My highlights from the book:
1. He had an utter aversion to doing anything conventionally.
2. Every interesting thing I've ever done, every important thing I've ever done, every beneficial thing I've ever done, has been through a cascade of experiments and mistakes and failures. I'm covered in scar tissues as a result of this.
3. If Bezos took one leadership principle most to heart-which would also come to define the next half decade at Amazon-it was principal #8, “think big": Thinking small is a self fulfilling prophecy. Leaders create and communicate a bold direction that inspires results. They think differently and look around corners for ways to serve customers.
4. Tough, unrelenting, and focused on meeting impossibly high standards.
5. Begin any conversation about a new product in terms of the benefit it creates for customers.
6. He seemed to have an unusual wellspring of patience for those at the company who practiced the challenging art of invention.
7. Wilke was a lot like Bezos: precocious, ambitious, and focused on satisfying customers over just about everything else, including the feelings of his employees.
8. Bezos deployed his playbook for experiments that produced promising sparks: he poured gasoline on them.
9. While he had triumphed against enormous odds, Jeff Bezos preferred those negative articles, like the old "Amazon.bomb cover story in Barron's, to be posted on his office walls, so that he and his colleagues would remain frightened and motivated.
10. Don't spend a lot of time on analysis and precision. Keep trying stuff.
11. “Focus on lowering cost structure. It is better to have low costs and then charge to maximize your value versus charging to cover costs. We do not charge more because we can't figure out how to make it cost less. We invent to make it cost less."
12. The biggest needle movers will be things that customers don't know to ask for.
13. "How would you get a million sellers into this marketplace?" he asked the stream of executives whom he interviewed to take over the group. Faricy understood that there was only one answer to Bezos's interview question-you couldn't possibly reach out to sellers and recruit a million of them one by one. You would have to build a machine that would have to be self-service, and sellers would have to come to Amazon instead of the other way around.
14. Years ago, he had learned that there were no annuities in retail. Customers were fickle and could change their loyalties at the moment they were presented with a better offer elsewhere. Amazon could only stay ahead of rivals if it kept inventing new technologies and improving levels of service.
15. In addition to wanting the Post to operate within its means, Bezos applied elements of his well-tuned business philosophy to the paper. He preached the wholesale embrace of technology, rapid experimentation, and optimism about the opportunities of the internet instead of despair. "You've suffered all the pain of the internet but haven't yet fully enjoyed its gifts," Bezos told his new employees. "Distribution is free, and you have a massive audience."
16. Colleagues thought it was crazy for the perennially money losing Amazon to make gadgets. "I absolutely know it's hard, but we'll learn how to do it," Bezos told them.
17. He was a ravenous reader. He was a ravenous reader, leading senior executives in discussion of books like Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma.
18. You can regulate yourself quite easily or think about what you're going to do with your existing resources. Sometimes, you don't know what the boundaries are. Jeff just wanted us to be unbounded
19. Bezos and Kessel were getting impatient. Despite three years of work, Amazon hadn't opened a single store. So in the peculiar fashion of invention at Amazon, they created separate teams to pursue the singular goal of bringing the company into the vast realm of physical retail. Bezos liked to say Amazon was "stubborn on vision, flexible on details," and here was an illustration: groups working on parallel tracks would essentially compete to fulfill the "Just Walk Out" ideal and solve the problem of the cashierless store.
20. “Don't come to me with a plan that assumes I will only make a certain level of investment," Bezos continued, "Tell me how to win."
21. "It has always seemed strange to me. . .The things we admire in men—kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding, and feeling—are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest—sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism, and self-interest—are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first, they love the produce of the second."
22. Bezos wanted to set his own metrics for success, without interference from impatient outsiders, so he encoded his operating philosophy in his first letter to shareholders, vowing a focus not on immediate financial returns or on satisfying the myopic demands of Wall Street, but on increasing cash flow and growing market share to generate value over the long term for loyal shareholders.
23. What followed was one of the most remarkable turnarounds in business history.
24. How does one of the most disciplined men in the world get himself into a situation like that?
25. Eventually Bezos and Hart crossed off all the items on the list except one-pursuing Bezos's idea for a voice-activated cloud computer.
“Jeff, I don't have any experience in hardware, and the largest software team I've led is only about forty people," Hart recalled saying.
"You'll do fine," Bezos replied.
26. Bezos also suggested "Alexa," an homage to the ancient library of Alexandria, regarded as the capital of knowledge.
27. Two Echo engineers recall another harrowing review-from Bezos himself. The CEO was apparently testing a unit in his Seattle home, and in a pique of frustration over its lack of comprehension, he told Alexa to go “shoot yourself in the head."
28. Their boss was right. Internal testing with Amazon employees was too limited and they would need to massively expand the Alexa beta while somehow still keeping it a secret from the outside world.
29. By 2014, it had increased its store of speech data by a factor of ten thousand. Bezos was giddy. Hart hadn't asked for his approval of the AMPED project, but a few weeks before the program began, he updated Bezos with a six-page document that described it and its multimillion-dollar cost. A huge grin spread over Bezos's face as he read, and all signs of past peevishness were gone. "Now I know you are serious about it! What are we going to do next?"
30. Alexa's division-wide motto became "Get Big Fast," the same slogan used in the early years for Amazon. History was repeating itself. An organization of a few hundred employees swelled to a thousand in the first year after the launch, and then, incredibly, to ten thousand over the next five years. Through it all, like a crazed pyromaniac, Bezos kept spraying lighter fluid on the fire.
31. He told them that while they all had done a fine job, the experience was too complicated. Customers would have to wait in line for meat, seafood, and fruit to be weighed and added to their bill, which contrasted with the store's major selling point: the absence of time-wasting queues. He felt the magic was walking out without waiting-the physical equivalent of Amazon's famous one-click ordering-and wanted to focus the effort on that, with a smaller and simpler experience.
32. "If I have to choose between agreement and conflict, I'll take conflict every time," Bezos often said. “It always yields a better result."
33. Bezos and Kessel were getting impatient. Despite three years of work, Amazon hadn't opened a single store. So in the peculiar fashion of invention at Amazon, they created separate teams to pursue the singular goal of bringing the company into the vast realm of physical retail. Bezos liked to say Amazon was "stubborn on vision, flexible on details," and here was an illustration: groups working on parallel tracks would essentially compete to fulfill the "Just Walk Out" ideal and solve the problem of the cashierless store.
34. Bezos invested Amazon's winnings like a crazed gambler at the craps table in Las Vegas. Years ago, he had learned that there were no annuities in retail. Customers were fickle and could change their loyalties at the moment they were presented with a better offer elsewhere. Amazon could only stay ahead of rivals if it kept inventing new technologies and improving levels of service.
35. "I was not excited about breaking our financials out because they contained useful competitive informațion," Jassy admitted.
36. Steve Jobs, upon returning full-time to Apple in 1997, had addressed an audience of the company's human resources employees in Cupertino and bluntly told them, "It seems to me you are all just a bunch of barnacles."
37. Bezos also advocated for the practice of stack ranking, where employees were rated by their managers on the basis of job performance, with the lowest performers pushed out the door. Bezos had absorbed that practice from Top Grading, by Brad Smart, who had helped legendary CEO Jack Welch set up a hiring system at General Electric that classified job candidates as A Players, B Players, and C Players.
38. Stack ranking would force managers to upgrade the talent on their teams.
39. Amazon then outbid Apple and Netflix to sign him and his cohosts to a three-year, $250 million deal to make a similar show, The Grand Tour. It was one of the largest deals in unscripted television history. Riggs recalled that Bezos approved the expenditure via email in "about 15 seconds."
40. Wilke announced that he wanted to attack this problem from a totally different angle. They were going to form an independent team to build a service that was separate from the Amazon website and singularly devoted to ultra-fast delivery. The goal, he declared, was to launch it within a hundred days.
41. In the fall of 2019 the S-team and Amazon's board of directors read The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America, by the economic historian Marc Levinson. The book traces the rise and fall of the first American grocery chain of the twentieth century, as well as its strategic drift after the death of its founders and the decades-long crusade against it by populist politicians and determined trustbusters.
42. Though A&P was known for strong-arming suppliers and undercutting rivals with predatory prices, the idea that the company actually doomed itself by failing to properly answer its critics, and then to plan for succession after the death of its founders, seemed to resonate with Bezos and other Amazon executives. "The takeaway was, we really can't ourselves get distracted by all the noise out there. This is going to happen. It's inevitable. This is kind of how our society reacts to large institutions."
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