“Type Relentless.com and it takes you to Amazon” – Page 46

“We pay attention to what our competitors do but it’s not where we put our energy.” – Page 335

“Slow steady progress can erode any challenge over time.” – Page 199

Brad Stone is the author of The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon. The book, a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller, was translated into 26 languages and won the 2013 Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.

This book I would say is a definite read for someone wanting to start their logistics or courier business or know the industry as it covers the industry in a fair depth and amount and lets you know what to expect when treading on a fairly slippery slope and dealing with customer service.

The book shows demonstrate what running a company is like and how Jeff deals with it at various stages of the company and his life and not as if it is perfect but a journey filled with ups and downs and the way these all were handled by a determined and ambitious man.

The prologue of Bezos childhood and how Jeffrey (Jeff) was in his school and ahead of his peers and speaks of Jeff’s tenure in the Wall Street and his employment with DESCO and speaks about it at lengths and a whole chapter is dedicated to it.

I was hoping to get an insight into the story and success of Jeff Bezos, however, the book failed to keep my attention compared to other similar books.

There is no certain rhythm to the book, and it goes back and forth, sometimes while Amazon exists and sometimes it is still a thought and this can create some confusion for the reader.

The first part of the book involves quick several details on the executives and lots of names joining and leaving Amazon with biographies and details of them here and there.

The book then continues to give an insight into Amazon’s history and culture and the turmoil’s and difficulties it went through in the beginning.

The book then continues uphill explaining the glories and high moments of Amazon after giving an inside view of what disasters unfolded for Amazon in Chapter 4 and it does give some serious perspective of what an entrepreneur should expect when starting a business, what happens when things go wrong for a public listed company and especially for those in a product business. (Kindle)

Chapter 6 – Chaos Theory is one of my favorite chapter in this book and this tells you the real grit that Jeff and his team members (Wilke) had. One of the lessons is that you require a smart and intelligent team when working together to move forward and you need to recruit them fast and take them out of the marketplace before someone does and this is exactly what Wilke did and when things get bad regretfully one needs to take a bold step and let the staff go and having the rest divided to smaller teams, each competing for resources. (Bad move in my opinion).

One really interesting tidbit was the story about Jeff having an open seat in meetings, where the “customer” is seated, to take control and to find ways looking for defects to be eliminated.

The author then presents a view of Bezos which is not a good one, getting into melodramatic temper tantrums and some of the hits that Amazon employees relate for example ‘I’m sorry, did I take my stupid pills today?’, or ‘Do I need to go down and get you the certificate that says I’m the CEO of the company to get you to stop challenging me on this?’.

Although I believe sometimes an entrepreneur needs to be hard on the employees to get going especially when the founder is completely vested in the idea, the book shows the dark side of Jeff and I guess this is the reason that Mrs. Bezos has written a long review completely putting the book to the way-side.

The book then goes on to explain various other ventures of Amazon and showcase them in the coming chapters including Kindle and Amazon Web Services (AWS) and competition with Barnes & Noble among other matters.
The book in its final to end chapters covers some of the legal hurdles Amazon has passed, including battles with Google, eBay, Apple and concludes with how Amazon values the customer and what it does to make sure the customer receives the experience it deserves.

As mentioned above, this book is somewhat of a hagiography of Amazon and Jeff Bezos but half if not more than it is also critical of it and sometimes go to an extent that Mrs. Bezos as mentioned above had to leave a critical review.

Key lessons from the book that can summarised is to put the ‘focus on the customer’ as is demonstrated throughout the book as how the Founder Bezos is ready to go at lengths for making sure the customer is satisfied and not to stay behind and have a passion for disruption and coming up with new products continuously to have the customer engaged.

Core Values need to include the customer predominantly and when it comes to hiring, the bar being made high every time a new hire is taken on-board as that truly adds value and old methods can be used as long as they work in the case of PowerPoint by Jeff.

Another core value mentioned in the book is ‘frugality’ not trying to spend money on things that are not required although the competition might be doing it.

Key lessons from the book that can summarised is to put the ‘focus on the customer’ as is demonstrated throughout the book as how the Founder Bezos is ready to go at lengths for making sure the customer is satisfied and not to stay behind and have a passion for disruption and coming up with new products continuously to have the customer engaged.

Core Values need to include the customer predominantly and when it comes to hiring, the bar being made high every time a new hire is taken on-board as that truly adds value and old methods can be used as long as they work in the case of PowerPoint by Jeff.

Another core value mentioned in the book is ‘frugality’ not trying to spend money on things that are not required although the competition might be doing it.