"If I have to choose between agreement and conflict. I will take conflict every time. It yields better results".

Amazon Unbound – Jeff Bezos and the invention of a global empire

?Just finished reading this book by Brad Stone. It starts with a quote from Jeff Bezos at a prize acceptance ceremony, “Every interesting thing, I have ever done, every important thing that I have ever done, every beneficial thing I've ever done, has been through a cascade of experiments and mistakes and failures.” He further continued and said, “I'm covered in scar tissues as a result of this.” The audience responded to Bezos speech with a rapturous standing ovation but outside that prosperous gathering the feeling towards Amazon and its high-profile CEO were far more complicated.

As the first chapter of the book talks about. “Amazon was booming but its name was stained. Amazon was admired and even beloved by customers while its secretive intentions were often mistrusted and the towering net worth of its founder, set against the plight of its blue-collar workforce in company warehouses, provoke unsettling questions about the asymmetric distribution of money and power. Amazon was no longer just an inspiring business story but a referendum on society and on the responsibilities that large companies have towards their employees, their communities and the sanctity of our fragile planet.”

The book talks about the amazing story of Amazon from a start-up in the garage of a three-bedroom house in a Seattle suburb to an immensely successful diversified business. The company almost died during the dotcom bust. But it remerged, perhaps stronger. Today, it sells nearly everything and delivers its packages promptly, powers much of the Internet in its data centers, runs one of the most successful newspapers in the world, streams television shows and movies to homes, and sells Alexa – a popular line of voice activated speakers.

The book gives a glimpse into the operating philosophy of Bezos. For example, the working groups inside Amazon were kept small, and called two-pizza teams (because they were small enough to be fed with two pizzas). It mentions how Bezos lived his company’s values. It gives the example of its principal #10 – Frugality, and how his former wife, Mackenzie would drive him to work most of the days in a minivan. If there was one leadership principle closest to Jeff Bezos heart, it was principle #8 “Think Big”. This is manifested in some of his recent initiatives in which he is now competing with Elon Musk on space travel and the immensely successful one on cloud transformation.?The company’s turnover on Dec 31, 2010, was $ 34 billion, going up to $ 136 billion in 2016, and the annual net sales as on Dec 31, 2018, was $233 billion.

Interestingly Bezos had nerves of steel and wasn’t afraid of embracing conflict. He would say, “if I have to choose between agreement and conflict, I will take conflict every time, it always yields a better result.” There are other Jeffisms in the book. For instance: ?how double the experimentation equals twice the innovation, how data overrules hierarchy, and the more famous one about “multiple paths to yes”- an Amazonian notion that an employee with a new idea who gets rejected from one manager should be free to shop it to another, unless a promising concept gets killed at birth.

What may not be known to many people, is that the retail business of Amazon is also now becoming a major advertisement revenue earner and competing with Facebook and Google.

While Google knew what people searched for, and Facebook knew what they liked, Amazon went to the core of consumer insights, it knew what people bought.

It has exploited this insight and by allowing sellers to advertise on Amazon, it has turned out to be a gold mine.

Jeff Bezos has now handed over the role of CEO to his trusted aide, Andy Jassy. ?This move heralded a formal changing of the guard at Amazon and brought an end to one of the most epic runs in modern business history. Over the course of two and a half decades, Bezos had taken an idea to sell books on the internet to a diverse global empire worth more than one and a half trillion dollars.