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How to Cultivate a Bias for Action
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos on the balance between thinking and doing
At Twitter, Dan Rose tells a story about working at Amazon on the team that was incubating the Kindle. He recalls a meeting with Jeff Bezos, and his boss Steve Kessel:
Steve brought me + 2 other people from the team, we got on Jeff’s plane in Seattle. Jeff was fired up from the start, posing strategy questions & brainstorming our approach to hardware, software and content (my job). He had us captive for 4 hours and didn’t waste a second.
When he asked about our strategy for getting book publishers on board with digital books, I mentioned we would need a DRM solution (like Apple had done with music). There was a small start-up based in Paris that had already built DRM for e-books and we might want to acquire them.
When Jeff heard this he said “let’s fly straight to Paris and buy this company.” I thought he was kidding but he was dead serious. Steve reminded him they had 2 days of operating reviews scheduled with the exec team later that week, but Jeff said he would move or cancel them.
Like I wrote in my piece on career pathing, narratives and decisions are clean only in stories looking back; but if you were to watch them unfold live, it would all look really messy and…
