Page 29 - Forbes Magazine-September 30, 2018

LEADERS

1 2 3 4 5
Jeffrey Bezos Elon Musk Mark Zuckerberg Timothy Cook Satya Nadella
AMAZON.COM TESLA MOTORS FACEBOOK APPLE MICROSOFT
THREE-YEAR MARKET
VALUE CREATION $450 BIL $48 BIL $376 BIL $369 BIL $278 BIL
THREE-YEAR STOCK 366% 819% 563% 123% 84%
MARKET GAINS
INNOVATION PREMIUM 72.8% 79.7% 70% 12% 26%

6 7 8 9 10
Marc Benioff Shantanu Narayen Reed Hastings Jeff Weiner 1 Larry Page/Sergey Brin
SALESFORCE.COM ADOBE SYSTEMS NETFLIX LINKEDIN ALPHABET
THREE-YEAR MARKET
VALUE CREATION $50 BIL $68 BIL $78 BIL $16 BIL $491 BIL
THREE-YEAR STOCK
MARKET GAINS 143% 365% 1351% 96% 197%
INNOVATION PREMIUM 82.4% 62.8% 71.5% 60% 37.5%
1 RANKINGS INCLUDE CEOS OF COMPANIES THAT HAVE BEEN ACQUIRED IN THE PAST TWO YEARS. LINKEDIN WAS ACQUIRED BY MICROSOFT.

sorts of fields Amazon could never have drives Amazon’s retail sales, leverages because you can work off a road map.”
justified, such as food, the kind of per- Amazon’s content and so on. “The most And make no mistake, that road map
ishable product that doesn’t fit into the interesting thing about machine learning is “pretty much all” that Bezos works on,
classic Amazon model. After years as a as opposed to a lot of other technologies delegating the day-to-day business op-
bookstore killer, the company now has is just how horizontal it’s going to be,” erations. Long-term thinking has been
16 permanent Amazon Books locations Bezos says. “There’s not a single category Amazon’s hallmark, and the cash spigot
across 11 states. And Amazon recent- of business or government or anything, from AWS empowers Bezos to keep run-
ly opened a second Go in Seattle. “They really, that can’t improve itself.” ning the retail juggernaut with near-zero
have to have something that’s special Even the much ballyhooed “HQ2” margins and unassailable efficiencies, as
and new,” Bezos says. “And that’s what second headquarters bake-off, which well as invest in far-flung areas. “I very
you’re seeing if you’re paying attention Amazon insiders continue to say will be rarely get pulled into the today,” Bezos
to our physical-stores strategy.” finalized by year’s end, speaks to Ama- says. “I get to work two or three years
Prime, in short, has become Ama- zon’s horizontal outlook. (Forbes is bet- into the future, and most of my leader-
zon’s central nervous system, connecting ting on Washington, D.C., where Bezos ship team has the same setup.”
everything in the company—and giving already has a base and which has the tal- “Friends congratulate me after a
Amazon a path to expand into new mar- ent, logistics and access to influencers; quarterly-earnings announcement and
kets while also juicing its core retail busi- by shortlisting both the Virginia and the say, ‘Good job, great quarter,’ and I’ll say,
ness—without really being it’s own thing. Maryland suburbs, as well as the District ‘Thank you, but that quarter was baked
“It can’t be a stand-alone business because of Columbia, Bezos can also play three three years ago.’ I’m working on a quar-
it’s completely tied in to our consumer of- governments within one metropolitan ter that’ll happen in 2021 right now.”
fering,” Bezos says. area against each other for the best sweet- It’s that mindset that has companies
Similarly, as seen with Go, artificial in- heart deal.) Increasingly, Bezos says, ge- in dozens of industries running scared.
telligence will increasingly connect what ography at Amazon is becoming irrele- “I come up with ideas. We could sit here
previously seemed like disparate product vant. When separate teams need to work with an idea, and I could fill this white-
lines, from cloud to retail. Take the wildly together, “what you want is those two board in an hour with 100 ideas,” Bezos
successful Echo, which has made Jeff Wil- groups to have infrequent meetings and says. “If I have a week with no brain-
ke’s existential question about Amazon— set a road map of the future.” He adds: storming meetings, I complain to my of-
is it a hardware or a software company?— “If you organize correctly, people do not fice, like ‘Come on, guys, help me here.’ ”
moot. It’s an effective piece of hardware have to be in the same building or the Corporate America, take note—either
empowered by AI-driven software, which same city or even the same time zone, innovate or Jeff Bezos will do it for you. F

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