, I don't sweat it.
I can afford gas for my car, I've never been one to even look at the rated MPG on a vehicle as a purchase parameters, I just want to know if it is fun and will go fast. I've had a car that got 10mpg if I was lucky.....and it was worth every penny before Katrina took it.
But I'm happy to help out my friends when they are in need. I have given money, time and more when they have hit hard times, or have health scares. They've done the same for me.....
The way I figure it, my time on earth is short, and I'm going to enjoy it to the max I can. In only a couple decades after I pass on, no one will even remember my name to "curse" it as some think future generations will.
I'll be taking a dirt nap anyway, and won't hear it, so, what do I care what happens beyond me?
I'm only concerned about my life and my lifestyle and pleasure while I'm here.
I"m happy and supportive for others that go out of their way to 'save the planet' or leave this or that for posterity. Good for them.
It doesn't affect me either way.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........