Peter Drucker once said that whenever you see a successful business, you know that someone once made a courageous decision. Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com, is a perfect example of courageous decision making. The decision making framework used by Bezos, who has an estimated net worth of $46.7 billion dollars, is detailed in this post.
The story goes like this: Jeff Bezos was a SVP at D.E. Shaw’s hedge fund in New York. With a fat yearly bonus check right around the corner, Jeff Bezos made an unfathomable decision: Bezos quit, packed up his bags, and drove out to Seattle to start his own company. Amazon.com was founded in 1994, and the rest is history.
Decision Making to Minimize Regrets
How did Jeff Bezos make this courageous decision? The Amazon.com founder and CEO minimized the chances of regret using something called the regret minimization framework. The details of this decision making framework that Bezos used (and still uses) is detailed in The Everything Store. Check it out below:
So looking back on life’s important junctures was on Bezos’s mind when he came up with what he calls “the regret-minimization framework” to decide the next step to take at this juncture in his career.
When you are in the thick of things, you can get confused by small stuff,” Bezos said a few years later.
“I knew when I was eighty that I would never, for example, think about why I walked away from my 1994 Wall Street bonus right in the middle of the year at the worst possible time. That kind of thing just isn’t something you worry about when you’re eighty years old. At the same time, I knew that I might sincerely regret not having participated in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a revolutionizing event. When I thought about it that way… it was incredibly easy to make the decision.”
