But when those businesses grow, Amazon runs them with algorithms. Amazon builds new businesses with people. It’s a classic example of a CEO suddenly changing altitudes, swooping down to audit the business in order to keep the company on track. Then he insisted on dramatic changes in their operating plans to cut costs and return the unit to profitability.
Bezos demanded the group’s executives sit there and recalculate their numbers.
Without ads, its underlying profitability was actually decreasing. In an executive meeting in 2017, Bezos was reviewing the operating plan of retail and saw something that worried him: Retail was blending Amazon’s new and growing advertising revenues into its financial projections. “It’s a classic example of a CEO suddenly changing altitudes, swooping down to audit the business in order to keep the company on track.” But every so often, he swoops down without warning and takes a close look, analyzing problems and insisting on strategic changes. When it comes to the large divisions at Amazon, like retail and cloud computing, he prefers to hover above them, allowing his deputies to operate with considerable freedom. People often conclude that Jeff Bezos is an intolerable micromanager, but that’s not always the case. He cleared away the bureaucratic thicket inside the company and encouraged his deputies to be unbound in their ambition. After the first Echo was released, he asked the leader of every division inside the company, “What are you doing for Alexa?”Ī company-defining product like Alexa-and the Kindle and AWS-wouldn’t have been possible without Bezos’s direct involvement. He personally selected the names Echo and Alexa, and tested the device in his own home. He set goals and walked out of meetings when they weren’t met. He wrote, “We should build a $20 computer whose brains are in the cloud, completely controllable by your voice.” Over the next few years, he met with the team making the first Echo multiple times a week. Those two things overlapped when he sent an email to an executive.
In 2010, Jeff Bezos was simultaneously impressed by advancements in voice recognition and hungry to capitalize on Amazon’s advantage in cloud computing. Leaders must drive disruptive new products inside their companies.
Listen to the audio version-read by Brad himself-in the Next Big Idea App. His previous book, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, was a New York Times bestseller, won the 2013 Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award, and received a one-star review on Amazon from MacKenzie Scott.īelow, Brad shares 5 key insights from his new book, Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire (available now from Amazon). Stone also probes the evolution of Bezos himself-who started as a geeky technologist totally devoted to building Amazon, but who transformed to become a fit, disciplined billionaire with global ambitions, who ruled Amazon with an iron fist, even as he found his personal life splashed over the tabloids.ĭefinitive, timely, and “engaging” (Jon Meacham, author of The Soul of America), Stone has provided an unvarnished portrait of a man and company that we couldn’t imagine modern life without.Brad Stone is a senior executive editor at Bloomberg News. In Amazon Unbound, Brad Stone presents an “excellent” ( The New York Times), deeply reported, vividly drawn portrait of how a retail upstart became of the most powerful and feared entities in the global economy. We live in a world run, supplied, and controlled by Amazon and its iconoclast founder.
#Amazon unbound plus#
It’s almost impossible to go a day without encountering the impact of Jeff Bezos’s Amazon, between services like Whole Foods, Prime Video, and Amazon’s cloud computing unit, AWS, plus Bezos’s ownership of The Washington Post. Since then, Amazon has expanded exponentially, inventing novel products like Alexa and disrupting countless industries, while its workforce has quintupled in size and its valuation has soared to nearly two trillion dollars. This New York Times bestseller is a “masterful” ( The Washington Post), “juicy tour of the company Bezos built” ( The New York Times Book Review), revealing the most important business story of our time by the bestselling author of The Everything Store.Īlmost ten years ago, Bloomberg journalist Brad Stone captured the rise of Amazon in his bestseller The Everything Store.
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