It's been said for a while that Mr Bezos was an original thinker, perhaps there's something to it.
I'm most surprised that he's been able to stand behind the scenes and sling filth at the authors and publishers and still come out top 5 in reputation.
Edit:
Quote:
When the attendees arrived, Bezos told them he’d received an employee suggestion that Amazon supplement its existing shipping policy—free shipping on orders over $25—with a new offer. Customers would pay an annual fee for free shipping on most products, regardless of order size. “Jeff was extremely energetic—he felt this was an opportunity to build something that was going to be very important,” Ravindran recalls. Hence the urgent weekend meeting at the lake.
The proposal sparked hushed concerns and consternation. Amazon’s finance team worried that waiving shipping charges would gut margins. “There were people who thought it was an extremely bad idea—the spreadsheets uniformly painted pictures of losses,” Ravindran says. Bezos ignored the objections, convinced that the offer would spur more orders. That intuition proved correct just weeks later, when the program, Prime, launched. Customers who’d previously made a few purchases a year were suddenly ordering multiple times a month. “Instead of looking to protect the current business, Jeff saw the upside,” says Ravindran, now chief digital officer at Graham Holdings. “It was the most impressive display of business leadership I’ve seen in my career.” Today tens of millions of customers pay $99 a year for Prime, which generates more than $1 billion in membership fees and incalculable incremental sales.
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