Jeff Bezos has ‘two-pizza’ meeting rule Amazon still uses today

It’s not as delicious as you might think.

The world’s biggest and richest entrepreneurs are known to have some pretty strange methods in their madness.

It was recently unveiled that Elon Musk has sold up his $130 million property portfolio in a bid to fund a colony on Mars.

Now, Musk says he lives in a modest three-bedroom house in Texas that is valued at around $45,000 but beforehand, he claimed that one of his mansions was haunted.

The billionaire has a ‘pizza rule’ for his meetings (Taylor Hill/Getty Images)

Meanwhile, Bill Gates made headlines with eerie predictions he had made 29 years ago about the future of the tech industry.

Now, Jeff Bezos has people talking after his unusual meeting rule was revealed.

His ‘pizza rule’ might sound delicious, but it actually doesn’t have much to do with it at all and instead, it’s all about a different kind of dough.

The Amazon boss likes to limit the number of meetings he has and won’t take part in one if two pizzas won’t feed the entire group.

He reckons that large meetings can waste a lot of time and time for him is, well, money.

Jeff Bezos won’t take part in a meeting if there are too many people to feed with two pizzas (AzmanL/Getty)

The ‘pizza rule’ stems from the idea that no team should be larger than the amount of people that can be fed by two large pizzas.

It’s ultimately because large meetings are really expensive and Bezos likes to be time and cost effective.

Of course, people in the meeting will be paid for their time so the more people that are involved, the more costly the meeting becomes.

It also means that those who are attending the meeting are taken away from their day-to-day roles and can’t get on with their current work.

If you can cut out anyone who isn’t needed to be in the meeting, it’ll lower the cost and also give those people the chance to focus on other important work.

The Amazon boss still uses his meeting rule to this day (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

Another option is to only have certain people in the meeting while they’re needed and allow them to leave after their subject of interest has been covered.

Eliminating as many unnecessary meetings as possible can also help to bring the cost down for the meeting which is why Bezos’ ‘pizza rule’ is still used widely at Amazon today.

While the meeting has nothing really to do with the Italian dish, it does make you wonder how many two margheritas could feed.

If an age-old quote from Friends is anything to go by, it could be a meeting-of-one if ordering ‘The Joey Special’ – two pizzas.

Jeff Bezos’ decision-making process resurfaces and everyone is pointing out the same thing

Jeff Bezos must have made some of the right choices to make Amazon the global behemoth it is today, and one of his go-to decision-making processes has resurfaced, leading everyone to think the same thing.

Amazon has risen from humble beginnings to one of the biggest companies in the world, and the garage bookshop origins back in 1994 feel like a long way away when you consider the scale at which the company currently operates.

While the company has made a number of costly mistakes, including an $80,000,000 flop and a decision that almost tanked the entire company, it’s founder Jeff Bezos swears by certain decision-making processes as the recipe for Amazon’s success.

Perhaps the most famous of these is what’s understood as the ‘door process’, where each decision is broken down into either a ‘one door’ or ‘two door’ process.

Jeff Bezos swears by the ‘door’ decision-making process (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

In simple terms, one door decisions are those that you can’t go back on – such as quitting your job or closing a company – whereas two door decisions are easy to revert like introducing a new product or service, or hiring someone for a job.

The goal of breaking these decisions down is to understand how you should approach the process, particularly from the perspective of speed, as one door decisions should have far more consideration than their two door counterparts due to the permanent nature of their conclusion.

This process has resurfaced on Reddit, with a recent post showing a whiteboard with Bezos’ process, outlining the two types of decision making.

One-way doors should be approached with “great deliberation and consultation,” whereas two-way doors should be “made quickly by high judgement individuals or small groups,” as it’s much easier to “reopen the door” and return to where you were.

A quote from Bezos himself indicates how important the implementation of this process is to growing organizations, explaining that “as organizations get larger, there seems to be a tendency to use type 1 decision-making processes on most decisions, including type 2 decisions.

“The end result of this is slowness, unthoughtful, risk aversion, failure to experiment sufficiently, and consequently diminished innovation. We’ll have to figure out how to fight that tendency.”

Where you might have initially thought the overall process is to lean towards the risk-averse mode as a guide for success, what Bezos actually insists is that companies take more risks and make decisions with greater speed, outlining that as the key for success.

Many underneath the Reddit post aren’t exactly taking this as the revolutionary advice that Bezos might think it is though, indicating that it’s nothing that hasn’t already been done in the world of business.

“That’s basic risk management,” one comment explains. “Not that it’s not great, but Bezos didn’t create this he’s just saying take less time on lower impact/probability risks/decisions than higher ones.”

Another adds that “this is what is known as professionalizing common sense,” as one user wonders: “Why would you need a graph for this. This is a concept a 5th grader could figure out.”

It’s hard to diminish the methodology though considering Amazon’s success, as while it might not be the most original train of though, it’s certainly worked for Bezos in his professional journey.