>No-one actually believes Jeff Bezos is running around himself doing all the labour.

You might be surprised just how much a figurehead is credited in contribution, regardless of how much or little they did along the process. I imagine a significant portion of the population at large would assume Bezos masterminded and pushed most the process down to about 1-2 levels of organizational hierarchy from such headlines and glances.

The reality is, he put a business need in place (focus on metrics and quantification) and let C levels percolate the concepts around the organization until a strategy emerged. He may have signed off on it but likely someone below him did and ran with it. I'm not sure emergent organizational successes should be credited to whomever set a few initial conditions unless the entire process can be outlined into how those successes emerged and were shaped--but of course they are frequently credited to someone who simply got lucky or had piles of money to throw at a problem with the right people in the room.

While it's sometimes good someone decided to throw piles of money at a given problem, their goal was not inherently to solve the problem. It also doesn't mean they solved the problem. Lots of people throw lots of money at very important problems and get no credit or sometimes have no success.

I think you underestimate the role of a leader in building an organization like Amazon.

The things you handwave away - putting a business need in place, letting C levels percolate the concepts until a strategy emerged, they are all evidence of effective leadership.

It's wickedly difficult to set the initial conditions for emergent organizational success. Simply discounting Bezos by saying that he threw piles of money at the problem with the right people in the room is misunderstanding what his job is. His job is to get the right people in the room - identifying the right people is very hard. The more difficult job is listening to what they say. Casting aside your own ego and confronting difficult data. Most leaders have too little courage and too much ego to be able to do this effectively.

If you'd like insight into how important having the right leader can be then I'd recommend starting by reading the book Good to Great by Jim Collins or at least the chapters on leadership.

If you're going to bring in "Good to Great" then you have to consider the fact that some of his case studies (Wells Fargo, Fannie Mae) went down the tubes because of what Collins postulated made them successful (overfitting, unscientific).

Maybe? But you haven't made a case supporting that's why they went down the tubes.