Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire

by Brad Stone

But with its fourteen sacrosanct leadership principles, interlocking business units, and overwhelming momentum, Bezos had seemingly set up Jassy and the company to flourish well after he stepped aside. In this respect, his life’s work, at Amazon at least, was arguably done. Still looming, of course, was a definitive answer to a perennial question that even now is almost impossible to resolve: Is the world better off with Amazon in it? Or perhaps, in the wake of Amazon’s evolution into a trillion-dollar empire and Jeff Bezos’s graduation into the annals of business history, it simply no longer makes sense to ask. The company is now woven inextricably into our lives and communities, hooking customers on the convenience of ordering from home and posing insurmountable challenges for all but the nimblest local retailers. It calls to mind Bezos’s old saying about one-way and two-way doors, and “type one” irreversible decisions. Long ago, we stepped through a one-way door and into the technological society conceived of and built in large part by Jeff Bezos and his colleagues. Whatever you think about the company—and the man—that controls so much of our economic reality in the third decade of the twenty-first century, there is no turning back now.