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The Everything Store

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Winner of the 2013 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.

Amazon.com started off delivering books through the mail. But its visionary founder, Jeff Bezos, wasn't content with being a bookseller. He wanted Amazon to become the everything store, offering limitless selection and seductive convenience at disruptively low prices.

To achieve that end, he developed a corporate culture of relentless ambition and secrecy that's never been cracked. Until now...

Brad Stone enjoyed unprecedented access to current and former Amazon employees and Bezos family members, giving readers the first in-depth, fly-on-the-wall account of life at Amazon.

Compared to tech's other elite innovators - Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg - Bezos is a private man. But he stands out for his restless pursuit of new markets, leading Amazon into risky new ventures like the Kindle and cloud computing, and transforming retail in the same way Henry Ford revolutionized manufacturing.

The Everything Store is the revealing, definitive biography of the company that placed one of the first and largest bets on the Internet and forever changed the way we shop and read.

©2013 Brad Stone (P)2013 Hachette Audio, published in the UK by Random House Audiobooks 2013 Economics Business Technology Inspiring Thought-Provoking Management
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An important book about one of the companies that is changing the world. Focusing on its founder Jeff Bezos, it's revealing that the original name he dreamed up for his company was Relentless.com. That one word says something about Bezos that explains his success but also sums up something about his unsettling dark side. The author Brad Stone has done a good job portraying the strength of this character - his unbounded drive and ambition, his unnerving search for truth at whatever expense.

Stone recounts one incident which sums this up and is chilling and compelling. He describes how Bezos publicly humiliated one of his senior execs by calling Amazon’s number during a team meeting, in front of his colleagues, to check the man’s assertion that its phones were being picked up promptly. “Bezos took his watch off and made a deliberate show of tracking the time. A brutal minute passed, then two ... Bezos’s face grew red; the vein in his forehead, a hurricane warning system, popped out”

What I found most poignant about the book was the narrative around his two fathers. His biological father was a circus unicyclist, Ted Jorgensen, who abandoned his mother when he was only one. His stepfather was a Cuban-American Miguel Bezos who was rescued from Cuba by a scheme sponsored by the Catholic Church, 'Operation Pedro Pan,' relocated and educated thousands of Cuban youths who arrived alone in the United States.

When you hear the backstory of his stepfather, meticulously researched by Brad Stone, you get an insight into this relentless drive. But most poignant was the courage it took, the now successful Bezos to track down his father - maybe it is that wound of abandonment that explains his uncompromising search for truth. Amazon has ripped up the retailer's rulebook, and was the first a company to allow hostile reviews of products that it sold. Relentless and truth at any cost.


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Fascinating and slightly Disturbing

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I enjoyed the book very much, and he story of Amazon is captivating, but the narrator was slightly difficult to get used to, and at times it seems the narrator changed their recording device, because it can suddenly sound like an entirely different person mid-paragraph. Very odd.

Narrator kept changing location / recording device

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I bought this after the book was recommended to me by a friend and it definitely didn’t disappoint. The chronicle of Bezos and Amazon’s rise to meteoric success is fascinating and I learnt so much about the company and its founder that I hadn’t expected. As someone with a firm interest in the human mind, I enjoyed hearing about Bezos’s drive and ambition, and how he has translated that into the brand we all know today. The book itself is well written and engaging, and I thought the narration style was fitting for the tale. Highly recommended!

A fascinating story

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I liked learning from the long research and access to people that went into this book, eg how Jeff Bezos thinks about business and the back story of how the Kindle came about from the threat of the ipod.

Narrator drew me along with the excellent story

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It's powerful how dreams/goals written down and held onto will manifest ... no matter how big. Jeff Bezos's focus and drive to win is inspiring.

Two key takeaways for success are 1) Codify the values/principles that define your organisation AND live by them. 2) ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS measure everything and figure out what the numbers are telling you - they don't lie.

Well worth the investment in so many ways!

Brilliantly Insightful

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