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

by Brad Stone

Jeff Bezos’s mission had been to stave off stasis and to keep Amazon a “Day 1” company with an inventive culture and durable customs that would outlast him. “Amazon is not too big to fail,” he once warned employees at an all-hands meeting. “In fact, I predict one day Amazon will fail. Amazon will go bankrupt. If you look at large companies, their lifespans tend to be thirty-plus years, not a hundred-plus years.” It would now largely fall to Andy Jassy to prevent that dark possibility. Among the new CEO’s greatest challenges will be retaining the company’s deep bench of experienced senior leaders, even if Amazon’s stock price stagnates; keeping the ever-growing warehouse workforce motivated and happy; and navigating the impending regulatory scrutiny inside and outside the U.S. That climactic battle, which might one day culminate in an antitrust lawsuit against Amazon by the U.S. government, was still largely ahead. 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?