The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

Grab an armful of business leadership books from your nearest bookshop and look through them for advice on how to treat staff. I doubt you'll find any of them encouraging business leaders to humiliate their colleagues in public more frequently.Yet one of the most memorable stories in Brad Stone's account of how Jeff Bezos made such a success of Amazon is just such an encounter with a senior manager. They were giving answers that Bezos did not believe about the speed with which the phones were being answered by the customer service team. So in the middle of a meeting with senior managers, Bezos put a phone on loudspeaker, dialed Amazon's customer service number and started ostentatiously timing how long it took to be answered. He'd been told that calls were being answered in less than a minute, but the meeting had to sit in excruciating silence as the minutes ticked up before finally the phone was answered.A devastatingly effective way of making a point, true. But how do you combine such a brutish attitude at times with an ability to recruit, retain and motivate the sort of brilliant staff you need, especially when Amazon wasn't paying high wages? The mystery is deepened by the grimly humorous collection of stories of other technology CEOs and their abrasive behaviour that Brad Stone presents in the book.As with Steve Jobs, reading about Jeff Bezos and all his quirks in dealing with other human beings (not to mention Amazon's huge sums spent on failed takeovers) leaves you wondering for much of the time if you're reading an account of a brilliant success or a tragic failure. Clearly the path Amazon has taken shows he - like Jobs - is the former.But whilst Walter Isaacson's biography of Jobs does answer the question of how Jobs and Apple ended up so successful despite his manner, in the case of Bezos and Amazon, Brad Stone leaves that question only partly answered. Early on in the book Amazon is but one amongst many online book selling startups. Stone explains well why traditional bookselling firms found it difficult to move into the online business, constrained as they were by their heavy investment in offline stores. Why, though, did Amazon triumph from all those different online startups? That Stone doesn't tell us.The more successful Amazon gets, the better Stone's book does explain its gathering momentum, especially thanks to Bezos's insistence on using Amazon's scale to drive prices as low as possible. There are two types of company, Bezos says. Those that looks to charge as high a price as possible (think Apple) and those that look to charge as low a price as possible (think Amazon). Amazon's low prices may have kept its profits down, but they have hugely boosted its size and, while Apple's high margins have attracted big competitors eating into its market, Amazon's low margins have kept competitors out of the market, leaving more space for it to grow even further.It's a shame though that the initial crucial breakthrough remains unexplained even by the end of an enjoyable book.

Some, but not all books, allow you to inhabit them and, at least while you are reading them, they become a part of your life; I can think of a few books like this and they are the ones that linger, that you return to, sometimes again and again. Certainly this book at a little over 400 pages takes some time to read, if, as I do, you read a little each evening before turning-in for the night, so I was slightly disappointed to have finished it. The story which covers the early genesis of what becomes Amazon, covers the early years and thereafter up to 2013, although I cannot imaging a sequel adding much to what has already been written, which is deep, extensive and in-glossed in its coverage of the ups and down of the Amazon journey. Jeff Bezos, the chief architect and principal character does not actually develop in a way that you could say that reading the book, you now know the man, but he is intrinsically bound up in the story and the edifice that is Amazon; the two are inseparable and give character, each to the other. Many people, other than Jeff inhabit the story and play their parts in the creation of the everything store and they come and go, for many reasons, not least exhaustion, but this account as everything and everyone becomes subsumed by the ethics that drive the inexorable rise of a monolith: is that the right word? Probably not; Amazon does not exclude the possibility of other such stores entering the market place, but the disruptive quality of the enterprise makes it seem unassailable, for not anyway. In the end, this is an interesting account of how a business develops, against all odds, due to the single-mindedness and resilience of one man, supported by an array of others, men and women, who for a while take part in the unfolding story. It is an account of how to do it and how to do it well, but also why you need a person of extraordinary grit and almost supra-human resolve. The book is amazing; it does justice to the character of Jeff Bezos, without over eulogising or ignoring his failures: read it.

I purchased this book and also the CD version of this book so that I can listen to it asap. I have been very inspired and motivated by Jeff Bezos's journey in starting Amazon and his extrodinary creative mind set. Learning about the failures and challenges Jeff had suffered on his journey to creating Amazon has made me more determined to succeed in my own ventures. I listen to the CDs twice in order to pick up on the many learnings that one can get from this CD/book. I am enjoying listening to the CDs and looking forward to reading the book.

Great read. A fascinating story about Amazon, Jeff Bezos and the culture of the most successful company in the world. This is a great book, written in a witty way. Real pleasure to read.It talks about the beginning of the small internet bookstore and how it became the biggest internet ecommerce company in the world, its leadership, philosophy of its founder. You can learn a lot how to setup up and run a successful business. It explains why Amazon was destined for success.It is a must read if you want to understand how Amazon became the biggest company and Jeff B one of the most powerful men on the planet.

Some of the large amount of information about business procedures and finance was at times a bit dry, but in the end you get drawn into the many battles he fought and risks taken that it was hard to put down.It was hard to absorb all the trade processes and mechanisms of his business, and to follow the development of the company as so much happened.A bit out of date but still important.