Quotes from Brad Stone

One of the paradoxes of growth is that growth creates complexity and complexity is the silent killer of growth," said Bain director James Allen in the video.

The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America,

If somebody else can sell it cheaper than us, we should let them and figure out how they are able to do it.

Bezos even wondered aloud whether Amazon could hire college students on every block in Manhattan and get them to store popular products in their apartments and deliver them on bicycles.

He wondered why Microsoft's large base of users had never come out in any significant way to defend the company against its critics and speculated that perhaps customers were simply not satisfied with its products. He

I have to choose between agreement and conflict, I'll take conflict every time," Bezos often said. "It always yields a better result.

Capital goes where it is welcome and stays where it is well treated.

All new hires had to directly improve the outcome of the company. He wanted doers—engineers, developers, perhaps merchandise buyers, but not managers. "We didn't want to be a monolithic army of program managers, à la Microsoft. We wanted independent teams to be entrepreneurial," says Neil Roseman. Or, as Roseman also put it: "Autonomous working units are good. Things to manage working units are bad.

Bezos also had a few strange notions about how the journalism process might be streamlined. He wondered aloud whether the paper would need so many editors if it simply hired great writers. Baron responded that if anything, the paper probably needed more editors. Bezos repeated that refrain so often that a few editors took to sending him the raw copy of high-profile journalists. Amazon said Bezos never received or read any such emails, but he eventually came to agree with Baron.

The notion that he can accomplish a huge amount with a larger time frame, if he is steady about it, is fundamentally his philosophy.

It's one thing to have a good idea, but it'a another to have confidence in a person to execute it.

It is far better to cannibalize yourself than have

Despite his famously hearty laugh and cheerful public persona, he is capable of the same kind of acerbic outbursts as Apple's late founder, Steve Jobs, who could terrify any employee who stepped into an elevator with him.

Para mim, a Amazon é a história de um fundador brilhante que promoveu pessoalmente a concretização de sua visão", diz Eric Schmidt, presidente executivo do Google,

There was little science to Amazon's earliest distribution methods. The company held no inventory itself at first. When a customer bought a book, Amazon ordered it, the book would arrive within a few days, and Amazon would store it in the basement and then ship it off to the customer. It took Amazon a week to deliver most items to customers, and it could take several weeks or more than a month for scarcer titles.

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.

series of choices

stubborn on vision, flexible on details

from his company. After the stock market crash in 2000, Amazon went through two rounds of layoffs. But Bezos didn't want to stop recruiting altogether; he just wanted to be more efficient. So he framed the kind

Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe,

He also exposed them to a steady stream of Jeffisms: about one-way and two-way doors; how double the experimentation equals twice the innovation; how "data overrules hierarchy" and there are "multiple paths to yes"—an Amazonian notion that an employee with a new idea who gets a negative reaction from one manager should be free to shop it to another, lest a promising concept get smothered in infancy.

Later Bezos recalled speaking at an all-hands meeting called to address the assault by Barnes & Noble. "Look, you should wake up worried, terrified every morning," he told his employees. "But don't be worried about our competitors because they`re never going to send us any money anyway. Let's be worried about our customers and stay heads-down focused."15

The confluence of those three initiatives—in the fulfillment centers, and with AWS and the Kindle—vaulted Amazon back into the graces of Wall Street. In 2008, Amazon surpassed eBay in market capitalization and was beginning to be mentioned in the same breath as Google, Apple, and a new Silicon Valley upstart, Facebook.

Thus did Jeff Bezos become one of the original investors in Google, his company's future rival,