Communication Style of Jeff Bezos

Jeff Bezos is one of the most successful leaders and the richest persons of the modern business world. He is the founder and CEO of Amazon.com, owner of TheWashington Post and founder of Blue Origin. It is no doubt that his innovativeness, vision, and leadership skills have led to the success of his business ventures. However, what most people do not know about Jeff Bezos is that he is an effective storyteller, too. In fact, his communication skill is the underlying factor that ensures his vision is well understood and is considered worth pursuing by his employees, investors, and consumers.

Jeff Bezos- "I'm a legitimately happy person."

We believe that business management students, aspiring entrepreneurs, and management professionals have a lot to learn from Bezos’s communication styles. And, this should be the first step towards improving their communication skills and becoming an effective communicator themselves.

Let us dive deep into exploring how Jeff Bezos communicates. Effectively, we will be looking at how he conducts meetings, what his presentations look like, what he emphasizes the most while communicating, how he tries to motivate his employees, how he handles conflicts, and so on. By the end, we will try to identify the primary communication style of Bezos.

Business Meetings:

Bezos prefers small (yet diverse), manageable, and agile team meetings. Therefore, he has a “Two Pizza” team rule to conduct meetings. He said in an interview that the number of members in a meeting should not be larger than that can be fed by two pizzas. You may be wondering about the rationale behind this rule! Well, it is to keep the number of (usually, conflicting) opinions at minimum and to help reach conclusions and make decisions faster.

Bezos's "Two Pizza Team Rule" to conduct meetings.

Presentations:

As mentioned earlier, Jeff Bezos is a storyteller; and, he expects that all his employees, too, develop this skill. In fact, recently, Bezos banned PowerPoint Presentations at Amazon and replaced them with well-narrated and detailed memos with real sentences.

Sounds strange, doesn’t it? Well, for a business student who has been encouraged to work on her presentation skills for years, the idea of using memos over presentations sounded counter-intuitive to me as well. However, memos have turned out to become more effective since it provides an opportunity to explain the thoughts behind the ideas, encourages deep thinking and gives enough time to articulate the concepts.

Jeff Bezos Presenting for Amazon.com inc.

Non-verbal communication:

Non-verbal communication cues such as smile, posture, hand movements and others constitute a significant portion of what people are communicating. Effectively, Jeff Bezos’s body language during the speech or presentations conveys strong leadership. For instance, in a TED talk series in 2003, Bezos’s hand-on-chin posture indicated that he is a thinker. Also, when he leaned to the left side of his body, it carried a message of his confidence and a willingness to open up to the audience.

His body language shows a need for audience’s attention and their engagement.

Jeff Bezos's body language conveys strong leadership

Conflict Management:

When it comes to conflict management, Jeff Bezos encourages his employees to voice their disagreements openly and to criticize each other’s’ ideas respectfully. “Disagree and Commit” is one of Bezos’s management tactics to encourage faster decision making. Although he might disagree with the idea, he will still take a chance and commit to the idea if the other person has strong conviction on a particular direction. He has set his priorities straight: failures are acceptable, however slow decisions are not! This enables faster decision making, promotes healthy disagreements as well as fosters risk-taking attitude among employees.

"Disagree and Commit" enables faster decision making.

Motivational speeches:

Jeff Bezos, being one of the successful entrepreneurs, has delivered various motivational speeches for his employees, students, aspiring entrepreneurs and general public. His lessons from success and failures are words of wisdom for all. Great life lessons and professional tips can be learned from his speeches. Mostly, his speeches are around following one’s passion, creating values for customers, taking risks and working hard.

Jeff Bezos Motivational Quotes

Jeff Bezos values customers over everything else

What is the communication style of Jeff Bezos?

Finally, it can be said that Jeff Bezos's primary style of communication is "Assertive". He expresses his ideas and feelings while also considering others' needs. He is confident when he communicates, knows what he wants, takes ownership of his feelings, does not fear to say "No!", and listens to others. Also, he is intuitive--a big-picture thinker. His legacy of surviving "dot com" disaster and being a tech mogul can be attributed to this attribute since it enables him to come up with out-of-the-box approaches to issues and to think BIG.