A former Amazon executive offers an insider’s perspective on the company’s guiding principles.
Tell-alls about exceptional companies and their founders are commonplace. Amazon has had its share of coverage, including Brad Stone’s The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (2013). But this lean book cuts a different way. Rossman, an executive at Amazon who left to become a managing director at a consulting firm, weaves his own war stories around Amazon’s 14 leadership principles. While these principles are no secret (they’re posted on the company’s website), Rossman brings them to life with insightful commentary of his own. Each chapter begins with a salient “Leaders at Amazon…” statement, e.g., “Leaders at Amazon focus on the key outputs for their business and deliver them with the right quality and in a timely fashion. Despite setbacks, they rise to the occasion and never settle.” Rossman then offers observations and anecdotes illuminating the corresponding idea. For example, in Chapter 1, “Obsess Over the Customer,” he discusses Amazon’s three customer desires, which the company considers “its holy trinity”—price, selection and availability. Instead of generalities, however, Rossman shares specific insider details that make each principle more dramatic. He relates one instance when Amazon was told by Apple that the company couldn’t deliver 4,000 iPods in time for Christmas. “We were not the kind of company that ruined people’s Christmas because of a lack of availability—not under any circumstances,” writes Rossman, so Amazon purchased the iPods at retail and had them shipped to their warehouse to be repackaged and delivered to customers. At times, readers might glaze over details of Amazon’s inner workings, but Rossman’s focus on how the company applies its principles is fairly fascinating stuff. So too is Rossman’s characterization of Jeff Bezos, who comes across as a remarkably driven, if irascible, leader. As for the iPods, Bezos agreed but quipped, “I hope you’ll get in touch with Apple and try to get our money back from the bastards.”
Succinct, engaging and crafted from a high-level viewpoint; a rare open-kimono look at how one of the world’s most innovative companies executes its vision.
Pub Date: May 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-1499296778
Page Count: 170
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 25, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
An informative if overlong account of how American car makers regained much of the ground they had lost during the 1980s to foreign rivals in their own backyard and Europe. Drawing mainly on their own reportage as Detroit-based correspondents for The Wall Street Journal, Ingrassia and White offer a lively series of set pieces illustrating how Motown's Big Three (Chrysler, Ford, General Motors) managed to avert envelopment by their Japanese counterparts (Honda, Nissan, Toyota, et al.) and to launch an impressively effective counterattack. In large measure, the authors conclude, the improvement in the US industry's fortunes is attributable to its capacity to adopt and adapt the cost-control, employee-empowerment, productivity, and quality- assurance techniques pioneered by Japanese manufacturers. As Ingrassia and White make clear, however, the makeover was convulsive on the assembly line as well as in the executive suite. The authors do a fine job of reconstructing the boardroom coups that resulted in the ouster of such old-guard stalwarts as Chrysler's Lee Iacocca, Ford's Don Peterson, and GM's Bob Stempel (the unfortunate engineer who inherited the god-awful mess Roger Smith had made of the planet's largest commercial enterprise). Covered as well are the lesser lights who designed the passenger vehicles (Chrysler's Neon and Ford's born-again Mustang among others), plus the plant managers who reconciled the requirements of lean production with the aspirations of a unionized work force accustomed to adversarial labor relations. On the minus side of the ledger, Ingrassia and White have not resisted the temptation to include whatever they've learned in more than a decade on the automotive beat, and their narrative occasionally veers into trivial byways. Nonetheless, an engrossing and cautionary take on a consequential industry whose welfare is everybody's business. (16 pages of photos, not seen) (First serial to the Wall Street Journal; author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 28, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-79214-8
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
A wonderful pudding of a book that serves up large helpings of US socioeconomic history over the past 35 years or so. The title and subtitle notwithstanding, GQ columnist Nocera never makes clear precisely what he means by the middle class. Nor does he provide a systematic reckoning on the financial times since 1958 (when BankAmerica launched what became the Visa credit card). What he does offer, though, are thoroughly engrossing takes on the breakthrough innovations that democratized America's monetary life. There are tellingly detailed briefings on the largely unsung creators of money-market mutual funds (including the first to give investors check-writing privileges), NOW accounts, negotiable CDs, no-load mutual funds, and other financial services that an affluent society now takes for granted. The author also profiles the bankers, Wall Streeters, and others who played leading roles in a revolution that profoundly altered Main Street's attitudes toward credit, debt, investment, and savings. Cases in point range from Peter Lynch (Fidelity's star portfolio manager until his 1990 retirement) through Charles Schwab (of discount brokerage fame), Citicorp's Walter Wriston, and Marshall Loeb (former editor of Money, which continues to overstate the rewards while minimizing the risks of do-it-yourself capitalism). Assessed as well are the convulsive consequences of Paul Volcker's conquest of inflation, deregulation of depository institutions, the stock market's 1987 crash, and the low interest rates that channeled increasing amounts of money into equities during the early 1990s. Conspicuous by its absence, though, is any sustained coverage of the S&L scandals, insider trading, the takeover boom, junk bonds, the assets controlled by insurance companies, derivative securities products, exchange-listed options, futures contracts, and allied aspects of the domestic financial scene. Even so, Nocera delivers a savvy rundown on the landmark developments that in less than four decades have made consumer finance a multilateral bazaar in which beating the markets is a populist pastime.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-66756-4
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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