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Once They Had A Master Plan
Once They Had A Master Plan
Once They Had A Master Plan
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Once They Had A Master Plan

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The sixteen-foot-tall, three-inch-thick hammer-wielding man is a black sunken statue that stands resolutely, left foot in front of the right, near the entrance to the Seattle Art Museum decorated with a marble arch, where Amazon 's annual shareholder meeting takes place. The day was May 20, 1999. Covered in jet-black auto paint, this 13-ton stee

LanguageEnglish
PublisherAmy Wise
Release dateFeb 1, 2024
ISBN9798869208880
Once They Had A Master Plan

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    Once They Had A Master Plan - Amy Wise

    Once They Had A Master Plan

    Once They Had A Master Plan

    Copyright © 2023 by Amy Wise

    All rights reserved

    TABLE OF CONTENTS

    INTRODUCE

    CHAPTER 1 : SECRET INFORMATION

    CHAPTER 2 : I ENJOYED DIFFICULT QUESTION

    CHAPTER 3 : CHESTER PLANT MANAGEMENT

    CHAPTER 4 : DO YOU STILL BELIEVE

    CHAPTER 5 : DO YOU STILL BELIEVE THAT A STRANGER

    INTRODUCE

    The sixteen-foot-tall, three-inch-thick hammer-wielding man is a black sunken statue that stands resolutely, left foot in front of the right, near the entrance to the Seattle Art Museum decorated with a marble arch, where Amazon 's annual shareholder meeting takes place. The day was May 20, 1999. Covered in jet-black auto paint, this 13-ton steel figure was sculpted by artist Jonathan Borofsky as a symbol of homage to workers. America, its name is named after the left hand extension hammer equipped with a motor. This arm passes over the head four times every minute at a 75-degree angle, pounding down on the motionless right arm holding the smashed object.

    The life of a man with a hammer in Seattle would not have existed if it had not happened by chance. In 1991, while being hoisted vertically from a truck, one of the statue's legs slipped from its straps, creating two large footprints on the sidewalk of First Avenue and Seneca Street. It was like the real thing, – an eyewitness told the Seattle Times. Life doesn't always go smoothly and sometimes we encounter failures. After a year of recovery, the hammerhead returned to Seattle, this time without any trouble; but it has become the target of unprecedentedly bizarre political and employment statements. Once, a group of expressionist painters secretly tied an iron ball weighing nearly four kilograms to the right leg of the statue; One dark Christmas night, a group of mischievous goblins used a weather balloon to place Santa's red and white hat (the size of a ship's sail) on top of the statue's head.

    And on that sunny May morning, a crowd of about 350 eager shareholders occupied the lobby of the Robert Venturi-designed Seattle Art Museum, sipping freshly brewed Starbucks coffee and munching on cakes. spread around cream cheese, eagerly waiting to hear their hammer-wielding man, Jeffrey P. Bezos, speak. He is both a business genius and a classroom joker who has methodically and resolutely created a new business model for the Internet age. Like the man with the hammer, Bezos became the target of both admiration and envy. (Why him and not you? asked Wired) as well as scorn (Amazon.toast, as Internet scholar George Colony quipped in 1997; Amazon.bomb, – Barron's commented in 1999). But this is a day for affection. Some shareholders were optimistically optimistic about the prospect of meeting and hearing from the man who had made them money – in some cases a lot of money.

    Overall, Amazon 's shareholders look a lot like the kind of people one meets at every annual meeting – many are retired with white hair and enough time to care for their bottom line; A father in his 30s from Allentown, Pennsylvania, explained the meeting's proceedings to his nine-year-old son, who was proudly wearing a Seattle Mariners baseball cap. Embodying Seattle, there is also a tattooed, piercing, red-haired former Amazon  employee of generation 5,600% (yes, 5,600%) in just two years since the company went public on May 15, 1997. Pushing through the crowd was the legendary L. John Doerr, a very valuable partner in the company. venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. He dressed methodically with a blue shirt, gray striped pants, and no tie. This scheming, resilient Doerr is a director of the company and he personally holds 1,011,561 shares, which on this particular day were worth about $131 million. And there's another similarly dressed member of the board of directors, Scott Cook, co-founder of Intuit, Inc., a leader in Web services and financial, tax, and accounting software. (He is also a director of Amazon 's rival eBay, Inc.). Scott and Jeff are very similar in their approach to strategy, said Paul Saffo, director of the Future Institute, who knows both Cook and Bezos well, and considers each a leader. Incredibly insightful strategy."

    And that's the strategy investors want to hear right at the scheduled time of ten o'clock in the morning. They quickly followed each other into the museum auditorium. The space was bustling with excitement before opening time. Bezos separated from the crowd, went down one of the aisles, and quickly walked up the steps of a small stage, dressed very much like John Doerr in a dark shirt and casual pants, white shirt with open collar, no tie. Looking like your favorite high school science teacher, like the one trying to quickly settle down a student assembly, Bezos happily guided the last few people out of line to open seats. . There are some seats down there, – he pointed, then glided up to the stage: And two more seats over there.

    After quickly going through the meeting protocol – reviewing procedures, introducing directors, voting on proposals, etc. – standing behind the podium, prepared to tell the shareholders about the state of the company company and the progress they have made over the past year since the last shareholder meeting. Everyone knows that over the past 12 months, Jeff Bezos and Amazon  have been featured heavily in the media – on PBS's NewsHour and CBS's 60 Minutes II; was the main topic in Business Week, Fortune, Forbes, Wired, and the New York Times, Amazon  was named the new icon on the Internet and Bezos as the pioneer of the new economy. In the past year, Amazon entered the economic lexicon as a verb when the Wall Street Journal wrote about companies founded offline facing the threat of being amazoned, for example. For example: losing the franchise to a new business on the Internet. Forbes claims that Youbet  wants to be the Amazon  of horse racing. Fortune (especially fond of analogies) called babycenter  the Amazon  of cyberbabies and sportsite  (the Zambonis brand sales site) the Amazon  of ice machines and said: Who will be the Amazon  of the $1 trillion car business? Finally, Fortune columnist Stewart Alsop wondered, Is there an Amazon  for every industry? (Bezos seems to think so, investing a fair amount in drugstore , HomeGrocer , Pets , and Gear ).

    Proud that the brand is known by 55% of intellectuals, the word Amazon has become a part of popular culture. To prove this, Bezos proudly provided shareholders with several reference videos talking about Amazon  in television shows: Tonight Show (Leno said: Bill Clinton thinks Amazon  is the place to be. Janet Reno e-mail only), 3rd Rock from the Sun, and Hollywood Squares. He then showed the comic Lagoon on Sherman, with a character walking through a tropical forest saying: It turned out to be the Amazon. So great. I hear a lot about it. Look, there's a parrot. Listen to the birds. Insect. Monkeys. Smell the tropical flowers. Amazon is great for sure. There is nothing like their Website." The audience laughed and applauded.

    Last year, almost everyone in the media business wanted to hear what rising star Jeff Bezos had to say, not just about the direction of Amazon , but about a variety of other topics, including favorite books. His favorites (Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day and Frank Herbert's Dune) and personal things like spending and sleeping habits. Regarding the previous story, he shared a little with shareholders about the things he personally bought from Amazon 's auction website. On the table near the podium were: an autographed photograph of Albert Einstein, a five-pound porcelain bust of Star Wars character Boba Fett, and an engraved zinc painting of Bozo the clown with a toggle light. When I was a kid, people teased me because the name Bezos was similar to the word Bozo, – he joked. (Luckily he didn't bring the Ice Age bear skeleton he bought for $40,000). Regarding sleep, in a Wall Street Journal story titled Sleep: The New Social Status Symbol, he revealed: I need eight hours of sleep a day and every night I do… even if No matter how much you worry about work. Turn off the lights, five minutes later I'm asleep. (In contrast, Donald Trump replied in the same article: I only sleep well next to a beautiful woman).

    Also last year, Bezos spoke at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and among a hundred corporate leaders invited to the CEO summit. ) by Bill Gates, this meeting draws the likes of Warren Buffet of Berkshire–Hathaway, Michael Eisner of Walt Disney and Jack Welch of General Electric to Microsoft's headquarters near Redmond, Washington. Jeff and his wife Mackenzie have moved out of their 300 square meter rented apartment in Belltown, neighboring Seattle, and are now living in a new $10 million home (nearly 2,400 square meters, five bedrooms) – formerly owned by owned by the descendants of lumber tycoon Weyerhaeuser – in the isolated Medina neighborhood on the Gold Coast of Lake Washington, where 3,085 wealthy residents include chairman Gates and Nathan Myhrvold, former chief technology officer of Microsoft. Oh yes, Bezos' net worth is around 10 billion – or in other words, more than the entire gross domestic product of Iceland.

    The hour and fifteen minutes that follow are essentially the Jeff Bezos show, as he discusses a range of topics including the effectiveness of the Amazon  business model; the company's understanding and development of customer experience; the company's newest services (at the time auctions and electronic greeting cards); and the company's biggest investments, before answering a series of shareholder questions covering everything from credit card privacy issues to stock volatility, and then deciding plans to offer a 50% discount on all books on the list of best-sellers according to the New York Times ranking. Bezos smoothly transitions from one personality to another. At one point he was a hard-working accountant: Net profit is what we're trying to evaluate optimistically; not a percentage of that profit. So, as we move forward, if we believe that having a lower net profit will help us get the most compensation, then we can apply changes in the plan that lead to moves that have the best potential. benefit shareholders. Then he became a jokester: asked if he was worried about online shoppers being supported with information that helps them compare prices across all retailers, he deadpanned: That's it. It's really worrying, but it's just like Boeing worrying about the earth's gravity. (This sentence makes people laugh). Then, in the next sentence he proved to be a great visionary: E-commerce is like that. Customers will have almost perfect information. In my opinion, traders who do not understand and do not build business plans based on this foundation will face the most serious problems.

    Suddenly a question appeared that stopped the performance. A young Asian American shareholder raised his hand politely and asked, When will the company turn a profit?

    Most of the audience laughed; Some people applauded. Bezos is awake. I'm looking forward to it. He has already answered this question.

    I have to discuss a little, because sometimes people misunderstand - he said, leaning towards the crowd. For any of you who doubt this (slowly appears smile): Amazon  believes it is important that we one day become profitable. (More laughter). Switching to a serious tone, he added: We don't have to expect any new calculations or anything like that. In the long run, all companies will trade on a reasonable multiple [of price/profit]. That is the principle of successful operation. The capitalization of the company must reflect the current value of its past and future cash resources.

    Clearly Bezos saw this as an opportunity to present the core of Amazon 's strategy, explaining to shareholders and journalists alike why the losses have continued – and will continue –. high before profits: What we're doing now is focusing our investments on all the 'irresistible opportunities' [John Doerr's term for the Internet] that we perceive. Our American book business was profitable in December [1998], which is strange for the time of year [because shopping activity is so high]. I believe that if we do not organize ourselves well, December will not be profitable. [More audience laughter.] The collective of wise shareholders will behead the company's leadership team if they do not know how to allocate investment capital well and be more proactive during the sensitive time that is forming. into many of these businesses. Look, – he added, with the conviction of a true believer: There are countless opportunities on the Internet, and now is the time to invest. We are trying to make every decision in a long-term context.

    Although he did not utter these specific words, Bezos' intention was clear: During the growth phase, Amazon 's strategy was to grow rapidly – by aggressively investing in new product categories and new products. new business, by spending money on brand recognition and finding new customers; by doing whatever it takes to ensure that Amazon  is one of the companies that survives.

    As the meeting was drawing to a close, a shareholder asked Bezos if he was at all worried about the companies Amazon  had invested in (drugstore , HomGrocer  and Pets , all Web hyperlinked to Amazon ) will be able to deliver the customer service experience that Amazon  strives to create. While he is confident that the management of these companies will be done very well, he readily admits: You've done it all and you're betting wrong. On the other hand, he told shareholders that if the people who run Amazon  make some significant mistakes in investing, then we will do a good job for shareholders, because it takes guts to get rich. . You should expect mistakes."

    And I think that's a really great question to end the meeting with. Thank you very much. Nice to meet you.

    When the applause ended, the shareholders quickly left the Seattle Art Museum and headed out into the light of the noon sun. The hammer-wielding man's stature makes one wonder whether Amazon  will continue to outperform the competition. Or will it collapse one day under the weight of expectations (and debt) with all the sounds and ferocious screams of the 13-ton statue crashing to the ground? Many observers

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