How can you master high standards? Jeff Bezos wants to share a few tips

As the world's richest man, Jeff Bezos can muster a crowd if he wants to talk about anything, big or small. This is the rare moment, once a year, when the Amazon founder stretches his horizons beyond the many parts of his business empire, in favor of a few bone-simple tips about how to run any business better.

Bezos's vehicle: his annual letter to shareholders. Much like fellow billionaire Warren Buffett, Bezos spends the first few pages of his letter unlocking the safe, if you will, as he shares a few key habits and uncommon beliefs that have helped him pull away from the pack. Bezos's focus this year is the surprisingly tough task of setting high standards within an organization -- and making them stick.

Don't look for any mention of business disputes with President Trump or various labor-relations controversies. Setting a prouder tone, Bezos opens with allusions to Amazon's No. 1 standing in two consumer-reputation surveys, and its emergence as America's most sought-after employer in LinkedIn's own Top Companies report last month. Such feedback from customers is "incredibly energizing," the Amazon boss declares.

By the next paragraph, though, Bezos is back to his usual impatient, perfectionist ways. "We didn’t ascend from our hunter-gatherer days by being satisfied," he writes. "People have a voracious appetite for a better way, and yesterday’s ‘wow’ quickly becomes today’s ‘ordinary.' . . . You cannot rest on your laurels in this world. Customers won’t have it." With that, he's ready to share his own quarter-century of discoveries involving high standards and how to implement them.

First, Bezos says, high standards are surprisingly teachable. Instead of trying to select for high-standards people, it's better to instill good habits in adaptable newcomers. "People are pretty good at learning high standards simply through exposure," Bezos writes. "High standards are contagious. Bring a new person onto a high standards team, and they’ll quickly adapt. The opposite is also true. If low standards prevail, those too will quickly spread."

Next, don't think that your personal high standards in one area will guarantee discernment in other fields. "You have to learn high standards separately in every arena of interest," Bezos declares. "When I started Amazon, I had high standards on inventing, on customer care, and (thankfully) on hiring. But I didn’t have high standards on operational process: how to keep fixed problems fixed, how to eliminate defects at the root, how to inspect processes, and much more." Without coaching from other people on his team, Bezos suggests, he never would have filled in those gaps.

"Understanding this point is important because it keeps you humble," Bezos adds. "There can be whole arenas of endeavor where you may not even know that your standards are low or non-existent."

Third, Bezos declares, anyone aspiring to greatness needs to recognize what great work entails, as well as having a realistic sense of how long or hard the journey will be. Guess wrong, by expecting success too early, and you will likely be so dispirited that your high standards collapse.

He cites the example of a friend who wanted to do "a perfect free-standing handstand. "Not leaning against a wall. Not for just a few seconds. Instagram good." She had budgeted two weeks for the task. That isn't how handstands work, Bezos says. It takes six weeks, even if you hire someone to be your handstand coach. (Wry aside from the world's richest man: "Yes, I know what you’re thinking, but evidently this is an actual thing that exists.")

Bezos's bigger point: "Unrealistic beliefs on scope – often hidden and undiscussed – kill high standards. To achieve high standards yourself or as part of a team, you need to form and proactively communicate realistic beliefs about how hard something is going to be."

All the same, Bezos says, "high standards are fun! Once you’ve tasted high standards, there’s no going back." Since Amazon's founding in 1994, the company has grown from a two-person start-up to a business behemoth that employs 566,000 people and rings up more than $177 billion a year in revenue. Even so, Bezos says, his high-standards principles "work at all levels of detail. Everything from writing memos to whole new, clean-sheet business initiatives."

For those readers who wouldn't mind an update on Amazon's business empire, too, Bezos doesn't disappoint. In later pages of the letter he discloses the following nuggets:

• Amazon' Prime, a $99-a-year service that provides customers with free shipping, many free movies and other perks, now has more than 100 million members worldwide. By way of reference, the entire United States has just 122 million households.
• Amazon Web Services, the company's cloud computing initiative, is booking revenue at a rate of $20 billion a year. It introduced "more than 1,400 significant services and features" last year.
• Amazon's shipping facilities have become a hub for countless small and medium-sized businesses that count on Amazon to fulfill orders. Amazon's Alexa sythesized-speech initiative is becoming faster and smarter in so many ways that it took Bezos seven zeroes, four parentheses, and an exclamation mark to explain them all.
• Looking to make its mark in sustainability, too, the company recently launched Amazon Wind Farm Texas, "our largest wind farm yet, which generates more than 1,000,000 megawatt hours of clean energy annually from over 100 turbines. "