The author Richard Brandt presents a well-researched engaging story. He shares the key milestones in the rise of Amazon and its founder and CEO Jeff Bezos through the year 2011. It is a masterful and comprehensive mostly chronologic history of Amazon’s evolution and Bezos’s mostly professional life. Brandt skillfully weaves Amazon’s early years, pre-profit times, and the pivot to profitability. Brandt provides insights about Bezos priorities through the making of Amazon. He tells of the skyrocketing profitable growth as Amazon creates a massive shift in buying behaviors and becomes an inspiring story that continues to unfold.
Published: October 27, 2011.
What’s the core message?
Jeff Bezos is a bright, positive, and inspirational man who never stops seeking better and simpler ways to serve customers and earn loyalty. He does this by innovative methods, thinking, tools, and technology.
How do these concepts compare with points raised in other books?
The author uses the documented and publicly available data about Amazon as the backbone to tell the story. Many books do the same when the CEOs are the primary architects of their ventures like the books written about Bill Gates of Microsoft, Richard Branson of Virgin Atlantic Airlines, Jack Ma of Alibaba, Larry Ellison of Oracle Corporation, and Sergei Brinn and Larry Page of Google. Where the CEOs are hard to reach, the authors piece together their profile from interviews, news reports, keynotes, and other available and researchable information. The stories highlight key decisions, team interactions, strategic vision, and priorities. The author does that beautifully in this book. He does an excellent job connecting the business milestone dots.
What the book does well.
The book does a masterful job of showing how Amazon birthed in the mind of a bright young man, ambitious and inspired from the start, rose to become the number one ranked online retailer in America. This includes the choices Bezos made that grew the business and those that he abandoned because they did not take root. One thread that runs through the whole book is about Jeff Bezos’s care for customer service through every online interaction.
What could have made this book better?
I arrived at different conclusions and saw a different picture by connecting the same dots that the author presents about the research and story. This book is not just about one-click innovation. One click is one single milestone in the many Amazon milestones. It is the 1% visible tip of the 99% of the invisible iceberg submerged beneath the sea that is the real Jeff Bezos. This book is about Bezos’s grit, boldness, decisiveness, and ambition. It’s about thinking big and also focusing on the details, about hiring the best talent and keeping the teams small, about chasing simplicity for customers and innovating tools that create a competitive advantage, about out-innovating and out-visioning competitors and racing to become the dominant force in the market, and it is about investing in customer loyalty, market share, and talent growth while disregarding stock market expectations. What makes a man of such boldness? More could have been done to make this one point in Jeff Bezos’s case. He was a bright and diligent child who found ways to get his way as he got his own bed by disassembling his crib because his mom did not want him to fall off the bed. He was a small physical framed thinking athlete who earned the defensive captainship on his team because he applied diligence to learn the whole playbook. He was bold and declared his vision to be the valedictorian of his class and went on to become one. After college, he sought out a careful path to become an entrepreneur by learning to apply his engineering and programming skills in technologically innovative investment firms. He studied hard in school and college and learned programming tools he applied to his jobs. When the Internet appeared on the scene, he embraced the potential he saw and risked all to start Amazon but studied the market that gave him the largest potential to grow. He researched the potential for the book market by attending a workshop to learn how to open a bookstore. This book has all the dots. The picture should have focused more on the foundations, diligence, and dogged characteristics of the founder, Jeff Bezos. In this case, unlike Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, who has no technology education or expertise, Bezos has academic and experiential mastery which when combined with his visionary genius has made the magnificent innovation, Amazon.
Who would benefit from reading this book?
All those who want to tap into their full potential and those who feel they are sub-optimizing their success should read this book. It’s a good business success story and it is an even better inspirational story about how success here is a one-step-at-a-time, step by step, focused, disciplined, and bold journey. It can help people find their own path as Bezos found by aligning his ambition with his work. This is success in every step earned over years of dedication and skillful execution.
How it affected me
I am inspired by Jeff Bezos’s disciplined mind, ambition, and boldness. Here is a man who gains mastery over his work, does his research and plans the work, then commits to it fully. He hires the right talent to deliver the results and works frugally even with access to abundant investors’ cash in hand. Bezos validates that success is a result of blending deliberate choices with brilliant energy.