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

by Brad Stone

If Bezos took one leadership principle most to heart—which would also come to define the next half decade at Amazon—it was principle #8, “think big”: Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Leaders create and communicate a bold direction that inspires results. They think differently and look around corners for ways to serve customers.

Accurately recording conversation from multiple microphones placed around a courtroom introduced him to the challenges of far-field speech recognition. At the start of the project, he said that eighty out of every hundred words were incorrect; but within the first year, they cut it down to thirty-three.

“The biggest needle movers will be things that customers don’t know to ask for,” he would write years later in a letter to shareholders. “We must invent on their behalf. We have to tap into our own inner imagination about what’s possible.”

Life inside the Prime building, and in the gradually increasing number of offices around South Lake Union inhabited by the Alexa team, became even busier. Many of the new features would be rushed out the door, so that Amazon could start gathering customer feedback. Silicon Valley startups call this style of product development “minimum viable product,” or MVP.

After those incidents, employees had to write a “correction of error” report, which analyzes an incident in detail and tries to get to its underlying root causes by going through a series of iterative questions and answers called “the five whys.” The memo went all the way to Bezos, describing what had happened and recommending how the process that created the problem in the first place could be fixed.

“If I have to choose between agreement and conflict, I’ll take conflict every time,” Bezos often said. “It always yields a better result.”

The store opened a few weeks later, on November 2, 2015. Employees who worked on the project got to contribute their favorite books to a “staff selections” bookshelf. Bezos himself selected three titles, and in a way, they foreshadowed an unexpected turn of events that lay ahead: Traps, a novel by his wife, MacKenzie Bezos; The 5 Love Languages, by Gary Chapman, about preserving romantic relationships; and The Gift of Fear, by his friend, the famed security consultant Gavin de Becker.

One former executive described the mentality this way: “We were really good at going up to the gold medal podium and complaining that our medals weren’t shiny enough.”

He also exposed them to a steady stream of Jeffisms: about one-way and two-way doors; how double the experimentation equals twice the innovation; how “data overrules hierarchy” and there are “multiple paths to yes”—an Amazonian notion that an employee with a new idea who gets a negative reaction from one manager should be free to shop it to another, lest a promising concept get smothered in infancy.

Amazon executives explained this as a triumph of their flywheel, the virtuous cycle that guided their business. Once again, it worked like this: Amazon’s low prices and the loyalty of its Prime members led to more customer visits, which in turn motivated more third-party sellers to list their wares on its marketplace. More products attracted more customers. And the commissions that marketplace sellers paid to Amazon allowed the company to further lower prices and invest in speedier delivery for a greater percentage of items, making Prime even more attractive. Thus the fabled flywheel fed on itself and spun ever faster.

“Focus on lowering cost structure. It is better to have low costs and then charge to maximize your value versus charging to cover costs.”

“Averages are bad measures. I want to see actuals, highs, lows and why—not an average. An average is just lazy.”

Jeff always said that when you focus on the business inputs, then the outputs such as revenue and income will take care of themselves.”

The idea was perhaps just kooky enough that an executive was assigned to write a PR FAQ, the Amazon memo that kicks off the development of a new project by imagining its press release.

For more than two decades, Bezos had emphasized the tactical advantages of low margins and low prices, in order to win points of market share as if they were continents on a Risk board. But now his thinking had shifted; he was frustrated that retail wasn’t more profitable and that two of his most trusted deputies, Jeff Wilke and Doug Herrington, weren’t getting more leverage out of their operation. The numbers suggested executives might be backsliding in their mandate to relentlessly improve operating performance, and that Amazon was inheriting some of the attributes of what Bezos ominously called “Day 2” companies. “Day two is stasis, followed by irrelevance, followed by excruciating, painful decline, followed by death,” he had said earlier that year on stage at an all-hands meeting. “And that is why it is always Day one.”

Amazon moved hesitantly to grow its New York–based ad sales team. It didn’t throw people at problems, it threw brainpower, went the common internal refrain.

“One of the paradoxes of growth is that growth creates complexity and complexity is the silent killer of growth,” said Bain director James Allen in the video.

“It’s better to assume trust and find out that you are wrong than to always assume people are trying to screw you over,” was essentially his philosophy, according to a friend.

In private though, Bezos prepared to take a less accommodating approach toward the intensifying techlash. In the fall of 2019, the S-team and Amazon’s board of directors read The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America, by the economic historian Marc Levinson.

The Human Condition, which examines how modern technologies affected democracy.

A few years later, Khan applied the same skeptical, journalistic approach to her article for the Yale Law Journal. Her paper took its name from a seminal 1978 book by Robert Bork, The Antitrust Paradox, which argued that regulators should curb market power only when it might result in higher prices for consumers.