“A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.” ~Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos, co-founder and CEO of Amazon.
Image: Fortune
Jeff Bezos, cofounder and CEO of Amazon.com, has created a company that has changed the landscape of how we shop, read and use online media. This year, Amazon jumped a whopping four ranks in global brand value, beating household brands Walmart, Mastercard and UPS with total brand valuation of $45.7 billion dollars and a ranking standing at fourteen. This ranking is a long way up from the uncertain aftermath of the infamous dot com bubble of the 1990s the company rode to a global stage on, when the company rapidly went from trading at $100 per share to a mere $6 per share.
How did he do it? Jeff Bezos looked at every challenge as an opportunity. While he attributes being exceptionally lucky as a key to his success, he is also one of the only start-up founders to endure as a leader even after the company grew to thousands of employees. He managed to make his company profitable in just a couple of short years after the bust, while Google, Yahoo!, eBay and other major internet companies made major leadership transitions, with Yahoo! running through five CEOs in as many years. His business style is characterized by a booming infectious laughter, a near obsession with analytics, and a quirky futuristic vision. He is also famous for pizza at meetings, company frugality and wearing jeans to work.
Now, Bezos is putting his futuristic visions to work. The company recently submitted a proposal for a new campus in downtown Seattle that would include three “biospheres”, basically providing 65,000 square feet of workspace inside a greenhouse to help employees feel more relaxed and continue the company’s friendliness towards bringing dogs to work. The project, if approved, would be Seattle’s largest development project in city history. Bezos wants to send the message that the way we view office space is changing, and is putting its company in the ranks of Apple using innovative work space ideas to increase creativity and productivity.
