Tag: Brad Stone

Brad Stone wrote a new book about about Amazon, and it’s already stirred up a controversy. I enjoyed Stone’s radio interview on Marketplace, but apparently Amazon isn’t one of Stone’s fans. “He had every opportunity to thoroughly fact check and bring a more balanced viewpoint to his narrative,” complains Amazon’s Vice President of Global Communications, “but he was very secretive about the book and simply chose not to.” And one of Stone’s detractors turns out to be the wife of Amazon’s CEO!

In an interesting twist, Mackenzie Bezos is expressing her displeasure with a negative one-star review of the author’s book on Amazon! And it opens with her own vivid and heartfelt perspective on the man she’s been married to for 20 years. “I worked for Jeff at D. E. Shaw, I was there when he wrote the business plan, and I worked with him and many others represented in the converted garage, the basement warehouse closet, the barbecue-scented offices, the Christmas-rush distribution centers, and the door-desk filled conference rooms in the early years of Amazon’s history…”

Her review is titled “I wanted to like this book”, and it’s already received 3,154 “helpful” votes from other Amazon customers. er first complaint is there’s inaccuracies in the book which contradict her own her firsthand memories of the Amazon story. And her second complaint is the negative quotes about the tension in executive meetings create a “lopsided and misleading portrait” of the culture at Amazon. So for balance, she presents some warm and positive quotes drawn from a personal collection — “an archive of the thousands of thank you messages written to Jeff over the years”.

I cried as I read the Career Choice announcement on Amazon today. What Amazon is doing to help its employees is affecting lives in the most meaningful way I can think of. It restores my faith in humanity…

Mrs. Bezos acknowledges that some people in the book describe a “supportive and inspiring culture”, but argues that the author dismisses them as robots throughout the book. And her third complaint is the book speculates about what Jeff Bezos was thinking or feeling, writing that “Hollywood often uses a more honest label: ‘a story based on true events.'” But in the end she points out one of the miracles of life on the internet. Since this book is about real people, the “characters” in the book can step forward “and speak for themselves!”

For example, she cites another review of the book posted on Amazon by Rick Dalzell, who was Amazon’s Chief Information Officer at Amazon for 10 years starting in 1997. “Brad Stone did a lot of research and the result is a glimpse into the history of one of the world’s most exciting companies,” Dalzell acknowledges, though he’s titled his review “Intriguing stories, incomplete and unbalanced history,” and awarded the book just three stars. Dalzell was actually interviewed for the book (along with 300 past and current Amazon employees), and he devotes a whole paragraph to debunking Stone’s interpretation of what it means when Jeff Bezos laughs. “Jeff’s laugh is spontaneous, sincere, warm and endearing. It diffuses stressful situations.” In Stone’s book, Dalzell is cited as saying that Bezos “often” wields the laugh to punish people who aren’t meeting his high standards…

“While I found [the book] rather interesting, lots of stories are missing or just inaccurate. Brad painted a one-dimensional picture of Jeff as a ruthless capitalist. He completely missed his warmth, his humor, and his empathy — all qualities abundantly present in the man.”

And Mrs. Bezos also applauded another review of the book posted on Amazon by Jonathan Leblang, who actually went to high school with Amazon’s founder, and has since become the director of the company’s Lab126 in Menlo Park. He awarded the book four stars, calling it “Interesting, but flawed,” saying it was interesting to see how the company where he worked would be seen by an outsider — but that there were mistakes.

“[A]s with any book where the subject is not an active participant, the book is slanted toward those episodes where Stone can find someone to talk about them. And of course, he includes that which supports his thesis… Overall, from the parts that I know about, about 80% is correct and 20% isn’t (often in details, but incorrect nonetheless). That, of course, taints my view of the book as a whole, because I have to assume that 20% of the stuff I don’t have personal knowledge of is also incorrect.

But even with his concerns about accuracy, he still managed to find something positive (and funny) about The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon.

“That said, I would still recommend the book (and especially the picture of Jeff in High School!)”

Check out the book (and the reviews) for The Everything Store:
Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

I love listening to the radio — and last month I heard a wonderful interview about the man who founded Amazon. Brad Stone has just written a new book about the company (after interviewing more than half a dozen senior Amazon executives). And it was really fun to hear him talking about what he’d learned with Kai Ryssdal, the enthusiastic host of Marketplace on public radio.

To listen to the interview, just point your browser to
tinyurl.com/BezosMarketplace

Amazon “is a force — maybe the force — in the retail economy today,” begins the segment. But soon the interviewer has honed in on a fascinating personal detail about Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon. “There’s a thread that runs through this book — you mention it early, and you mention it often. It’s part of Bezos’s personality, I guess you would say. And since this is radio, we’re just going to hit you with a little bit of it here, and then I want to talk about it.”

And then he played the sound of Jeff Bezo laughing…!

” ‘Jeff Bezos’s laugh,’ you write, ‘precedes him down the hallway. You hear it in meetings, it will come after a volcanic outburst of temper. I mean, it’s this defining thing for him.’ ”

It’s a great way to start they’re discussion, and the author points out that Jeff’s laugh is unusual in another way. Brad Stone has personally spoken to Jeff Bezos, and “He’s not always laughing with you. It’s difficult to put your finger on, but one of his colleagues literally said, ‘He’s punishing you.’ It’s that his standards are so high, and his intellect is so fierce, that sometimes it’s you’re not catching up with him. And that is what he finds funny!”

I wonder what he talked about with Jeff Bezos (since reportedly the book is based more on his interviews with other Amazon executives). And the radio interviewer moves to a second observation — that for people who work at the company, it’s not always pleasant. “He doesn’t want it to be a country club for his employees,” the author counters, saying that the extra pressure is “by design… [Bezos] wants everyone giving the proverbial 110% percent.”

And there’s a good side to that too, the author points out in the interview. Besides Amazon’s slightly elevated turnover rate, “It also might be why this is a company that has achieved so much over the last two decades.”

But the most interesting part of the interview was about Amazon Web Services, the massive online platform which lets companies offer services and storage from “the cloud” — all hosted on Amazon’s own servers. “You say — and I agree with you — that [Jeff Bezos] has changed the world, and he’s done that just with Amazon.com, the retail shopping site, and he’s changed our behavior. But there are a couple of things that sort of have come from that that arguably have changed the world even more… This idea of us all living in ‘the cloud’ — which now we take for granted — started with Bezos and Amazon, in some degree.”

The author notes that NetFlix uses Amazon Web Services, but then brings up an even more impressing customer — the CIA! “Amazon just won a contract against IBM. The CIA will soon be running its operations on Amazon’s servers. A bookseller! And now they’re running the government!”

“Wow… Think about that for a minute,” the interviewer responds….

Next, their conversation turns to Amazon Prime — and both the author and the interviewer admit that they’re already subscribers. “It makes it really easy to buy stuff off of Amazon,” the interviewer says.

“It turns you into an Amazon addict,” the author responds (to which the interviewer agrees). “I think it’s a little CostCo, in a way, buried inside Amazon. CostCo magically has this business model where you have to pay to shop there — a good business, if you can get it. And now the same is true of Amazon. You’re paying $79 a year for the luxury of spending even more money on all these add-on services!”

The interviewer actually mutters, “Now you’re making me feel stupid, man.”

And the author just replies, “Well, I pay it too…”

The book is called The Everything Store:
Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon