The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

by Brad Stone

Kaphan himself took a book off the shelf that was meant for a customer, a Chinese memoir called Bitter Winds: A Memoir of My Years in China’s Gulag.

As a result, between 1991 and 1997, the market share of independent bookstores in the United States dropped from 33 to 17 percent, according to the American Booksellers Association, whose membership dropped from 4,500 to 3,300 stores in that time.

Dalzell happened to mention that to Bezos, and soon after, Bezos and MacKenzie stopped by Dalzell’s home with flowers and a copy of Sam Walton’s autobiography, Sam Walton: Made in America.

The book clearly resonated with Amazon’s founder. On the last page, a section completed a few weeks before his death, Walton wrote: Could a Wal-Mart-type story still occur in this day and age? My answer is of course it could happen again. Somewhere out there right now there’s someone—probably hundreds of thousands of someones—with good enough ideas to go all the way. It will be done again, over and over, providing that someone wants it badly enough to do what it takes to get there. It’s all a matter of attitude and the capacity to constantly study and question the management of the business.

“Jeff didn’t believe in work-life balance,” says Kim Rachmeler. “He believed in work-life harmony. I guess the idea is you might be able to do everything all at once.”

Before he joined the company, he had read the book Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple, by John Sculley, who had joined Apple as CEO in the mid-1980s and then ousted Steve Jobs in a boardroom coup.

Bezos was a standout pupil, and the school’s principal trotted him out to speak to visitors like Julie Ray, who was doing research for her book Turning On Bright Minds. A local company donated the excess capacity on its mainframe computer to the school, and the young Bezos led a group of friends in connecting to the mainframe via a Teletype machine that sat in the school hallway.

He brought him to the local Cotulla library, where over successive summers Bezos made his way through a sizable collection of science-fiction books donated by a local resident. He read seminal works by Jules Verne, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Heinlein and fantasized about interstellar travel, deciding that he wanted to grow up to be an astronaut.

In an interview I conducted with Bezos in 2000, I asked him what he was reading. He talked about Robert Zubrin’s books Entering Space: Creating a Spacefaring Civilization and The Case for Mars.

Wilke subscribed to the principles laid out in a seminal book about constraints in manufacturing, Eliyahu M. Goldratt’s The Goal, published in 1984. The book, cloaked in the guise of an entertaining novel, instructs manufacturers to focus on maximizing the efficiency of their biggest bottlenecks.

People had been talking about this for years, ever since Project Gutenberg, a nonprofit founded in the early 1970s in Champaign, Illinois, with a mission to digitize the world’s books and make them available on personal computers.

By that time, Bezos and his executives had devoured and raptly discussed another book that would significantly affect the company’s strategy: The Innovator’s Dilemma, by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen. Christensen wrote that great companies fail not because they want to avoid disruptive change but because they are reluctant to embrace promising new markets that might undermine their traditional businesses and that do not appear to satisfy their short-term growth requirements.

The company acquired most of its books from Ingram, Baker and Taylor, and other distributors, and on the rare occasions when the distributors didn’t have a title in stock, they bought directly from publishers.

In his bestselling book Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose, Hsieh wrote that Amazon continued to make acquisition offers during this time and that Zappos’ investors were increasingly interested because they were impatient to see a return on their investment.

So in 2009, Circuit City, a sixty-year-old company lauded in one of Bezos’s favorite books, Good to Great, liquidated its operations and laid off thirty-four thousand employees.

That dichotomy originated with now former board member John Doerr, who formulated it after reading his partner Randy Komisar’s 2001 business-philosophy book The Monk and the Riddle. Missionaries have righteous goals and are trying to make the world a better place.

Jeff’s Reading List Books have nurtured Amazon since its creation and shaped its culture and strategy. Here are a dozen books widely read by executives and employees that are integral to understanding the company. The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro (1989). Jeff Bezos’s favorite novel, about a butler who wistfully recalls his career in service during wartime Great Britain. Bezos has said he learns more from novels than nonfiction. Sam Walton: Made in America, by Sam Walton with John Huey (1992). In his autobiography, Walmart’s founder expounds on the principles of discount retailing and discusses his core values of frugality and a bias for action—a willingness to try a lot of things and make many mistakes. Bezos included both in Amazon’s corporate values. Memos from the Chairman, by Alan Greenberg (1996). A collection of memos to employees by the chairman of the now-defunct investment bank Bear Stearns. In his memos, Greenberg is constantly restating the bank’s core values, especially modesty and frugality. His repetition of wisdom from a fictional philosopher presages Amazon’s annual recycling of its original 1997 letter to shareholders. The Mythical Man-Month, by Frederick P. Brooks Jr. (1975). An influential computer scientist makes the counterintuitive argument that small groups of engineers are more effective than larger ones at handling complex software projects. The book lays out the theory behind Amazon’s two-pizza teams. Built to Last: Successful Habits of V...