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

by Brad Stone

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.”