The Primary Difference Between Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Oracle’s Larry Ellison? Intellectual Curiosity.
The research we have conducted over the past two decades strongly suggests that intellectual curiosity is the most important attribute that a Technology CEO may possess.
Oracle should own the cloud. Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison out maneuvered IBM in the late 1970s, 1980s and 1990s to build the best Enterprise DB company in the world. Oracle (ORCL) held that position until Amazon (AMZN) had the innovative idea to connect its excess server capacity to the Internet and offer it as a commercialized service. That Amazon business of course is AWS, the world’s largest cloud / remote server platform.
Why did Amazon have that brilliant idea when Oracle should have owned the space? For starters, Oracle’s Larry Ellison is a top down leader, more concerned about how others view him than he is concerned about unleashing Oracle’s creativity and innovation. Ellison named himself Oracle’s CTO at a time when Amazon was developing its AWS business.
Ellison was busy leading a cult of personality where directives would flow from him. Conversely, Bezos and his famous curiosity was busy encouraging, or more accurately, demanding that employees think creatively and raise new ideas in meetings. Bezos harnessed the power and creativity of his team. Ellison did not drive the same creativity and encourage the necessary risk-taking from his team.
Bezos made a podcast pitstop at week’s end which got me thinking about the subject. I thought I would share the story since I have spent a fair amount of time tracking both Oracle and AWS/Amazon as well as the two founders.