How Jeff Bezos Built One of the World’s Most Valuable Companies

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Business, Marketing, Teams, Business/entrepreneurship, Harvard, Management, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Hbr, Business/management, Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Business/marketing, Innovation, Communication

4.3 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 17 November 2020

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sunil Gupta, Harvard Business School professor, has spent years studying successful digital strategies, companies, and leaders, and he's made Amazon and its legendary CEO Jeff Bezos a particular areas of focus. Drawing on his own in-depth research and other sources, including a new collection of Bezos' own writing, "Invent and Wander," Gupta explains how Amazon has upended traditional corporate strategy by diversifying into multiple products serving many end users instead of focusing more narrowly. He says that Bezos's obsession with the customer and insistence on long-term thinking are approaches that other companies and senior executives should emulate.

Transcript

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0:00.0	How do you navigate gender in your workplace?
0:04.0	HBR's fan favorite podcast Women at Work is back with personal stories, the newest research,
0:09.6	and practical advice on navigating divorce, disability, and career failures.
0:14.0	Listen for free to H.B.
0:16.0	Women at Work wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the H-B Ideacast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Allison Beard. If you had to name the most successful business leader alive today, who would you say?
0:49.0	I can't hear you from my basement podcasting room, but I would bet that for many of you the
0:54.2	answer is Jeff Bezo CEO of Amazon. This is a man who over the past 25 years
0:59.6	turned his online bookstore startup into a diversified company valued at 1.6 trillion dollars.
1:06.5	Amazon is a digital retailing juggernaut, a web services provider, media producer, and
1:11.6	manufacturer of personal technology like Kindle and Echo.
1:15.0	Oh, and Bezos also owns the Washington Post and Blue Origin, a space exploration company.
1:21.0	Forbes tells us he is the richest person in the world. How did he accomplish so much?
1:26.1	How did he change the business landscape? What mistakes has he made along the way?
1:30.6	A new collection of Bezos' own writing, which, full disclosure, my colleagues at Harvard Business Review
1:35.2	Press have published, offer some insights.
1:38.1	The book is called Invent and Wander, and our guest today, who has spent years studying
1:42.2	both Amazon and Bezos, is here to talk with me about
1:45.2	some of the key themes in it.
1:47.2	We'll discuss the broad drivers of both the company and the CEO's success.
1:51.7	Sunil Gupta is a professor of business administration at Harvard
1:54.6	Business School and co-chair of its executive program on driving digital
1:58.3	strategy which is also the title of his book. Sunil thanks so much for being on the show.
	...

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