More than just “the everything store,” Amazon.com is also the everywhere store. Founder Jeff Bezos is equally ubiquitous, showing up as a frequent news item in The Washington Post (which he now owns), The New York Times, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg Business Week and – now – Flagstaff Business News. Your intrepid FBN book reviewer has finally caught on. Full disclosure: you’re more likely to find me in an analog Barnes & Noble or Bookman’s than shopping for literature and Game of Thrones DVDs online.
I like the underdog. Amazon is anything but. It is, instead, a force to be reckoned with in the book industry, not to mention, the “everything” industry. According to Brad Stone, author of “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon” (available, of course, at Amazon.com), the online retailer “rivals Wal-Mart as a store, Apple as a device maker and IBM as a data services provider,” with merchandise ranging from the Kindle e-reader, to Cloud services, and other buyable stuff available, until recently, with no shipping charges and no sizable profits, since 2010, despite increasing revenues (an expected $75 billion this year). “It violates mainstream finance theory,” said one New York Times source.
Given a business model that both suggests and supplies an ever-widening array of choices, it’s noteworthy that Stone quotes from a 2010 Princeton University commencement speech, by Bezos, in which he says that the most meaningful telling of one’s life stories is “the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices.”
Bezos’s story begins, in Stone’s telling, with choices available, in the early 1970s, to a little boy of “general intellectual excellence, slight of build, friendly but serious.” A participant in the Vanguard program, a public-school initiative for gifted children in Houston, Texas, Bezos was exposed to opportunities for creativity, independence, and “outside-the-box thinking.” He later founded a company as loved by many of its customers as it is feared by competitors. Amazon.com’s business strategies have even fostered the expression “to be Amazoned,” which means “to watch helplessly as the online upstart from Seattle vacuums up the customers and profits of your traditional brick-and-mortar business.” Double ouch.
Bezos’s leadership and management style flouts current trends – taught in many B schools – that promote a kinder, gentler approach to collaboration and team-building. Stone recounts incidents suggesting, in fact, that kinder and gentler may be back-ordered items for the CEO. Although “Amazon’s culture is notoriously confrontational,” however, Bezos “has proved quite indifferent to the opinions of others” in his speedy ascent to success.
In large part, success derives from the attention Bezos gives to customer service – which Stone describes as “obsessive-compulsive” – and the careful development of customer trust. Given the infancy of online selling in the early days of the Internet, however, attention to customer service may be eminently forgivable. The idea of sending credit card information to – quite literally – virtual strangers was often a scary prospect. Bezos likes to say that unlike many companies, his is customer-, instead of competitor-focused.
Google chairman (and Amazon competitor), Eric Schneider, sees Amazon as “a story of a brilliant founder,” who “understands every detail and cares about it more than anyone.” Others see it as excessive micro-management. One obsession is that customer complaints receive immediate attention (his company email is openly available), including an innocuous seeming, but intimidating e-message from Bezos to employees responsible for the problem. He is, “extremely difficult to work for” and capable of terrifying his staff, according to Stone’s reporting of interviews with current and former employees. A senior writer for Bloomberg, Stone is a thorough researcher; both fair and compelling.
Terrifying, to competitors, of course, is the idea of Amazon as invincible monopoly. Its business strategies may be seen as reducing consumer choice, and even, autonomy. To some, Amazon.com fulfills customer demands while delivering millions of consumers to product producers. Millions of consumers are clearly quite content with the arrangement. Given Amazon.com’s now pervasive presence, it is tempting, however, to contemplate the question, referring to Bezos, what one might give the man who has everything. And then answer it with a cynical re-contextualizing of E.L. James. “I thought I’d give you… me.” FBN
By Constance DeVereaux
Flagstaff Business News