Why Do This?
PREAMBLE
Hello and welcome to the inaugural edition of The A Word: Inside the World’s Largest Tech Firm.* The A Word is a narrative which aims to get beyond Amazon's authorized content and provide readers with new, meaningful insights of the company written in an entertaining, eclectic style. More details (about me and this project) are on my website. I expect, but cannot guarantee, that the formatting, graphics, etc., will improve as I learn about Substack. Thank you for reading.
*By number of employees
There are times when a writer should feel compelled to provide justification for writing about a subject. A case in point—Amazon.
News about Amazon saturates the media, and Amazon, with its peripatetic services, Kindle, Audible, Prime Video, Alexa, not to mention an endless stream of stuff arriving in smiley-embossed packages, saturates our lives. Additionally, in the last three years, five books, comprising what could be considered an authorized “canon,” have been published on the topic of Amazon**.
Recently I was reading one of those books, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories and Secrets from Inside Amazon, co-authored by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr, two executives who worked closely with Jeff Bezos in conceiving and fine-tuning elements of the Amazonian culture—one of the most essential being the process enshrined in the book’s title, Working Backwards. What is implied, but omitted, in the main title is a significant phrase: from the customer.
Business gurus and would-be tycoons who wish to psychoanalyze Jeff Bezos and his formula for success should be mollified that the contents of this mind are easy to probe. Everything significant in his operating philosophy has been uttered by him hundreds of times and recorded ad nauseum. It consists of one word.
Pull up an interview of Jeff on You Tube and count how many times he says the word “customer.” Pay close attention to how he pronounces the word, with a focused, careful enunciation; a special, breathless reverence reserved for the strongly stressed first syllable, the kuh sound emerging with a languorous, throaty resonance suggesting he is so enamored of the word he is reluctant to let it leave his mouth.
* *The core of the Amazonian published “canon” features two books by former Amazon executive John Rossman, Think Like an Amazon (2019), and The Amazon Way: Amazon’s 14 Leadership Principles, third edition (2021); and another, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories and Secrets from Inside Amazon (2021), co-authored by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr. A book of Jeff’s collective writings, Invent & Wander (2021), completes the business grouping. Journalist Brad Stone’s book, Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire (2021), is the sole book targeted at a general audience.
As an Amazon salaried employee, I was incessantly schooled in this veneration of customers. It made me consider how, as a writer, I might be able to work backward from my customers, the readers.
There exists a type of proof called “the Principle of Falsification,” advanced by the renowned science philosopher Karl Popper. In the case of deciding whether to write a narrative on the topic of Amazon, a variation of the proof would be the following: Is there a clearly identified, meaningful need or demand of the reading public that is not being met? To conjure proof of this requires falsifying this statement: Everything that can be written about Amazon, has been written about Amazon.
Proof, I decided, could not be obtained by an ad-hoc, general, trivial solution, e.g. “more news,” but had to be directly correlated with the topic of Amazon. For this there is only one authoritative body of evidence to consult—the “canon.”
As customers are famously disenchanted people, fortunately there is a way to investigate this: Feedback from readers.
Of the five, identified, authorized non-fiction books published since 2019, three (two by John Rossman, and one by Bezos) are prescriptive business books, while one, the aforementioned Working Backwards, falls between the business and general-reader genres, but (in my view) is primarily intended as prescriptive. These four are meant to deliver the Amazon “gospel” to an audience of acolytes and penitents who cannot find a way to maximize the value of future cash flows via their own wits.
The one book in the canon targeted at the same general audience I am attempting to reach is Bloomberg business journalist Brad Stone’s New York Times bestseller, Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire (2021). The book has received a solid overall rating of four stars on Goodreads; one that came, however, with a certain strain of critical dissent. Working backward from the customer in the most direct and earnest manner possible, I discerned a telltale pattern to the criticism, as these snippets of posted reviews for Amazon Unbound, attest:
“Stone fails to get beyond any buzzwords of what makes Amazon or Bezos successful beyond ‘ruthless.’”
-Included in a 3-star review by “Jonathan”
Or,
“More of the same on the subject of Amazon … as if we don’t already have too much information.”
-Included in a 4-star review by “Carole’
Or,
“Informative but aggressively neutral. I don’t feel like I learned anything about Bezos as a human being.”
-Included in 3-star review by “Hugh”
Or,
“It doesn’t have enough analysis … Full of dates and figures, but not much deeper insight.”
-Included in a 3-star review by “Robert”
In other words, tons of facts, little illuminating delight; a lot of “hmm,” a paucity of “wow!” At Amazon this is a gap. It is the gap of the missing star. The 5th one. It is meaningful.
An average 4-star rating and bestseller to boot exceed chopped liver. In lieu of a formal review, which this is not, Mr. Stone’s book has manifold merits. But the ask is not for more, better, investigative journalism. It is for context, analysis, reflection, and risky, high-wire conjecture, opining and wandering. It is for the weird, ineffable, and maybe not doable. The expectation is reasonable and understandable. Amazon is weird; a social-economic phenomenon unlike any seen in history. The public wants to know the how and why. It wants to see the secret sauce.
Being a former rank-and-file Amazon salaried employee provides me a unique vantage point outside the scope of the S-team or reporter. In this respect, I feel like I am carrying the torch for thousands of Amazonians. For guidance on shaping an analysis-rich chronicle, I can take inspiration from Amazon’s affinity for the craft of writing; lessons such as, narratives “allow for non-linear, interconnected arguments to unfold naturally.”1 Non-linear strikes me as the ideal métier for this project. Expect the unexpected. My two-plus years of research has revealed a company with a richly paradoxical character; an idea reflected in this blog’s yin-and-yang logo. The narrative, by turns, may combine elements of non-fiction and fiction—I’ll be sure readers are aware of the transition. I am certain the online format is best suited for the undertaking as changes to the text must keep pace with changes in the subject.
I apologize for dedicating the entire first post to the setup; given the topic, however, I feel obligated to prove the validity of the premise to the readers. Stay tuned to this space as the journey begins next week with the first in a series of essays on an Idea called Amazon.
Bryar, C. & Carr, B. 2021. Working Backwards: Insights, Stories and Secrets from Inside Amazon. St. Martin’s Press, pp. 88