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
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
A readable, persuasive argument that our ways of doing business will have to change if we are to prosper—or even survive.
A well-constructed critique of an economic system that, by the author’s account, is a driver of the world’s destruction.
Harvard Business School professor Henderson vigorously questions the bromide that “management’s only duty is to maximize shareholder value,” a notion advanced by Milton Friedman and accepted uncritically in business schools ever since. By that logic, writes the author, there is no reason why corporations should not fish out the oceans, raise drug prices, militate against public education (since it costs tax money), and otherwise behave ruinously and anti-socially. Many do, even though an alternative theory of business organization argues that corporations and society should enjoy a symbiotic relationship of mutual benefit, which includes corporate investment in what economists call public goods. Given that the history of humankind is “the story of our increasing ability to cooperate at larger and larger scales,” one would hope that in the face of environmental degradation and other threats, we might adopt the symbiotic model rather than the winner-take-all one. Problems abound, of course, including that of the “free rider,” the corporation that takes the benefits from collaborative agreements but does none of the work. Henderson examines case studies such as a large food company that emphasized environmentally responsible production and in turn built “purpose-led, sustainable living brands” and otherwise led the way in increasing shareholder value by reducing risk while building demand. The author argues that the “short-termism” that dominates corporate thinking needs to be adjusted to a longer view even though the larger problem might be better characterized as “failure of information.” Henderson closes with a set of prescriptions for bringing a more equitable economics to the personal level, one that, among other things, asks us to step outside routine—eat less meat, drive less—and become active in forcing corporations (and politicians) to be better citizens.
A readable, persuasive argument that our ways of doing business will have to change if we are to prosper—or even survive.Pub Date: May 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5417-3015-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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