jeff bezos

I am a big fan of Jeff Bezos, the founder of amazon.com and i never hided that i would like to spend 1 day with him anywhere in the world to get to know him better and maybe take some of his DNA and apply into my ideas.

He surely revolutionized the e-commerce scene in the USA and all over the world, even the biggest brick-and-mortar retailers could not compete with him including the world’s biggest retailer Walmart and i was admiring more and more everyday with every new product he was launching under the amazon brand.

Yesterday I finished reading Brad Stone’s book “The Everything Store“, the latest book in covering Amazon’s amazing journey but while reading it, i started thinking differently about Jeff Bezos, is he a bad boss???

Maybe this is the reason of his success, being harsh to people to make things move forward and his style of managing people and each one of us has his different style in doing so.

A paragraph taken from the book:

Bezos fits comfortably into this mold. His drive and boldness trumps other leadership ideals, such as consensus building and promoting civility. While he can be charming and capable of great humor in public, in private he explodes into what some of his underlings call nutters. A colleague failing to meet Bezos’s exacting standards will set off a nutter. If an employee does not have the right answers or tries to bluff, or takes credit for someone else’s work, or exhibits a whiff of internal politics, uncertainty, or frailty in the heat of battle—a blood vessel in Bezos’s forehead bulges and his filter falls away. He’s capable of hyperbole and harshness in these moments and over the years has delivered some devastating rebukes. Among his greatest hits, collected and relayed by Amazon veterans:

“Do I need to go down and get the certificate that says I’m CEO of the company to get you to stop challenging me on this?”

Few days back I saw a question on Quora asking: “Is there a person, a stranger, whom you met once in your life and are likely to never meet again, who affected you in some profound way?” and yes it made think of a stranger i met 2 years ago.

It was in December 2011 while having my camera and was strolling in Warsaw, Poland where I met a beggar, I had my eye in the viewfinder and waiting for the right moment to snap it and then suddenly he turned and looked at me and gave me a smile.

A smile that means a lot when i look back at his photo, maybe for him it meant yes you can take my photo and drop me few coins to get some food, or he used to get snapped by total strangers and this was his way to look cool, but every time i remember this guy or look at his photo, it means “don’t worry, be happy”!

warsaw beggar

When you enter the 4th quarter of the year, retailers and suppliers also enter the ultimate battle zone of negotiations of the following year.

And it looks like Casino stores (part of the French retailer Groupe Casino) are going down the road every supplier avoids to enter, the break where the two sides start pulling in their own directions and conditions and end up not getting anywhere, thus removing the product(s) from the shelves becomes inevitable.

Below is a sample, for English readers, the sign says: “You will not find the Puget products on our shelves because we did not accept their excessive price increase, instead discover the Casino oil – Casino gets engaged for you”.

Puget-Casino

I do visit lots of shopping malls during my trips, or my business trip, basically I am not there for shopping for the latest fashion trends, but instead to visit the supermarket or hypermarket inside those malls for professional reasons.

I was lately in Jeddah-Saudi Arabia, staying at a hotel with a walking distance from a big shopping mall just across the street, so it took me few steps to enter it and after going around it, I decided to ask the information desk where the supermarket was located and to my surprise the answer was: “Sorry sir, there is no supermarket in this mall”.

Haifaa Mall is a trendy shopping mall, mainly focusing on major fashion brands.

haifaa

Cyprus-map Cyprus, the beautiful Mediterranean island which is my all time favorite destination, for business and pleasure, is in deep trouble since 2 weeks. here is my opinion from a non-financial view and tryign to simplify it for the people who had no idea what is goign on in Cyprus.

Cyprus got stuck in this banks bailout with the Troika (European Central Bank (ECB), International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Eurozone partners) and a deadline to secure 7 billions out of the 17 billions they need which 10 billions will come from the EU.

The main problem started when Cyprus banks started buying Greek bonds because of the over extra cash they had on hand from the Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs and after the total failure of Greece these bonds became useless and had no real values anymore.

Now for those who think that the Russian will come helping Cyprus, this is another fictional theory which will never happen. Why will Russia come to save those who are trying to run away from paying taxes in the motherland and put all their fortunes in a tax-haven called Cyprus with super treatment and lots of advantages?

Cyprus has some opportunities in the newly discovered natural gas fields, but will the Russian win the bid of exploring it and the Europeans stay watching? This we have to wait and see as it needs some time to be cleared.

Did the Cypriots offer the Russian a deal over military bases in the Mediterranean in case something goes wrong in Tartouss, but what about the British bases on the island? Another theory.

I think the Orthodox Church of Cyprus can be the savior at one point in time, as a major stakeholder in Hellenic Bank, can the church come back to power as the old days of Archbishop Makarios?

If you need more news about the Cyprus financial crisis, please check the Cyprus Daily.

Cash only sign on Ledra Street in Nicosia on 24-03-2013
Cash only sign on Ledra Street in Nicosia on 24-03-2013

As Albert Einstein said: “Two Things Are Infinite: the Universe and Human Stupidity”, we can clearly see this theory applied every day somewhere in Lebanon.

It does not matter if the municipality is asking people not to stick any ads on the bridge pillar, someone very clever will come and stick an ad exactly under the warning. And it looks like previously someone had its ad directly on the warning itself but it was removed.

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