Bezos’ Amazon: Mercenary or missionary, or both? One great paradox in the tale of retail powerhouse Amazon is that its founder remains an earnest missionary about the things he hopes his ruthless business practices will enable him to accomplish

Bezos’ Amazon: Mercenary or missionary, or both?

Chip Bayers, Special for USA TODAY9:31 p.m. EST November 4, 2013

One great paradox in the tale of retail powerhouse Amazon is that its founder remains an earnest missionary about the things he hopes his ruthless business practices will enable him to accomplish.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

New book ‘The Everything Store’ chronicles the rise of Amazon.com

Lofty principles are a core driver for many of tech’s most successful companies

‘Be a missionary, not a mercenary’ is one mantra

NEW YORK — No industry indulges its earnest side more than the tech sector. From Apple’s “A Computer for the Rest of Us” to Google’s “Don’t Be Evil, the message from tech companies is that the higher purpose of their cause must come before the quest for wealth.In Silicon Valley these are more than just management principles. It is religious dogma honed during the Internet era, with the Valley’s biggest financiers serving the role of high priests spreading the gospel.

“Be a missionary, not a mercenary,” the venerable venture capitalist John Doerr has long urged entrepreneurs. Citing principles laid down by his colleague Randy Komisar in The Monk and the Riddle, a brief (170-page) Zen-inspired parable about finding spiritual fulfillment in a business plan, Doerr sees missionary companies as those with, among other things, “passion,” “big ideas” and a “lust to make meaning.”

Mercenary companies, on the other hand, are “paranoid,” “obsessed with the competition,” and have managers who are “bosses of wolf packs” rather than “mentors” and “coaches of teams.”

And yet one of the hottest new business books of the fall (it debuted at #13 on the Times combined digital and print nonfiction list), is an inside look at what now might be the least earnest, most predatory technology company in the world: Amazon, one of Doerr’s great investment triumphs.

Not that anyone from Amazon, including and especially its founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, would admit to violating the creed described by Doerr, his now-former board member.

As BusinessWeek writer Brad Stone details in The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, Bezos has built the most mercenary of enterprises—squeezing partners, undercutting competitors, degrading employees—while insisting repeatedly to both internal and external audiences that Amazon fits Doerr’s definition of the missionary business.

Which doesn’t necessarily make Bezos a liar, at least in his own mind. For one thing, there’s no PR value in declaring yourself a mercenary.

But beyond that, one of the great paradoxes in the tale of Amazon is that its founder remains an utterly earnest missionary about the things he hopes his ruthless business practices will enable him to accomplish.

Stone appropriately mocks the anodyne “Jeffisms” Bezos and his most loyal lieutenants (“the Jeff Bots”) use to obscure and frustrate attempts to gain insight into Amazon’s business practices and future plans.

One of the surest ways to get Bezos to drop the Jeffisms and reveal his earnest core is get him off the subject of Amazon and ask him—as I first did in late 1998 when I began working on one of the first national magazine profiles of him—about humanity’s future in space. It’s then that you see a facet of Bezos’ personality unchanged from what his closest friends saw in his youth.

Back then, Bezos hadn’t yet begun work on Blue Origins, the private space company he operates in his non-Amazon hours, or on any of the other outside businesses he now owns via his personal investment fund Bezos Expeditions (the latest of these being the Washington Post).

Yet even then his former high school girlfriend could say, in what seemed like a joke at the time, that she thought Bezos’ real goal with Amazon was to amass enough money to build a space station. And her father would tell me about Bezos’ belief as a teenager that “the future of mankind is not on this planet.”

Odd? Megalomaniacal? Perhaps. But for many in the technology world what’s worse is that it’s heretical. Using the proceeds of his company to finance his true passions violates a core tenet of the catechism preached by the likes of Doerr and Komisar.

Every company, of course, will contain at least elements of both the mercenary and the missionary in its practices . But you can’t understand the Valley without understanding the critical mass of earnest believers in tilting toward the missionary, which long predates Komisar’s attempt to codify it.

Some of the most ardent devotees, for example, were pioneers of the open source movement which gave us the Apache web server, Linux operating system, and Firefox browser.

It helps inspire twentysomethings working endless hours for below-market wages at startups when their potential options wealth is still a distant dream. And at the margins, it motivates customers—like the Apple fanatics who have been the most earnest missionaries for the company’s products.

All of this is eminently and deservedly mockable. Still, it’s telling that, near the end of Stone’s tale, we learn that Bezos has recently begun to recognize the way his company has strayed from the true path of tech enlightenment.

In a plaintive memo to his senior staff entitled “Amazon.love,” his fundamental question about Amazon was, as Stone puts it, “Could it be loved and not feared?” The earnest billionaire, it seems, now wants to re-position his company from the mercenary to the missionary. Not exactly a Road to Damascus moment, but one that the high priests of the Valley would approve.

Chip Bayers is a N.Y.-based journalist covering technology and business. He has been an editor at Adweek, Newser and Wired Digital, and was previously a staff writer for Wired Magazine.

 

November 4, 2013

Book About Amazon Is Reviewed on Amazon, by Founder’s Wife

By JULIE BOSMAN

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, has yet to make a public peep about “The Everything Store,” a major biography of Mr. Bezos and his company that was published last month.

But his wife, MacKenzie Bezos, has made her displeasure known — on the book’s Amazon.com page.

In a scathing 922-word review posted on Monday, Ms. Bezos described the book, written by Brad Stone, as “a lopsided and misleading portrait of the people and culture at Amazon.’’

“I have firsthand knowledge of many of the events,” Ms. Bezos wrote, describing her time with Mr. Bezos through the early years of Amazon and 20 years of marriage, including “the basement warehouse closet, the barbecue-scented offices, the Christmas-rush distribution centers, and the door-desk filled conference rooms.’’

“The Everything Store” has received raves for its comprehensive and meticulously researched details about Amazon’s history and Mr. Bezos’s conception of the company. Mr. Stone is a senior writer for Bloomberg Businessweek and a former reporter for The New York Times.

In Ms. Bezos’s review, the only one-star review “The Everything Store” has received, she accused Mr. Stone of making factual errors and, noting that Mr. Bezos was “never interviewed for this book,” took issue with Mr. Stone’s use of the phrases “Bezos believed” and “Bezos felt.” Readers, she wrote, should “take note of how seldom these guesses about his feelings and motives are marked with a footnote indicating there is any other source to substantiate them.”

Sarah Gelman, a spokeswoman for Amazon, confirmed that the review was written by Ms. Bezos. In a statement late Monday, Craig Berman, Amazon’s vice president for global communications, said: “Over the course of the author’s reporting, Amazon facilitated meetings for him with more than half a dozen senior Amazon executives, during which he had every opportunity to inquire about or fact-check claims made by former employees. He chose not to.”

Reagan Arthur, the publisher of Little, Brown, said in an email that Mr. Stone’s book was “scrupulously sourced and reported.” “’The Everything Store’ has been reviewed widely and praised for its evenhandedness,” she said.

Mr. Stone said in an interview that writing about people’s thoughts was how nonfiction was done these days, and said Mr. Bezos approved “many interviews with current Amazon executives and former Amazon executives.” As the book itself notes, Mr. Bezos himself declined to be interviewed. Mr. Stone has said that he interviewed more than 300 people who work at or previously worked at Amazon.

“Most of the readers and reviewers have been inspired by Amazon’s story,” Mr. Stone said. “To me, it’s not an unflattering account.”

The book gives Mr. Bezos his due as a visionary, the more familiar part of his life story. More surprising, and thus more attention-getting, has been the part that describes the company as even more aggressive toward its partners than was previously known.

Ms. Arthur acknowledged one mistake in the book pointed out by Ms. Bezos: the year that Mr. Bezos read the novel “The Remains of the Day” by Kazuo Ishiguro. The error will be corrected in subsequent printings.

Mr. Stone said he would be happy to correct any mistakes in the book, and indeed had already done so in the e-book version. He said he had not heard from Mr. Bezos directly about his book.

Ms. Bezos, who grew up in San Francisco, is the author of a novel, “Traps,” that was published by Knopf in March.

 

958 of 1,074 people found the following review helpful

I wanted to like this book, November 4, 2013

By MacKenzie Bezos

Amazon Verified Purchase(What’s this?)

This review is from: The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (Hardcover)

In the first chapter, the book sets the stage for Bezos’s decision to leave his job and build an Internet bookstore. “At the time Bezos was thinking about what to do next, he had recently finished the novel Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro, about a butler who wistfully recalls his personal and professional choices during a career in service in wartime Great Britain. So looking back on life’s important junctures was on Bezos’s mind when he came up with what he calls ‘the regret-minimization framework’ to decide the next step to take at this juncture in his career.” It’s a good beginning, and it weaves in nicely with what’s to come. But it’s not true. Jeff didn’t read Remains of the Day until a year after he started Amazon.
If this were an isolated example, it might not matter, but it’s not. Everywhere I can fact check from personal knowledge, I find way too many inaccuracies, and unfortunately that casts doubt over every episode in the book. Like two other reviewers here, Jonathan Leblang and Rick Dalzell, I have firsthand knowledge of many of the events. I worked for Jeff at D. E. Shaw, I was there when he wrote the business plan, and I worked with him and many others represented in the converted garage, the basement warehouse closet, the barbecue-scented offices, the Christmas-rush distribution centers, and the door-desk filled conference rooms in the early years of Amazon’s history. Jeff and I have been married for 20 years.
While numerous factual inaccuracies are certainly troubling in a book being promoted to readers as a meticulously researched definitive history, they are not the biggest problem here. The book is also full of techniques which stretch the boundaries of non-fiction, and the result is a lopsided and misleading portrait of the people and culture at Amazon. An author writing about any large organization will encounter people who recall moments of tension out of tens of thousands of hours of meetings and characterize them in their own way, and including those is legitimate. But I would caution readers to take note of the weak rhetorical devices used to make it sound like these quotes reflect daily life at Amazon or the majority viewpoint about working there.
For example, when the author does include people whose accounts of a supportive and inspiring culture contradict his thesis, he refers to them dismissively throughout the book as robots. In an archive of the thousands of thank you messages written to Jeff over the years, a small sampling includes “I just wanted to thank you for giving my husband the opportunity to work for your company so many years ago and let you know that he always spoke kindly and enthusiastically of the distribution center, the people and you.” “Having finished my shift I thought I would send you a short email to say thank you. There is a fantastic team based here and we have super support. Our mentors are true Amazon angels providing guidance and showing great patience.” “I cried as I read the Career Choice announcement on Amazon today. What Amazon is doing to help its employees is affecting lives in the most meaningful way I can think of. It restores my faith in humanity.” It seems like unbalanced reporting to avoid including the point of view of more people like these (and to use narrative tricks to discredit those who are included), given how plentiful they are.
In light of the focus in many of the reviews here and elsewhere on what the book “reveals” about Jeff’s motives, I will also point out that the passage about what was on his mind when he decided to start Amazon is far from the only place where the book passes off speculation about his thoughts and intentions as fact. “Bezos felt…” “Bezos believed….” “Bezos wanted….” “Bezos fixated…” “Bezos worried….” “Bezos was frustrated…” “Bezos was consumed…” “In the circuitry of Bezos’s brain, something flipped…” When reading phrases like these, which are used in the book routinely, readers should remember that Jeff was never interviewed for this book, and should also take note of how seldom these guesses about his feelings and motives are marked with a footnote indicating there is any other source to substantiate them.
One of the biggest challenges in non-fiction writing is the risk that a truthfully balanced narration of the facts will be boring, and this presents an author with some difficult choices. It may be that another telling of the Amazon story—for example, that people at Amazon have no secret agenda they’ve been able to keep hidden for 19 years, really do believe in the mission they keep repeating, and are working hard and of their own free will to realize it —would strike readers as less exciting than the version offered here. I sympathize with this challenge. But when an author plans to market a book as non-fiction, he is obliged to find a suspenseful story arc that doesn’t rely on mischaracterizing or avoiding important parts of the truth. I am grateful this is the era of the Internet, when characters in non-fiction can step out of books, as Jonathan Leblang and Rick Dalzell have done, and speak for themselves. Ideally, authors are careful to ensure people know whether what they are reading is history or an entertaining fictionalization. Hollywood often uses a more honest label: “a story based on true events.” If authors won’t admit they’ve crossed this important line, their characters can do it for them.

 

Amazon Puts Out An Official Statement Blasting New Book About The Company

JAY YAROW NOV. 4, 2013, 8:47 PM 4,366 3

It looks like Amazon is not happy with the book Bloomberg Businessweek writer Brad Stone produced about Amazon.

Earlier today, we noted that the wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, MacKenzie Bezos, trashed the book with a one-star review on Amazon.

She thought there were factual inaccuracies. She also thought that Stone had inserted his opinion into the story.

Stone told us he was willing to update his book if new facts came to light. He also said that his story was based on hundreds of interviews with Amazon employees and executives, as a result he felt like he was in a position to report on what Bezos was feeling at different moments in the history of the company.

Following Bezos’ wife’s review, Amazon is kicking up the war of words a notch by putting out an official statement on the book.

Amazon spokesperson Craig Berman sent us this statement:

“Over the course of the author’s reporting, Amazon facilitated meetings for him with more than half a dozen senior Amazon executives, during which he had every opportunity to inquire about or fact-check claims made by former employees.  He chose not to.  I met in person with him on at least three occasions and exchanged dozens of emails where he only checked a few specific quotes.  He had every opportunity to thoroughly fact check and bring a more balanced viewpoint to his narrative, but he was very secretive about the book and simply chose not to.”

We called Stone for a comment on the newest Amazon statement and he told us, “I exhaustively fact checked the work with my sources. Amazon declined to make Jeff Bezos available for fact checking.”