The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

by Brad Stone

Wilke’s algorithms seamlessly matched demand to the correct FC, leveling out backlogs and obviating the need for the morning phone call.

He told his general managers that on each call, he wanted to know the facts on the ground: how many orders had shipped, how many had not, whether there was a backlog, and, if so, why. As that holiday season ramped up, Wilke also demanded that his managers be prepared to tell him “what was in their yard”—the exact number and contents of the trucks waiting outside the FCs to unload products and ferry orders to the post office or UPS.

“We were struggling to recruit the right leaders, and struggling to get enough people to work there.”

Along the way, he was exhibiting a style—leadership by example, augmented with a healthy dose of impatience—that was positively Bezosian in character. Perhaps not coincidentally, Wilke was promoted to senior vice president a little over a year after joining Amazon. Jeff Bezos had found his chief ally in the war against chaos.

“I understand what you’re saying, but you are completely wrong,” he said. “Communication is a sign of dysfunction. It means people aren’t working together in a close, organic way. We should be trying to figure out a way for teams to communicate less with each other, not more.” That confrontation was widely remembered.

Bezos’s counterintuitive point was that coordination among employees wasted time, and that the people closest to problems were usually in the best position to solve them.

Bezos hoped, these loosely coupled teams could move faster and get features to customers quicker.

Up until that time, Amazon employees had been using Microsoft’s PowerPoint and Excel spreadsheet software to present their ideas in meetings. Bezos believed that method concealed lazy thinking. “PowerPoint is a very imprecise communication mechanism,” says Jeff Holden, Bezos’s former D. E. Shaw colleague, who by that point had joined the S Team. “It is fantastically easy to hide between bullet points. You are never forced to express your thoughts completely.”

Quickly there was a supplemental decree: a six-page limit on narratives, with additional room for footnotes.

Not everyone embraced the new format. Many employees felt the system was rigged to reward good writers but not necessarily efficient operators or innovative thinkers.

Bezos refined the formula even further. Every time a new feature or product was proposed, he decreed that the narrative should take the shape of a mock press release. The goal was to get employees to distill a pitch into its purest essence, to start from something the customer might see—the public announcement—and work backward. Bezos didn’t believe anyone could make a good decision about a feature or a product without knowing precisely how it would be communicated to the world—and what the hallowed customer would make of it.

Bill Gates used to throw epic tantrums. Steve Ballmer, his successor at Microsoft, had a propensity for throwing chairs. Andy Grove, the longtime CEO of Intel, was known to be so harsh and intimidating that a subordinate once fainted during a performance review.

Jeff Bezos fit comfortably into this mold.

While he was charming and capable of great humor in public, in private, Bezos could bite an employee’s head right off.

Some Amazon employees currently advance the theory that Bezos, like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Larry Ellison, lacks a certain degree of empathy and that as a result he treats workers like expendable resources without taking into account their contributions to the company.

“Jeff doesn’t tolerate stupidity, even accidental stupidity.”

“He called me a ‘complete fucking idiot’ and said he had no idea why he hired idiots like me at the company, and said, ‘I need you to clean up your organization,’

Wilke and Bezos dug into the details, asking their inhumanly prescient questions. It was both inspiring and terrifying. “Those guys could be brutal,” says Mark Mastandrea. “You had to be comfortable saying, ‘I don’t know; I’ll get back to you in a couple of hours,’ and then doing it. You could not ever bullshit or make stuff up. That would be the end.”

Wilke started his negotiations with UPS that summer in Louisville, ahead of a September 1 contract deadline. When UPS was predictably obstinate about deviating from its standard rate card, Wilke threatened to walk. UPS officials thought he was bluffing. Wilke called Jones in Seattle and said, “Bruce, turn them off.”

As usual, the executives Bezos chose to head the product’s sales had no prior experience selling that product.

Jewelry manufacturers and retailers clung tightly to that custom, which didn’t fit well with Bezos’s newly adamant resolve to offer the lowest prices anywhere.

The document, as Miller and other executives who were there remember it, defined how Bezos saw his own company—and explains why, even years later, so many businesses are unsettled by Amazon’s entrance into their markets.

In Bezos’s eyes, Amazon offered both everyday low prices and great customer service. It was Walmart and Nordstrom’s.

Bezos instructed Amazon’s communication staff to time public announcements in the jewelry category to coincide with the quarterly reports of Seattle-based rival Blue Nile, the leader in online jewelry sales.

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Amazon’s ability to ship products efficiently and offer precise delivery times to customers gave the company a competitive edge over its rivals, particularly eBay, which avoided this part of the business altogether.