World’s richest man and Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos is against the concept of work-life balance, and calls it a ‘debilitating phrase.’ He prefers work-life harmony instead.
“I get asked about work-life balance all the time. And my view is, that’s a debilitating phrase because it implies there’s a strict trade-off,”
Jeff Bezos said.
Bezos has been trying to teach young employees and the senior executives at Amazon too the importance of what he calls ‘work-life harmony’
The world’s first centibillionaire believes that if he is happy at home, he can carry the energy to work and vice-versa. Bezos explains,
“It actually is a circle; it’s not a balance. And I think that is worth everybody paying attention to it.”.
What Bezos talks about is something very basic. He points out how work and personal life are related and cannot be compartmentalised into boxes. It is important that we understand this and try to build a harmonious cycle comprising our personal and social lives. Otherwise, it will become difficult if we try to strike a balance between the two.
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Interestingly, Bezos still keeps a customer-facing email address at the company where he receives plenty of emails every day.
“I still have an email address that customers can write to. I see most of those emails, and I don’t answer very many of them anymore but I see them and I forward them, some of them — the ones that catch my curiosity,”
Jeff Bezos told in an interview.
In the interview, Jeff Bezos shared a unique way by which he notifies his execs to certain complaints.
For attracting the attention of his employees towards a particular customer-complaint Bezos forwards that specific email with a note that comprises a single character: “?”. The “?” is just a shorthand for – ‘Can you look into this? Why is this happening? What’s going on?’ clarified Bezos while speaking to the George W Bush Presidential Center’s Forum on Leadership in April.
Bezos says that he loves one thing about customers- their hunger for more.
“One thing I love about customers is that they are divinely discontent. Their expectations are never static – they go up. It’s human nature. We didn’t ascend from our hunter-gatherer days by being satisfied,”
Jeff Bezos wrote in a letter to shareholders.
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