The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

Jeff, one day you'll understand that it's harder to be kind than clever.

Managers in departments of fifty people or more are required to 'top-grade' their subordinates along a curve and must dismiss the least effective performers. As a result of this ongoing examination, many Amazon employees live in perpetual fear. A common experience among Amazon workers is a feeling o…

— Brad Stone, amazon.com

Amazon Managment Performance Reviews

All of this comes from Bezos himself. Amazon’s values are his business principles, molded through two decades of surviving in the thin atmosphere of low profit margins and fierce skepticism from the outside world. In a way, the entire company is scaffolding built around his brain — an amplification…

— Brad Stone, amazon.com

Business Personalities Leadership Power

We are genuinely customer-centric, we are genuinely long-term oriented and we genuinely like to invent. Most companies are not those things. They are focused on the competitor, rather than the customer. They want to work on things that will pay dividends in two or three years, and if they don’t work…

— Jeff Bezos, amazon.com

Long Time Horizons Think Big

Book publishers needed only to listen to Jeff Bezos himself to have their fears stoked. Amazon’s founder repeatedly suggested he had little reverence for the old 'gatekeepers' of the media, whose business models were forged during the analogue age and whose function it was to review content and then…

— Brad Stone, amazon.com

Amazo Book Publishing

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