Review of
Instaread Summary, Analysis & Review of Brad
Stone's The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos
and the Age of Amazon
Five out of five stars
In many ways,
this summary is a confirmation of what I have heard from other sources. Bill
Gates and Steve Jobs are known for driving their employees mercilessly as they
were determined to get their products to their customers. Microsoft employees
were regularly derided as “Microserfs.” The other sources indicated that Jeff
Bezos had a similar personality, only was described as “worse than Gates or
Jobs.”
The book is a
dual biography of two things that cannot be separated, the life of Jeff Bezos
and the life of his powerful company, Amazon. The company has many aspects of a
tyrannical organization with nothing like the rewards of other tech companies.
This is summarized in the following segment from the overview.
“Unlike its perk-rich competitors, such as Google and
Facebook, Amazon strives for a lean operation in which employees pay for their
own parking and do not enjoy any semblance of a work-life balance. Meetings are
designed to be adversarial and only the strong are intended to survive the
experience.”
The stress of
the work environment is well-stated in the following excerpt from key takeaway
one.
“Current and former employees told the ‘Times’ stories
about how they’d seen almost everyone they ever worked with crying at their
desk at some point.”
As a follower
of the tech industry and someone that has worked with Amazon for many years,
there was not much in the summary that was dramatically new. It is a great
summary of one of the most complex and ruthless personalities in the modern
business world. As is stated in the summary, employee well being means nothing
to Bezos, there is only customer satisfaction at all costs. If you have any
interest in Bezos or Amazon, this summary will convince you that you must read
the book.
No comments:
Post a Comment