Jeff Bezos on Leading for the Long-Term at Amazon

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

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

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 3 January 2013

⏱️ 11 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	If you work with early career professionals, my colleagues at
0:03.8	HPR have a great new podcast for you. It's called New Here. Think of it like the
0:08.4	Young Professional's Guide to Building a Meaningful Career on your own terms.
0:11.9	Share New Here with the Young Professionals in your life. a meaningful career on your own terms.
0:12.8	Share new here with the young professionals in your life.
0:15.9	Listen for free wherever you got your podcasts.
0:18.6	Just search new here. Welcome to the HPR Idea cast from Harvard Business Review.
0:33.0	I'm Adi Ignatius, the editor-in-chief,
0:35.2	and recently I talked to Amazon's Jeff Bezos,
0:37.8	who in our new survey, which appears in the January issue,
0:40.7	comes out as the world's number one living CEO. Here are excerpts of our conversation.
0:46.1	Jeff, thanks for joining us. When Amazon went public back in 1997, you wrote a letter
0:51.0	to shareholders that said it's all about the long term.
0:54.0	Did you feel at the time that you were really challenging orthodoxy?
0:57.0	I felt that we were trying to make sure that we were correctly advertising the actual event.
1:08.0	Warren Buffett has a really good phrase for this.
1:11.0	He says, you can hold a rock concert and that's okay you can hold a
1:16.0	ballet and that's okay just don't hold a rock concert and advertise it as a ballet
1:21.0	and the job of the public company is to be clear about whether you're holding
1:29.9	a ballet or a rock concert and then investors can opt into that. So what does it really mean
1:36.5	from the perspective of a CEO to think in the long term? Well if you're long-term oriented, customer interests and shareholder interests are aligned.
1:48.6	In the short term, that's not always correct. Also, we like to invent and do new things and I know for sure that long-term
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Harvard Business Review, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Harvard Business Review and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.