Bezonomics Quotes

“As Bezos once quipped, “Your margin is my opportunity.”
― Brian Dumaine, Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives, and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning from It

“With the exception of Whole Foods, it doesn’t acquire big businesses in different industries and try to run them. Instead it organically builds businesses in new sectors, sometimes making a relatively small (under $1 billion each) strategic acquisition to acquire the talent or technology it needs to get its invasion armies rolling.”
― Brian Dumaine, Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives, and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning from It

“Gise had deep experience in the way the government worked and was privy to some of the most advanced and secretive technology of his day. During those summers on the ranch, Bezos says that his grandfather would tell him stories about the missile defense systems he worked on during the Cold War with the Soviet Union. That made a deep impression on the young Bezos. Today, among the Silicon Valley titans, he is one of the most pro-government CEOs. Amazon’s cloud computing business has won multibillion-dollar contracts from the Pentagon and the CIA. The significance of that business to Amazon is one reason why, in 2018, Bezos put his new second headquarters in northern Virginia, near Washington, D.C., and why he paid $23 million for an old textile museum in D.C.’s swish Kalorama area—his neighbors are the Obamas and Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump”
― Brian Dumaine, Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives, and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning from It

“One reason Lore left Amazon is that he didn’t like the culture Bezos had created in which executives used sharp elbows and raised voices to get to the truth. Sitting in his modern Hoboken, New Jersey, office overlooking the Hudson River, Lore, dressed in a very un-Walmart-like black T-shirt and jeans, reflected on his years at Amazon. “Jeff said he didn’t believe in social cohesion because you can get to the wrong answer that way,” explains Lore. “There are some benefits to that approach. If you tell people exactly what you’re thinking—even if you hurt their feelings—you get to the right answers.” The downside, Lore believes, is that if you hurt coworkers’ feelings, maybe they don’t have as much trust in the leadership or they won’t speak up the next time or they’ll be risk averse or leave the company. “There are pros and cons to both approaches, but I personally love the Walmart culture of social cohesion where feelings matter. How you interact with people is very important and how you make them feel is very important. It’s not always about just getting to the right answer.”
― Brian Dumaine, Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning from It

“When he sees an email from an unhappy customer, he forwards it to the appropriate executive with a simple “?” This sets off an alarm bell in the mind of the poor soul receiving the message, a Pavlovian response that makes that person drop everything and solve that problem for the customer—now.”
― Brian Dumaine, Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning from It

“Eventually the cost of not doing it exceeds the cost of doing an UBI,” says the futurist Martin Ford. “Socially, wealth inequality becomes so disruptive that you have to do something. And it might not be a bad thing for the economy.” As Reich argues: “It seems a safe bet that increased automation will allow the economy to continue to grow, making a UBI more affordable. A UBI would itself generate more consumer spending, stimulating additional economic activity. And less poverty would mean less crime, incarceration, and other social costs associated with deprivation.”
― Brian Dumaine, Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning from It

“the three wealthiest people in America own more wealth than the bottom 50 percent and when 52 percent of all new income goes to the top one percent”
― Brian Dumaine, Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning from It

“water the garden and ignore the weeds.”
― Brian Dumaine, Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning from It

“Your margin is my opportunity”
― Brian Dumaine, Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning from It

“Amazon already has a deal with Lennar, the nation’s largest homebuilder, to preinstall Alexa in all the company’s new homes.”
― Brian Dumaine, Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning from It

“The combination of in-store foot traffic and home delivery is the magic,”
― Brian Dumaine, Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning from It

“FedEx in mid-2019 announced that it would no longer distribute Amazon packages in the U.S. Indeed, it disclosed in its 10-K SEC filing that given the significant capital Amazon has invested over the years in its shipping fleet, it now considers the e-commerce giant to be a competitor.”
― Brian Dumaine, Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning from It

“bank for its third-party sellers, lending more than $1 billion in 2018”
― Brian Dumaine, Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning from It

“voice expands the number of people who can enter Amazon’s world.”
― Brian Dumaine, Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning from It

“Most people join for fast and free shipping, but once inside the Prime ecosystem they start discovering other benefits, such as downloading their first movie or song or access to video games on Twitch.”
― Brian Dumaine, Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning from It

“you have to earn your Trident every day.”
― Brian Dumaine, Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning from It

“We didn’t ascend from our hunter-gatherer days by being satisfied. People have a voracious appetite for a better way, and yesterday’s ‘wow’ quickly becomes today’s ‘ordinary.”
― Brian Dumaine, Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning from It

“Prime is a way to change consumer shopping patterns, to turn the occasional online shopper into a person locked into the Amazon ecosystem who interacts with the company on a frequent basis. The idea is to make Prime so attractive and so easy to use that customers can’t imagine living without it. It’s the online equivalent of nicotine—a metaphor that Amazon would never use. It is addictive”
― Brian Dumaine, Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning from It

“AI-driven flywheel won’t work unless it has access to tremendous amounts of data on customers and the brainpower to make sense of all that information. Companies will guard their data zealously and battles will emerge over who controls what information”
― Brian Dumaine, Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning from It

“It’s a flywheel, it’s a circle, it’s not a balance”
― Brian Dumaine, Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning from It

“customers are always dissatisfied even if they don’t know it, even when they think they’re happy. They always want a better way and they don’t know what that will be. I warn people that customer obsession is not just listening to customers, it’s also inventing on their behalf.”
― Brian Dumaine, Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning from It

“If everything has to work in two to three years,” says Bezos, “then that limits what you can do. If you give yourself the breathing room to say okay, I’m okay to take seven years, all of a sudden you have way more opportunities.”
― Brian Dumaine, Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning from It

“Amazon is becoming an operating system for your life”
― Brian Dumaine, Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning from It

“Experts predict that this next generation of Internet connectivity will be as much as a hundred times faster than today’s web. (On a 5G network, a two-hour movie can be downloaded in seconds.)”
― Brian Dumaine, Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning from It