Quotes from Brad Stone

He was a ravenous reader, leading senior executives in discussion of books like Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma, and he had an utter aversion to doing anything conventionally. Employees were instructed to model his fourteen leadership principles, such as customer obsession, high bar for talent, and frugality, and they were trained to consider them daily when making decisions about things like new hires, promotions, and even trivial changes to products.

He was looking for versatile managers—he called them "athletes"—who could move fast and get big things done.

In the seminal high-tech book The Mythical Man-Month, IBM veteran and computer science professor Frederick Brooks argued that adding manpower to complex software projects actually delayed progress. One reason was that the time and money spent on communication increased in proportion to the number of people on a project.

Amazon executives were going to have to substitute artifice and improvisation for truly comprehensive selection.

Bezos had ruthlessly engineered another acquisition by driving his target off a cliff. Says one observer who had a seat close to the battle, "They have an absolute willingness to torch the landscape around them to emerge the winner.

Just like Creation author Steve Grand had predicted, the creatures were evolving in ways that Bezos could not have imagined. It was the combination of EC2 and S3—storage and compute, two primitives linked together—that transformed both AWS and the technology world.

precipitously,

Bezos and other startup founders were reacting to lessons from previous technology giants. Microsoft took a top-down management approach with layers of middle managers, a system that ended up slowing decisions and stifling innovation. Looking at the muffled and unhappy hierarchy of the software giant across Lake Washington, Amazon executives saw a neon sign warning them exactly what to avoid.

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

To adjudicate the matter, he turned to a Silicon Valley legend, a former Columbia University football coach named Bill Campbell.

The membership fee is a onetime pain, but it's reinforced every time customers walk in and see forty-seven-inch televisions that are two hundred dollars less than anyplace else," Sinegal said. "It reinforces the value of the concept. Customers know they will find really cheap stuff at Costco.

In the spring of 2011, Amazon was valued at $80 billion. Buoyed by the rise of his stock holdings, the forty-seven-year-old Bezos was the thirtieth richest person in the world, with an $18.1 billion net worth.

Two other technology icons, Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison, were adopted, and the experience is thought by some to have given each a powerful motivation to succeed.

And on the other side of the world, there was Mohammed bin Salman—the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, who was embittered at Bezos for the Washington Post's coverage of the murder of dissident Jamal Khashoggi, and who some cybersecurity experts would come to believe had hacked Bezos's cell phone.

Single at the time, he started taking ballroom-dance classes, calculating that it would increase his exposure to what he called n+ women. He later famously admitted to thinking about how to increase his "women flow,

didn't understand that his business was to sell books, not trash them. "We saw it very differently," Bezos said. "When I read that letter, I thought, we don't make money when we sell things. We make money when we help customers make purchase decisions."5

Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose,

Jobs's personal interests guided Apple's strategy. Bezos's particular passions would have the same defining impact at Amazon. Bezos didn't just love books—he fully imbibed them, methodically processing each detail.

Moving cautiously and playing by the rules had proven to be a costly mistake.

The true measure of an entrepreneur is how well he or she can identify new opportunities.

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He embraces the truth. A lot of people talk about the truth, but they don't engage their decision-making around the best truth at the time.

We try not to spend money on things that don't matter to customers. Frugality breeds resourcefulness, self-sufficiency and invention. There are no extra points for headcount, budget size or fixed expense.

companies to acquire other firms only when they had fully mastered their virtuous circles, and then "as an accelerator of flywheel momentum, not a creator of it.