B. The Everything Store

The Everything Store

Highlights

vertiginous — location: 101

anemic, — location: 102

PowerPoint decks or slide presentations are never used in meetings. Instead, employees are required to write six-page narratives laying out their points in prose, because Bezos believes doing so fosters critical thinking. For each new product, they craft their documents in the style of a press release. The goal is to frame a proposed initiative in the way a customer might hear about it for the first time. — location: 142

raucous — location: 157

“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 in two or three years they will move on to something else. And they prefer to be close-followers rather than inventors, because it’s safer. So if you want to capture the truth about Amazon, that is why we are different. Very few companies have all of those three elements.” — location: 177

The narrative fallacy, Bezos explained, was a term coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his 2007 book The Black Swan to describe how humans are biologically inclined to turn complex realities into soothing but oversimplified stories. — location: 184

prescient — location: 318

“It’s easier to invent the future than to predict it.” —Alan Kay — location: 415

presciently — location: 822

demurred — location: 832

retrenchment. — location: 1000

corgi. — location: 1003

profligate — location: 1025

consternation — location: 1109

hokum — location: 1146

à la — location: 1168

They agreed on five core values and wrote them down on a whiteboard in a conference room: customer obsession, frugality, bias for action, ownership, and high bar for talent. Later Amazon would add a sixth value, innovation. — location: 1292

inculcate — location: 1294

vociferously. — location: 1395

bedlam — location: 1432

adjudicate — location: 1435

metastasizing — location: 1441

doff — location: 1484

cavalcades — location: 1558

parlance — location: 1580

denouement — location: 1667

consternation — location: 1714

nascent — location: 1750

ad nauseam — location: 1864

fecund — location: 2036

“Jeff, one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever.” — location: 2175

nascent — location: 2381

“Communication is a sign of dysfunction. It means people aren’t working together in a close, organic way. We should be trying to figure out a way for teams to communicate less with each other, not more.” — location: 2448

Bezos’s counterintuitive point was that coordination among employees wasted time, and that the people closest to problems were usually in the best position to solve them. — location: 2454

As part of his ongoing quest for a better allocation of his own time, he decreed that he would no longer have one-on-one meetings with his subordinates. These meetings tended to be filled with trivial updates and political distractions, rather than problem solving and brainstorming. Even today, Bezos rarely meets alone with an individual colleague. — location: 2562

embroiled — location: 2652

obstinate — location: 2659

baubles — location: 2672

pilfering — location: 2672

amenable — location: 2680

surreptitiously — location: 2829

passé — location: 2843

en masse. — location: 2868

cognoscenti. — location: 2885

screed — location: 2972

malapropisms, — location: 3012

beset — location: 3017

internecine — location: 3017

crestfallen. — location: 3043

constituency — location: 3104

quasi — location: 3189

Bezos believed that high margins justified rivals’ investments in research and development and attracted more competition, while low margins attracted customers and were more defensible. — location: 3270

consternation — location: 3287

malaise. — location: 3293

cosseted — location: 3312

reviled — location: 3364

“It is far better to cannibalize yourself than have someone else do it,” said Diego Piacentini in a speech at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business a few years later. — location: 3417

connotes — location: 3439

The Innovator’s Dilemma, by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen. Christensen wrote that great companies fail not because they want to avoid disruptive change but because they are reluctant to embrace promising new markets that might undermine their traditional businesses and that do not appear to satisfy their short-term growth requirements. — location: 3455

harangued — location: 3553