Amazon’s top boss Jeff Bezos loathes work-life balance concept; here’s what he’s telling to aim for instead

World’s richest man and Amazon’s top boss 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. So what does he suggest? “This work-life harmony thing is what I try to teach young employees and actually senior executives at Amazon too. But especially the people coming in,” Jeff Bezos said at a recent event hosted by Axel Springer.

The world’s first centibillionaire believes that if he is happy at home, he can carry the energy to work and vice-versa. “And the reality is, if I am happy at home, I come into the office with tremendous energy. And if I am happy at work, I come home with tremendous energy. It actually is a circle; it’s not a balance. And I think that is worth everybody paying attention to it,” he said at the event.

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 CNBC. In the interview, Jeff Bezos shared a unique way by which he notifies his execs to certain complaints.

For attracting 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?’” said Bezos, 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.

Amazon India