Read more: Found hereNo CEO is better known for their letter to shareholders than Berkshire Hathaway's legendary Warren Buffett. His annual letters contain so much frank discussion, amusing anecdotes, gentle humor, and folksy business wisdom that they have been anthologized into books.
In his 2024 letter, dated February 22, 2025, Buffett criticized most CEO letters as "happy talk and pictures." He noted that in the preceding five years, he had used "mistake" or "error"16 times. Most other big companies used those words precisely zero times in the same time period.
Buffett singled out one notable exception. He praised Amazon's 2021 letter from Andy Jassy as being "brutally candid."
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy released his letter to shareholders on April 12,2025. Inspired by Warren Buffett's example of text mining, I did a quick analysis of Jassy's letter. It ran about 5,000 words total. That's much longer than Walmart CEO Doug McMillion's 900 word letter . But, it's a tiny fraction of J. P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon's 35,000 word, 58-page screed .
Many CEOs use their letter to highlight financial results - revenue, income, year-on-year growth, share price improvement and so on. If the primary responsibility of a company's management is to increase shareholder value, this focus makes sense.
Going back to the days of Jeff Bezos, though, Amazon has defined itself as customer-centric. Serve your customers well, and positive financial results will eventually follow.
Jassy uses the term "revenue" a mere eight times, six of which are in one paragraph. Similarly, "income" appears just twice. He covers the financial results for 2024 in three short paragraphs that total just 106 words!
No comments:
Post a Comment