'I'm very easy to influence': Jeff Bezos reveals how he conducts Amazon meetings

Jeff Bezos prefers Amazon meetings to be messy, have a reverse hierarchy of voice, and have one empty chair in the room

Amazon's founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos said said he likes official company meetings to be messy and so full of discussion that it runs late and disrupts schedules, while speaking at The New York Times’ DealBook Summit last week.

Then Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos speaks at the the Amazon re:MARS convention on June 6, 2019, in Las Vegas (John Locher/AP)

Bezos claims that such meetings characterised by six-page memos and a half-hour study hall where they are read, turn out to be the most productive meetings and that he gets skeptical if the meeting is not messy.

He also prefers everyone at the meeting to speak in reverse order of seniority, with him speaking at the last. This is to prevent “group think" and ensure everyone has original opinions rather than being influenced by higher-ups.

When it comes to influence, Bezos claims he is “actually personally very easy to influence,” according to a CNBC Make It interview he gave, which also quoted him as saying that just a couple percent of the time, “no force in the world” can move him because he is so sure of something.

He speaks up in the middle of meetings very rarely, and only if he has an unwavering opinion.

Yet another interesting aspect of Amazon's meetings include an empty chair being placed in the room, symbolically representing the customer. It is to remind everyone there to focus on the customer's potential satisfaction while making every decision.

Jeff Bezos is currently the second-richest person in the world with a net worth of $246 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index which also calculates his net worth as having grown by a staggering $69.3 billion year-to-date.