Rarely surprising, but amusing and intelligently written: a good exploration of how Amazon survived the crash and earned its...
Amiable memoir of Amazon.com’s dizzying rise and eventual earthbound return.
Marcus’s debut aptly captures his sense of riding an unforeseeable whirlwind. From 1996 to 2001, he was employed as “Senior Editor” at Amazon. He was the 55th hire, personally interviewed by founder and future billionaire Jeff Bezos, whom the author depicts as superficially easygoing but obsessed with a “Culture of Metrics”: Bezos believed that endless analysis of Amazon’s business numbers would insure its explosive growth—and, in fact, it did. Marcus found the halcyon early days at the perpetually expanding company a constant whirlwind of 60-hour weeks and eccentric, wonky co-workers, many of whom, like the author, temporarily became paper millionaires during the Boom. Marcus perceptively discusses the challenges in representing books through the ultra-mutable online medium and describes how Amazon and Bezos struggled to stay ahead of the maelstrom. (For instance, they developed a top-secret auction capability to compete with eBay.) Many such initiatives failed to deliver—online success seemingly depended on “First Mover” status—even as dot.com raconteurs like Henry Blodget hyped the company and ensured its stock would soar. As the company grew, Marcus became conscious of how few site visitors actually read his careful reviews: “We were creators, and we were clerks,” he ruefully notes. Even before the 2000 market crash, he realized the site’s drive to personalize itself to the needs of all customers would ultimately hobble his editorial vision, as data-mining programs overtook hands-on efforts. Bezos was named Time’s 1999 Person of the Year, and the company’s employee population exploded, but they couldn’t outrun the millennium: by June 2000, the stock had plunged, as erstwhile cheerleaders like Blodget ran for cover and its credit was assessed as “degrading.” After the company laid off 15 percent of the workforce in 2001, the burned-out but wistful Marcus decided it was time to go.
Rarely surprising, but amusing and intelligently written: a good exploration of how Amazon survived the crash and earned its longevity.Pub Date: June 24, 2004
ISBN: 1-56584-870-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf