Lesser known facts about Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos

The company that Bezos founded was started as an online book retailer. No surprises then that the founder is a voracious reader himself. Books have been written about how the written words have shaped him as a leader. At Amazon, employees have access to something called 'Jeff's reading list'. The list includes autobiographies, books on business and technology and even some fiction.  Kazuo Ishiguro is one of his favourite authors.

Bezos' fascination for flying had once nearly killed him. In 2003, Bezos was in a helicopter that crashed at Texas while he was scouting a site for a test-launch facility for Blue Origin. There were two other passengers and a pilot. The accident took place due to strong winds that caused the helicopter to fly into trees.

Bezos founded Blue Origin in September 2000.  In 2015, he announced that a new orbital launch vehicle was under development. The same year, in November, Blue Origin's New Shepard space vehicle successfully made it to space and reached its planned test altitude. In December 2017, the space vehicles successfully reached space with dummy passengers. Blue Origin is the result of a dream Bezos nurtured since childhood. He was fascinated by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. He wanted to develop space technologies and give people a choice of living either on Earth or elsewhere. Blue Origin is a step in that direction.

Bezos allows customers to directly contact him on mail if there is an issue which needs to be addressed urgently. He forwards the mail to the concerned department with a single question mark, "?". When the department receives the message, they know the issue needs to be addressed immediately.

Bezos is known to have banned PowerPoint presentations at Amazon. He asks his staff to give a well-written long six-page memo instead. According to him, this process encourages critical thinking over simply listing the proposals in bullet points.

Bezos donated 1 million Australian dollars ($6,90,000) to the disastrous Australian bushfire. He also happened to be heavily criticised online for this gesture as the sum donated is allegedly a very small part of his fortune.

Bezos has his own unique set of rules on how meetings at Amazon should be conducted. According to Bezos, teams should be created in a way that they are no larger than the size of two pizzas. In other words, this means that the number of members in the team in a meeting, should be enough to finish two pizzas.