Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos, With an Introduction by Walter Isaacson

by Jeff Bezos (Contribution by), Walter Isaacson (Introduction)

Overview

In Jeff Bezos's own words, the core principles and philosophy that have guided him in creating, building, and leading Amazon and Blue Origin.

In this collection of Jeff Bezos's writings—his unique and strikingly original annual shareholder letters, plus numerous speeches and interviews that provide insight into his background, his work, and the evolution of his ideas—you'll gain an insider's view of the why and how of his success. Spanning a range of topics across business and public policy, from innovation and customer obsession to climate change and outer space, this book provides a rare glimpse into how Bezos thinks about the world and where the future might take us.

Written in a direct, down-to-earth style, Invent and Wander offers readers a master class in business values, strategy, and execution:

• The importance of a Day 1 mindset
• Why "it's all about the long term"
• What it really means to be customer obsessed
• How to start new businesses and create significant organic growth in an already successful company
• Why culture is an imperative
• How a willingness to fail is closely connected to innovation
• What the Covid-19 pandemic has taught us

Each insight offers new ways of thinking through today's challenges—and more importantly, tomorrow's—and the never-ending urgency of striving ahead, never resting on one's laurels. Everyone from CEOs of the Fortune 100 to entrepreneurs just setting up shop to the millions who use Amazon's products and services in their homes or businesses will come to understand the principles that have driven the success of one of the most important innovators of our time.

Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos is co-published by PublicAffairs, an imprint of Perseus Books, and Harvard Business Review Press.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781647820718
Publisher:	Harvard Business Review Press
Publication date:	11/17/2020
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	73,323
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

About Contributors Jeff Bezos and Walter Isaacson:
This book is a collection of writings and public statements by Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon. Bezos is also the founder of aerospace company Blue Origin, which is working to lower the cost and increase the safety of spaceflight, and he is owner of the Washington Post. In 2018, he founded the Bezos Day One Fund, which focuses on funding non-profits that help homeless families, and on creating a network of tier-one preschools in low-income communities. Bezos graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa in electrical engineering and computer science from Princeton University in 1986, and was named TIME Magazine's Person of the Year in 1999.

Walter Isaacson is the author of several books, including The Innovators and Leonardo da Vinci.

Table of Contents

Introduction Walter Isaacson 1

A Note on Sourcing 27

Part 1 The Shareholder Letters

It's All About the Long Term (1997) 31

Obsessions (1998) 37

Building for the Long Term (1999) 44

Taking the Long View (2000) 51

The Customer Franchise Is Our Most Valuable Asset (2001) 55

What's Good for Customers Is Good for Shareholders (2002) 60

Long-Term Thinking (2003) 64

Thinking About Finance (2004) 67

Making Decisions (2005) 72

Growing New Businesses (2006) 76

A Team of Missionaries (2007) 80

Working Backward (2008) 84

Setting Goals (2009) 88

Fundamental Tools (2010) 92

The Power of Invention (2011) 96

Internally Driven (2012) 102

"Wow" (2013) 107

Three Big Ideas (2014) 122

Big Winners Pay for Many Experiments (2015) 133

Fending Off Day 2 (2016) 146

Building a Culture of High Standards (2017) 153

Intuition, Curiosity, and the Power of Wandering (2018) 167

Scale for Good (2019) 176

Part 2 Life of Work

My Gift in Life 189

A Crucial Moment at Princeton 191

"We Are What We Choose": Address to the Princeton Graduating Class of 2010 193

Resourcefulness 197

Why I Went from a Hedge Fund to Selling Books 200

Finding the Root Cause 204

Creating Wealth 205

The Idea for Prime 206

Thinking Three Years Out 208

Where the Idea of Amazon Web Services Came From 210

Alexa, AI, and Machine Learning 212

Physical Stores and Whole Foods 216

Buying the Washington Post 218

Trust 221

Work-Life Harmony 223

Recruiting Talent: Do You Want Mercenaries or Missionaries? 225

Decisions 227

Competition 230

Government Scrutiny and Big Companies 232

The Climate Pledge 234

The Bezos Day One Fund 239

The Purpose of Going into Space 244

It's Still Day One for America 257

Editorial Reviews

A Wall Street Journal Bestseller

From the Publisher

2020-09-10
Business writings from the richest man in the world.

In an admiring introduction, Walter Isaacson praises Bezos for his “insatiable, childlike, and joyful curiosity about almost everything.” A “voracious reader” who devoured science fiction—taking lessons, it seems, from Robert Heinlein in particular—Bezos has since become one of the leading private investors in space exploration. To get there, however, he had to forge a business empire that grew from 10 employees to 750,000 over the last quarter-century. In this collection of shareholder letters and occasional writings, Bezos immediately emerges as the kind of businessperson who clearly believes the maxim that if it can’t be measured, it can’t be managed. He’s a demon for quantification, noting, for instance, that over a seven-year period, Amazon’s “Frustration-Free Packaging Program” grew from 19 products to more than 400,000 and by 2015 had “eliminated tens of millions of pounds of excess packaging.” Corporate cheerleading is minimal compared to that sort of quantification, although a mantra is that investors should prefer “missionaries” over “mercenaries,” the latter of whom “are trying to flip their stock” while the former are “trying to build a great service.” Those with an interest in business history will find that charting the evolution of Amazon from annual letter to annual letter is a fascinating exercise in constant self-invention: The company began as a bookstore but always with an eye, as Bezos wrote in 1999, of becoming “a place where customers can come to find and discover anything and everything they might want to buy online.” Of ancillary interest are Bezos’ account of how he came to buy the Washington Post and his commitment, clearly inspired by that love of science fiction, to use some of his fortune to set the stage for building space colonies “that would be really pleasant places to live.”

Business students will find plenty of case studies to put to use.

Kirkus Reviews