Most people don’t get told their genius might destroy the company they built. But Jeff Bezos isn’t most people. At Italian Tech Week in October, the Amazon founder looked back on an early piece of feedback that changed the way he approached invention—and may have helped save Amazon from becoming its own worst enemy.

“I am an inventor,” Bezos told the audience. “This is my fundamental nature.” His favorite place? In a room with a whiteboard, surrounded by a small group, spitballing ideas. “You can literally put me in front of a whiteboard and I can come up with a hundred ideas in half an hour,” he said with a grin.

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But that endless flow of innovation—once considered a superpower—nearly became a liability. In the early years of Amazon, one longtime executive pulled Bezos aside with a blunt warning. “Jeff, you have enough ideas to destroy Amazon,” Jeff Wilke told him.

It stunned him. “This was such a shocking idea for me,” Bezos admitted. Wilke, a manufacturing expert, saw the problem clearly: every new idea was essentially a task dropped into a queue. If the company couldn’t absorb it fast enough, it wasn’t just useless—it was destructive.

“You have to release the work at the right rate that the organization can accept it,” Bezo said, quoting Wilke. “You’re creating a backlog, a queue, work in process. It’s adding no value and in fact, it’s creating distraction.”

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That was the moment Bezos shifted. Instead of flooding Amazon with nonstop initiatives, he started filtering. “I started prioritizing the ideas better, keeping lists of them, keeping them to myself until the organization was ready,” he said.

Even more important, Bezos began thinking like a builder—not just of ideas, but of infrastructure. “How can I build an organization that can be ready for more ideas?” he said. The answer was scaling leadership, growing bandwidth, and creating systems that could handle multiple innovations at once.

Amazon didn’t slow down after that—it got smarter. “We built a company that’s very good at inventing and doing more than one thing at a time,” Bezos said. But none of it worked until he accepted a hard truth: ideas are powerful, but only if they’re released at the right moment. Without discipline, even genius becomes a liability.