The Everything Store by Brad Stone talks about e-commerce by chronicling the story of Amazon and its founder, Jeff Bezos. Bezos once was named the top technology CEO in the US and as you might guess there is a lot of knowledge to learn from the reading. The book describes how Amazon was run at the beginning, how it went through the dot-com bubble in the 2000s when a lot of internet companies went bankrupt and, of course how it has evolved into one of the biggest and well-respected e-stores and not only that. The book is not only about selling books, music, electronics and AWS (Amazon Web Services). More importantly, it depicts how Jeff Bezos made it all happen, not by thinking about the short term share price, but persistent delivery of his long-term promises and goals.
Anyway, I’m not going to write here about the history of Amazon, but I’ll focus on a few major takeaways from Jeff Bezos:
1. Don’t shy away from temporary losses in they bring a long-term advantage. For instance, when Kindle was introduced Amazon was selling books with loss just to create a market for its device.
2. Decentralisation and independent decision-making are better as people closest to the problem usually are in the best position to solve it. Coordination is a waste of time.
3. Focus on e-commerce over traditional businesses as it offers many more advantages, such as recommendations which pop up based on previous shopping behaviour. This is one of the most important pillars of Amazon’s business model. Amazon’s AI propose relevant products to their customers which they wouldn’t have discovered otherwise.
4. You can work long, you can work hard, you can works smart, but at Amazon, you can’t choose two out of three.
5. A new product has to be presented in the form of a press release. The goal of this is to frame the product initiative in a way a customer might hear about it the first time.
6. Take every possibility you can to learn something. Learn from every person you know
7. Teams at Amazon have usually fewer than ten members, following the two-pizza rule. A team shouldn’t have more employees than could be fed with two pizzas. Bezos believes that smaller teams are more productive and are often use to tackle issues independently. They often compete with each for resources.
8. Meetings should be extremely data-driven. People should always support their thesis with hard data which leads to unambiguous decisions.
9. Customer satisfaction should be your most priority to focus on. It should lead to the continual development of new features in e-commerce that traditional...(if you like to read my full review please visit my blog https://leadersarereaders.blog/the-everything-store/)
The book brings a mixed feeling to me. While Amazon claims to find the best price for its customers, its handling of its partners (don't they consider them partners?) is so damaging that I can't help wondering how the relationship lasts. Take a step back and think of Apple, its handling of vendors is similar. All animals are equal?
...ContinuaIo ho addirittura la mia copia acquistata su Amazon.it a mente autografata dal patron di Amazon quando è venuto a Cagliari per visitare il centro Customer Care Amazon di Cagliari. ne vado molto fiero.
"Powerpoint decks or slide presentations are never used in meetings. Instead employees are required to write six-pages narratives laying out their point in prose, because Bezos believes doing so fosters critical thinking."
