Jeff Bezos has frequently been labeled the "next Steve Jobs" ever since the Apple cofounder passed away two years ago, but Bezos himself bristles at the comparison.
"We have our own approaches and vision and you would never… no one would ever be the next Steve Jobs," the Amazon founder and CEO told Mashable in an interview earlier this year. "He was a unique guy."
On the surface, there are many differences between the two tech titans and the companies they founded. Jobs was more design-focused and less concerned about keeping prices low; Bezos is fiercely focused on customer and operating on minimal-to-no margins, plus he indulges in more pursuits outside his day job as CEO, including running a space company and now a national newspaper.
See also: 20 Eclectic Jeff Bezos Investments
However, an excerpt from a new book by Bloomberg Businessweek senior writer Brad Stone reveals a few striking similarities between the biographies and leadership styles of the two CEOs.
In the book, The Everything Store, Amazon is described as a company similar to Apple under Jobs where employees "thrive in an adversarial atmosphere with almost constant friction." This is a direct result of Bezos, who is said to prefer "his minions battle it out" and who frequently lobs harsh criticisms at employees that would make HR reps at other companies blanch.
"Why are you wasting my life?" Bezos reportedly said after one engineer's presentation. “This document was clearly written by the B team. Can someone get me the A team document? I don’t want to waste my time with the B team document," he said on another occasion after reviewing a supply chain document.
Jobs, too, was famous (or infamous) for being temperamental and exacting in his demands for employees, and he used similar language to emphasize the difference in quality between "A players" and "C players."
It turns out both men were also estranged from their biological fathers. Bezos was born to Jackie Gise and Ted Jorgensen and lived with his father for the first year and half of his life until his mother became fed up with Jorgensen for drinking too much and being an inattentive parent. She filed for divorce, eventually got remarried to Miguel Bezos and asked Jorgensen to stay out of their lives.
In what is certainly the most gripping part of the excerpt, Stone recounts walking into a bike shop in 2012 — where Jorgensen now works — and informing him that his son is the billionaire founder of Amazon. Jorgensen didn't have a clue.
Jobs' parents Joanne Schieble and Abdulfattah Jandali were unmarried when she became pregnant, but later married. Under pressure from her parents, however, Schieble moved away to San Francisco to give birth without telling Jandali and subsequently put Jobs up for adoption. Jobs later revealed in Walter Isaacson's biography that he happened to meet his father in the restaurant he owned, though neither were aware at the time they were related.
Beyond that, the new book serves as a reminder of basic managerial similarities between the two. Both founders are focused on long-term bets; both made their email addresses public (jeff@amazon.com) and responded to customers directly and both shaped their companies with a single-minded vision. It's that last point that may prove the most significant for Amazon going forward.
There have been countless articles questioning whether Apple can be as successful without Jobs at the helm, but Stone's book suggests that Bezos is just as pivotal to Amazon as Jobs was to Apple — if not more so.
"In a way, the entire company is built around his brain—an amplification machine meant to disseminate his ingenuity and drive across the greatest possible radius," Stone writes, before adding a telling quote about the company from an Amazon SVP. “It’s scaffolding to magnify the thinking embodied by Jeff."
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