Book notes and lessons learnt: “The Everything Store” by Brad Stone

This is a good book for those that still don’t get it that making mistakes and long-term thinking is part of every successful story.

“When a company comes up with an idea, it’s a messy process. There’s no aha moment. Reducing Amazon’s history to a simple narrative, he worried, could give the impression of clarity rather than the real thing”. (You gotta have a high tolerance for uncertainty)

“The regret minimization framework” was used by Bezos to decide the next step in his career (founding Amazon or keep being an employee). He got this idea from reading Remains of the Day, by Kazoo Ishiguro, about a butler who wistfully recalls his personal and professional choices during a career in service in wartime Great Britain.

Acquiring other firms only “as an accelerator of flywheel momentum, not a creator of it”, as advised by Jim Collins in Good to Great. You have to fully master the virtuous circles of your company before anything else.

Amazon’s six core values

• customer obsession

every meeting starts with a 6 page long press release that shows everyone how the thing being proposed will be seem by the eyes of the customer

• frugality

all money should be spent on the customer (lower prices, better services, etc)

doors made as tables for employees to work so everybody remembers this value

• bias for action

Amazon did lots of mistakes along the way but the wins they got paid off in the long-term end

• ownership

• highball for talent

every employee was last interviewed by a director who had veto power over the new hire (they were called bar raisers)

• Innovation (added later)

Bezos always saw amazon as a technology company, not as an e-commerce.

Bezos Curiosities

Groups within Amazon were told to use AWS while the services were still immature, a demand that led to another round of consternation among its engineers. As startups and even some big companies began to rely easily on AWS, outages had widespread repercussions, and chronically secretive Amazon found it had to get better at explaining itself and speaking to the public.

As part of a new personal ritual, he took time after the holidays to think and read. (as Bill Gates did)

He was disciplined and precise, constantly recording ideas in a notebook he carried with him, as if they might float out of his mind if he didn’t jot them down. He quickly abandoned old notions and embraced new ones when better options presented themselves.

He and his direct team had a book club in which they read and discussed how to apply knowledge found in businesses books.

Books they read and that employees are encouraged to read:

• The remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro

• Sam Walton: Made in America, by Sam Walton

• Memos from the Chairman, by Alan Greenberg

• The Mythical Man-Month, by Frederick P. Brooks Jr.

• Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies

• Good to Great, by Jim Collins

• Creation: Life and How to Make It, by Steve Grand (influenced the creation of AWS)

• The Innovator’s Dilemma, by Clayton M. Christensen

• The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement, by Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox

• Lean Thinking, by James P. Womack

• Data Driven Marketing, by Mark Jeffery

• The Black Swan: The impact of the Highly Improbable, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb