A minor financial earthquake to end the week: Amazon reported a record profit for the third consecutive quarter. That’s right, the company that for so long made a virtue of its losses in pursuit of growth, growth and more growth, is now solidly cash generative. Net income came in at $875m (£665m) for the three months ending June 30, Amazon’s second financial quarter, which was comfortably ahead of the $540m forecast by Wall Street. Not that growth has been forgotten. The company said earnings will likely fall a bit during the current quarter. More investment, you see. Growth is still CEO and founder Jeff Bezos’ prime, or should that be Prime, focus as demonstrated by the 31 per cent surge in revenues to $30.4bn. The other notable feature of Amazon’s reports are the sheer number of businesses that are feeding into that vast pool. The list of operating, as opposed to financial, highlights ran to 26 separate entries this time around. I actually had go through them three times to get that number because I kept losing count.

They talked about Amazon’s own retailing, the marketplace it offers to other retailers, its Fire TV service, the activities of its original content producing studios, the services provided to other businesses, cloud computing and data warehousing, the operational “Career Choice” programme that pre-pays 95 per cent of tuition and books for courses that teach in-demand skills. See, we’re good corporate citizens too! It’s bears repreating that Mr Bezos started out as a humble bookseller, selling them over the internet from out of his garage in a Seattle suburb. Having mastered the online bookselling business, he expanded Amazon into new areas of retail, which is what many traditional retailers do. They don’t always make it work, but it doesn’t stop them from trying. Amazon did make it work. But then it exploded into a dizzying array of new business areas. When big companies become conglomerates like this it mostly falls apart. They end up getting broken up, or they just fall to pieces under their own weight.

Amazon has shown scant sign of that happening. Compare and contrast it to Apple. As I highlighted earlier this week, the world’s biggest tech company has actually been something of a one trick pony for a long time. Wall Street has only just started to notice that there might be a life beyond the iPhone. Amazon, however, has more tricks than David Blaine. Can You Buy Six Flags Tickets At KrogerThey’re usually a lot more entertaining. John Lewis Magic Trees Duvet CoverIf you don’t believe me you obviously haven’t sampled some of the original offerings from Amazon studios.Wheel And Tire Visualizer Mr Bezos has found it necessary to thumb his nose at Wall Street to get to where he is now but given its recent results, his investors will give him licence to flip the bird to American financial commentators and analysts any time he choses to do so.

He will probably provide ample fodder for MBA students for years to come. But you don’t need to spent a year of your life and a consideration slug of your capital on identifying the secret to Mr Bezos’ success via a thesis. He invests, and heavily, for the future, sacrificing short term profits for longer term value. He gives his businesses all the love they need to succeed. There are many things that he does that are quixotic, and that you wouldn’t actually want other chief executives to be doing. There are not many that have the force of personality or the ability to keep so many plates spinning in the air. Too often when rivals go on acquisition and diversification sprees they backfire badly on shareholders and staff because too many executives lack the capability and competence to succeed with what they buy. Mr Bezos is a notable excepton. Amazon hasn’t been free of controversy, of course. It offers a service to other retailers, but it has also squeezed too many independens, booksellers in particular but others too, out of existence.

Mr Bezos has also got on to the Forbes list of the world’s ten richest billionaires on the back of workers whose treatment has sometimes been quesionable at bestl. “Wrestling big ideas in a bruising workplace,” is how the New York Times described the corporate culture among white collar staff. According to the report - and there have been others - blue collar staff in Amazon warehouses didn't have it any better. Some of the practices detailed ought to have gone the way of gaslight and transport by carts pulled by horses. Mr Bezos said he did not recognise the Amazon that was portrayed and urged scarred employees to contact HR, or to e-mail him, if they knew of any incidences of the kind it related. Business picture of the day You don't need to put employees under the lash to build  a successful business. The same, or better, results can be achieved with sugar. One would hope that lesson has been taken on board. But the point about Mr Bezos' long term thinking and its long term view remains.

In a financial world obsessed with quarterly numbers, Amazon stands out. Those who invested along with Mr Bezos have reaped handsome rewards. They will continue to do so while this approach continues. If there is a fly in the ointment it is this: What on earth happens to the company when its mercurial founder finally retires to his books?There is a famous Zen story of a man walking along a trail who sees a horse and rider racing at full pelt toward him. As they shoot past, the man calls out, “Where are you going in such a hurry?” The rider turns in his saddle and shouts back, “I have no idea, ask the horse.” This is the perfect metaphor for the age we live in, as the pace of technology is moving so swiftly that we are at risk of our humanity becoming subservient to efficiency. There were two events that reminded me of this in the last few days. The first was the dysfunctional workplace culture uncovered at Amazon by The New York Times -- where a failure to integrate technology with compassion has helped create what my colleague Emily Peck called a Hobbesian culture that is nasty, brutish and short.

The second was a meeting with Bill Drayton, the founder and CEO of social enterprise network Ashoka. He reminded me that in our increasingly complex and fast-moving world, the most important characteristic for any leader is empathy. Take note, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO. The reason this is so important is that we are facing an existential crisis resulting from the many-headed hydras of climate change, resource scarcity, acute inequality and ecosystem collapse. To confront these issues and to effectively harness technological advances, individuals, businesses, institutions and civil society need to work in collaboration. The last thing we need now is to maintain our current brutish form of capitalism that rewards individualism and the ability to create money, over and above social cohesion and a duty of care. However you look at it, there never has been, nor will there ever be, a justification for the multimillion-dollar bonuses of bankers and CEOs in contrast to the low pay of those who spend their professional lives caring for the weak and marginalized.

We forget at our peril that it is up to each and every one of us to get in touch with our deep well of empathy because the world we create outside of ourselves is merely an external representation of our inner psychology. Empathy is not found through money and success, which tend to separate us and generate the fear of loss, but through touching and transcending our suffering. We can all in our honest moments relate to the saying that the extent we can understand someone else’s pain is the extent we have been prepared to touch our own. This is something that Bezos would do well do to take on board. Winning has clearly been an important part of his life, whether it was becoming the valedictorian of his class, setting up his first business in school or becoming the youngest vice president at Wall Street investment firm D.E. Shaw. By contrast, I would point to John Fullerton, the founder of the American-based Capital Institute who walked away from a successful 20-year career on Wall Street because he touched his own despair at the part he was playing in propping up the greedy self-interest of the financial markets.

“I was searching for how to make sense of a world that I could no longer explain to my children,” writes Fullerton, who was a managing director at JP Morgan. “At some level, I was also searching for my own purpose in it all.” He concurs with Drayton on the need for empathy: “We must overcome our fears. But we must also transcend our ideological divides and our false separation from one another and from our environment. Climate change, ever-rising inequality, and even the despair that fuels radical fundamentalism are all symptoms of a deeply flawed economic ideology that requires that we shift to a more effective, systemic way of thinking about our next economy. That systemic shift most certainly includes the transformation of the financial system to embrace a meaningful purpose in service of a regenerative world.” It would be great for Bezos to get together with Fullerton over a drink and see what they make of each other close up. But more relevant would be if Bezos were courageous enough to sit and listen deeply to the many employees who say they have suffered at the hands of the culture he has created, rather than dismiss them out of hand.

After the Times' story, Bezos wrote to employees to say that he deplored what he called the piece's portrait of “a soulless, dystopian workplace” and added that "I don’t recognize this Amazon.” But this is to bury his head in the ground. An act of empathy would do him and his company far more good than adding another few billion dollars to his estimated $50 billion fortune, or announcing another increase in market share. This is something the CEO of consumer goods giant Unilever understands all too well. When I spoke to Paul Polman about balancing purpose and profits, he told me that "nobody will remember that I was the CEO of Unilever when profits went up by 20 percent, or when the [revenue] went up by 40 percent. I would like to be remembered for leaving the place a little bit better than I found it." With Zen stories, one always ends up at the beginning, so all I would say is to think what you would say the next time someone shouts out to you asking where you are heading as you hurtle along, eyes glued to your latest smartphone.