Brad Stone, Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire (Book Review)
This is fascinating narrative about how Amazon came to dominate in many business areas, and it's a nice complement to Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon. Amazon Unbound book is great on story; kind of lacking on analysis.
You really have to work to pull out some of the substantive claims that are implicit in this book. One is this: While Bezos created his 14 leadership tenets, the most significant of which is probably customer obsession, there are times when Bezos didn't follow his own rules. For example, Bezos was the champion of something called Bloom Street, which was an in-house brand for fancy products: There was almost no evidence that customers wanted this, but Bezos thought it was a good idea. This kind of bugs me, because if you have a winning system, maybe you should stick to it; also makes me wonder whether his S-Team was able to put the brakes on awkward ideas, even if coming from the CEO.
If I had to pinpoint one key point, though, it would be the idea of leverage (pp. 163-4). Amazon doesn't raise prices. What it does is lower costs, which are passed on to the customer -- It's almost that simple. With that, you get more visits, and more buying, and this produces a value-creating flywheel (grow revenue while lowering costs). You get some of the ideas about the flywheel from the Working Backwards book, but I think this one really unlocks the sequence in the pages cited. There is also a related section on ads (pp. 244-249): Amazon started making a lot of money from ads in the online store; but Bezos shrewdly asked his teams a key question: Would we make money without the ads? In fact, the company's flywheel was starting to weaken, because online store profits were being propped up by the ad income. In other words, the flywheel was coming apart. This question caused teams to double down on the fundamental economics and get the store back into shape.
Let's see, what else? The index is good for people, products, etc., but not great for the more conceptual pieces of what makes Amazon so powerful. I know other reviews think the book overdoes it on Bezos's divorce and involvement with Lauren Sanchez, but, frankly, I think Stone pretty much sticks to the facts. On the other hand, the stories about Juan Carlos Garcia (pp. 85-86) and Roy Price (p. 157) -- yeesh. Those guys probably should have been fired or dismissed.
Originally reviewed on Goodreads on 22 March 2023.
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