The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
by Brad Stone. I never thought a biography of living person (or a company) can be so fascinating and entertaining. Brad Stone has delivered a classic - a must read book of the year.
Dogs in Amazon (yeah, call me biased):
From the outside, Amazon’s modern, low-slung offices are unmarked and unremarkable. But step inside Day One North, seat of the Amazon high command on Terry Avenue and Republican Street, and you’re greeted with Amazon’s smiling logo on a wall behind a long rectangular visitors’ desk. On one side of the desk sits a bowl of dog biscuits for employees who bring their dogs to the office (a rare perk in a company that makes employees pay for parking and snacks).
Eric and Susan Benson didn’t come to Amazon alone every day— they brought their dog Rufus, a Welsh corgi. Because the two would be working such long hours, Bezos had promised they could always bring Rufus to the office. That was no problem in the SoDo buildings, but then Amazon moved yet again, late in the summer of 1996, to a building downtown, and the company had to write Rufus into the lease with the new landlord. The dog, an amiable presence who liked to park himself in meetings and occasionally suffered gastric distress from being overfed by employees, became the startup’s mascot. There was a superstitious belief that his paw tap on the keyboard was required to launch a new feature, and even today, though Rufus is long gone, there’s a building named for him on Amazon’s Seattle campus.
I am Amazon prime member and I buy everything except groceries on Amazon. It's an understatement when I say I love Amazon. But yet, I think it makes the whole system fragile when a single entity controls the retail economics (and more) of the world. Jeff Bezos made all his executives read Taleb's Black Swan; I wonder what's his take on Antifragile?
Amazon has pioneered innovation by making it easy to cater billions and will do more so in future but it will be sad if it's legacy becomes just a caterer of keeping up with the Joneses generation. Jeff is aware of that:
Some big companies develop ardent fan bases, are widely loved by their customers, and are even perceived as cool for different reasons, in different ways and to different degrees, companies like Apple, Nike, Disney, Google, Whole Foods, Costco and even UPS strike me as examples of large companies that are well-liked by their customers. On the other end of spectrum, companies like Walmart, Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, and ExxonMobil tended to be feared. Bezos applied his usual analytical sensibility to parse out why some companies were loved and others feared.
by Brad Stone. I never thought a biography of living person (or a company) can be so fascinating and entertaining. Brad Stone has delivered a classic - a must read book of the year. Dogs in Amazon (yeah, call me biased):
From the outside, Amazon’s modern, low-slung offices are unmarked and unremarkable. But step inside Day One North, seat of the Amazon high command on Terry Avenue and Republican Street, and you’re greeted with Amazon’s smiling logo on a wall behind a long rectangular visitors’ desk. On one side of the desk sits a bowl of dog biscuits for employees who bring their dogs to the office (a rare perk in a company that makes employees pay for parking and snacks).
Eric and Susan Benson didn’t come to Amazon alone every day— they brought their dog Rufus, a Welsh corgi. Because the two would be working such long hours, Bezos had promised they could always bring Rufus to the office. That was no problem in the SoDo buildings, but then Amazon moved yet again, late in the summer of 1996, to a building downtown, and the company had to write Rufus into the lease with the new landlord. The dog, an amiable presence who liked to park himself in meetings and occasionally suffered gastric distress from being overfed by employees, became the startup’s mascot. There was a superstitious belief that his paw tap on the keyboard was required to launch a new feature, and even today, though Rufus is long gone, there’s a building named for him on Amazon’s Seattle campus.
I am Amazon prime member and I buy everything except groceries on Amazon. It's an understatement when I say I love Amazon. But yet, I think it makes the whole system fragile when a single entity controls the retail economics (and more) of the world. Jeff Bezos made all his executives read Taleb's Black Swan; I wonder what's his take on Antifragile?
Amazon has pioneered innovation by making it easy to cater billions and will do more so in future but it will be sad if it's legacy becomes just a caterer of keeping up with the Joneses generation. Jeff is aware of that:
Some big companies develop ardent fan bases, are widely loved by their customers, and are even perceived as cool for different reasons, in different ways and to different degrees, companies like Apple, Nike, Disney, Google, Whole Foods, Costco and even UPS strike me as examples of large companies that are well-liked by their customers. On the other end of spectrum, companies like Walmart, Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, and ExxonMobil tended to be feared. Bezos applied his usual analytical sensibility to parse out why some companies were loved and others feared.
- Rudeness is not cool.
- Defeating tiny guys is not cool.
- Close-following is not cool.
- Young is cool.
- Risk taking is cool.
- Winning is cool.
- Polite is cool.
- Defeating bigger, unsympathetic guys is cool.
- Inventing is cool.
- Explorers are cool.
- Conquerors are not cool.
- Obsessing over competitors is not cool.
- Empowering others is cool.
- Capturing all the value only for the company is not cool.
- Leadership is cool.
- Conviction is cool.
- Straightforwardness is cool.
- Pandering to the crowd is not cool.
- Hypocrisy is not cool.
- Authenticity is cool.
- Thinking big is cool.
- The unexpected is cool.
- Missionaries are cool.
- Mercenaries are not cool.
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