As Amazon's executive chair, Jeff Bezos is still involved in growing the company — and the way he does it is simple, he said at the New York Times' DealBook Summit on Wednesday.
Bezos only needs to focus on "a few things" to keep the $2.32 trillion company on track, he said, and they're three elements that can help anyone get ahead. "Big leaders have to identify big ideas," said Bezos, who has an estimated $234.9 billion net worth. "They have to enforce tough execution against those big ideas and they need to grow the next generation of leaders."
Caring about ideas, processes and the people around you is a good recipe to achieve company-wide goals, organizational psychologist Adam Grant told CNBC Make It in 2017. Effective leaders care about propelling projects and their employees, not necessarily themselves, to success, Grant said.
"What distinguishes the greatest leaders of our time is that success is very rarely a goal for them. It's a byproduct of other goals that they have," said Grant, who is also a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. "The bigger you aim there, the more you focus on doing something that's going to benefit others, the more likely you are to produce something that's also going to achieve success for you."
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Bezos' mindset can be adopted by just about anyone in the workplace, no matter where you are on the career ladder. Employees who work well with others in pursuit of a common goal — embracing communication, teamwork and problem-solving — are currently in high demand in the job market, according to a LinkedIn report published in February.
The Amazon founder, who stepped down as CEO in 2021, now works on helping current CEO Andy Jassy "and the whole leadership team" remain successful, he said. Their big common goal right now is artificial intelligence, Bezos noted — including Nova, Amazon's generative AI model that was released on Tuesday.
"We're literally working on a thousand [AI] applications internally," said Bezos. "It can be used to improve everything. It will be in everything [in the world]."
Money Report
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