[heyn05tradamu5]

I think you underestimate the role of a leader in building an organization like Amazon.

The things you handwave away - putting a business need in place, letting C levels percolate the concepts until a strategy emerged, they are all evidence of effective leadership.

It's wickedly difficult to set the initial conditions for emergent organizational success. Simply discounting Bezos by saying that he threw piles of money at the problem with the right people in the room is misunderstanding what his job is. His job is to get the right people in the room - identifying the right people is very hard. The more difficult job is listening to what they say. Casting aside your own ego and confronting difficult data. Most leaders have too little courage and too much ego to be able to do this effectively.

If you'd like insight into how important having the right leader can be then I'd recommend starting by reading the book Good to Great by Jim Collins or at least the chapters on leadership.

[asdfqwer234]

If you're going to bring in "Good to Great" then you have to consider the fact that some of his case studies (Wells Fargo, Fannie Mae) went down the tubes because of what Collins postulated made them successful (overfitting, unscientific).

[heyn05tradamu5]

Maybe? But you haven't made a case supporting that's why they went down the tubes.