And Bezos loved it, despite the customer-experience headaches. Selection exploded, prices declined, and all sorts of chaos rained down on Amazon-fraudulent products, counterfeits, hoverboards that exploded when they were plugged in, and fake books filled with gibberish. A tool called Seller Central became a self-service platform for third-party vendors. You couldn’t possibly reach out to sellers and recruit a million of them one by one you would have to build a self-service machine that encouraged sellers to come to Amazon. “How,” he asked, “would you get a million sellers into this marketplace?”Įxecutives understood that there was only one answer to Bezos’s question. Bezos was so frustrated by the lack of progress that he tore up the team’s documents in an annual planning meeting. Back in 2007, the marketplace was already a few years old, but it was basically just a dusty repository for used books. Take the marketplace, which lets independent sellers hawk their wares on the Amazon site.
These systems, even when designed with good intentions, are often gamed-and that can have negative repercussions for customers, and for society. And in the company’s advertising division, sellers can sign up and advertise their listings without ever talking to a human being.
#Amazon unbound software#
In Amazon’s new supermarkets, ceiling-mounted cameras and AI software track what you buy, so a cashier doesn’t have to check you out. In Amazon’s fulfillment centers, warehouse robots and algorithms ruthlessly monitor employee performance. But when those businesses grow, Amazon runs them with algorithms. Amazon builds new businesses with people. It’s a classic example of a CEO suddenly changing altitudes, swooping down to audit the business in order to keep the company on track. Then he insisted on dramatic changes in their operating plans to cut costs and return the unit to profitability. Bezos demanded the group’s executives sit there and recalculate their numbers. Without ads, its underlying profitability was actually decreasing. In an executive meeting in 2017, Bezos was reviewing the operating plan of retail and saw something that worried him: Retail was blending Amazon’s new and growing advertising revenues into its financial projections. “It’s a classic example of a CEO suddenly changing altitudes, swooping down to audit the business in order to keep the company on track.” But every so often, he swoops down without warning and takes a close look, analyzing problems and insisting on strategic changes. When it comes to the large divisions at Amazon, like retail and cloud computing, he prefers to hover above them, allowing his deputies to operate with considerable freedom. People often conclude that Jeff Bezos is an intolerable micromanager, but that’s not always the case. He cleared away the bureaucratic thicket inside the company and encouraged his deputies to be unbound in their ambition. After the first Echo was released, he asked the leader of every division inside the company, “What are you doing for Alexa?”Ī company-defining product like Alexa-and the Kindle and AWS-wouldn’t have been possible without Bezos’s direct involvement. He personally selected the names Echo and Alexa, and tested the device in his own home. He set goals and walked out of meetings when they weren’t met. He wrote, “We should build a $20 computer whose brains are in the cloud, completely controllable by your voice.” Over the next few years, he met with the team making the first Echo multiple times a week. Those two things overlapped when he sent an email to an executive. In 2010, Jeff Bezos was simultaneously impressed by advancements in voice recognition and hungry to capitalize on Amazon’s advantage in cloud computing.
Leaders must drive disruptive new products inside their companies. Listen to the audio version-read by Brad himself-in the Next Big Idea App. His previous book, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, was a New York Times bestseller, won the 2013 Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award, and received a one-star review on Amazon from MacKenzie Scott.īelow, Brad shares 5 key insights from his new book, Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire (available now from Amazon). Brad Stone is a senior executive editor at Bloomberg News.
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