The Everything Store by Brad Stone is an in depth look at Amazon and the story of Jeff Bezos. Stone interviewed Bezos, as well as hundreds of Amazon employees, and people adjacent to this story for this book, and this fantastic formulation of the story is why Brad Stone is the best Silicon Valley reporter alive.
Quick takeaways:
It’s Easier to Be Clever than Kind
Bezos tells the story of him and his grandparents on a road trip. Being a clever, matter-of-fact kid he started quoting mortality statistics about smoking to his grandma, informing her that she was shortening her life. He was pulled aside by his grandfather who delivered the eponymous line, “Jeff, one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever.”
I think that’s an important lesson for a lot of younger smartasses like myself, as well as older people who preach “tough love.” Being curmudgeonly and cynical is just laziness masquerading as wisdom. Giving good advice while being kind and accepting is very difficult, but also much more productive.
No Powerpoints
The famous Amazon meeting memos make an appearance, and make their case for being a superior form of corporate communication. Powerpoints allow for a lot of detail skipping, as well as narrative laziness. Putting a cohesive narrative down on a page with dissectible numbers is much more difficult than talking about a graph on a screen and moving on before all the numbers are digested. Yes, in many meetings if you’re rushing through numbers people will ask you to go back and explain something, but oftentimes you can get away with lazy stats and narratives if your superiors aren’t extremely exacting (much like Jeff Bezos).
The Narrative Fallacy
In a contrarian follow up to the last point, sometimes complex stories don’t have an easily accessible narrative. A story you tell about the numbers may be completely inaccurate, but if it fits a narrative and a worldview that you have, you’ll make the numbers fit. Bezos brought this up to Stone while being interviewed for the book. “Humans are biologically inclined to turn complex realities into soothing but oversimplified stories.”
Why Books?
- They were commodities; the words on the page are the same
- There were too many choices to carry in a single physical bookstore
Music was the obvious second choice: the sounds are the same, and a single record store couldn’t hold all the music being made. Bezos made an amazingly succinct explanation in this 1997 interview.
