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Bezonomics

How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives, and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning from It

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Bezonomics

By: Brian Dumaine, Brian Dumaine - introduction
Narrated by: Dan Bittner
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About this listen

 Amazon is the business story of the decade. Jeff Bezos, the richest man on the planet, has built one of the most efficient wealth-creation machines in history. Like a giant squid, Amazon’s tentacles are squeezing industry after industry and, in the process, upsetting the state of technology, the economy, job creation and society at large. So pervasive is Amazon’s impact that business leaders in almost every sector need to understand how this force of nature operates and how they can respond to it.

Saying you can ignore Jeff Bezos is equivalent to saying you could ignore Henry Ford or Steve Jobs in the early years of Ford and Apple. These titans monumentally changed how we do business, redefining the rules on a global scale. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is the new disruptor on the block. He has created a 21st century algorithm for business and societal disruption. He has turned the retail industry inside out, is swiftly dominating cloud computing, media and advertising, and now has his sights trained on every other domain where money changes hands and business is transacted.

But the principles by which Bezos has achieved his dominance - customer obsession, extreme innovation and long-term management, all supported by artificial intelligence turning a virtuous-cycle 'flywheel' - are now being borrowed and replicated. 'Bezonomics' is for some a goldmine, for others a threat, for still others a life-shaping force, whether they’re in business or not.

Brian Dumaine’s Bezonomics answers the fundamental question: how are Amazon and its imitators affecting the way we live, and what can we learn from them? Economics Business Technology Artificial Intelligence Money Innovation Management Computer Science

Critic reviews

'Bezonomics is an easy and engaging read...Quite often, though, it is eye-opening.' (Hugo Rifkind)
'You'd think it would be easy to write a page-turner about the firm and its founder, but what makes them so successful is complicated, contradictory and controversial... What makes the book a great read, however, is the way Dumaine shines a light on the man who has made Amazon such a success. The first third of the book reveals Bezos's special sauce. He is hard-driving and ruthless.' (John Arlidge)
'Highly engaging. An addictive read - one of the most compelling business books I've ever read. Meticulously researched...it never veers too far into dry details and is written engagingly.' (Emma Newlands)
'Brian Dumaine has written a touchstone book, significant in helping people understand some of the big underlying forces changing the world we live in. In fifty years, historians may look back at Bezonomics and point out that its choice of protagonist captured the essence of what was happening at the time - in our society, in our culture and in our economy. Dumaine is a crisp and incisive writer, able to weave big, arcing themes with vivid details and narrative stories to make his insights come to life.' (Jim Collins, author of Good to Great)
‘In America, Amazon is bigger than Jesus. One of the many arresting facts in this study of the e-retailer and the forces that drive it, by Forbes journalist Brian Dumaine, is that 51 per cent of US households attend church, but 52 per cent have an Amazon Prime membership... This is a business book, the tone readable, dry and painstakingly even-handed, though Dumaine duly includes a few of the odd quirks that tech gurus fashion into myth.' (Nick Curtis)
‘Where the book really shines is in its detailed but clear exposition of how the Amazon phenomenon was built on expert data analysis, marketplace psychology and perpetual innovation – and where it is headed…Politicians and regulators have their eyes on Amazon and its profits, but will a company named after the Earth’s biggest river ever know its own limits? Bezos’s desire to expand into sectors such as healthcare, banking and even space suggests the opposite.’ (Jenny McCartney)
'How does Amazon do it all? You’ll marvel at the tech giant’s magic after reading Bezonomics.' (David A. Vise, Pulitzer Prize-winning co-author of The Google Story)
'If you want to know about Amazon - really know about Amazon! (and who doesn’t?) - then you have to read this book. Brian Dumaine’s deeply reported and yet accessible work takes you inside this secretive behemoth that’s rewriting the rules of business and changing the world.' (Andy Serwer, Editor-in-Chief of Yahoo! Finance)
All stars
Most relevant
Enjoyed thoroughly, kept my interest from beginning to the end. For someone whose English is second language, the narrator was very easy to understand. Amazon is a fascinating company and so is its leader.

Drink every time you hear "flywheel"

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Good content and easy to follow but a fair amount of thematic repetition with some areas.

Insightful to a degree

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Adapt to Bezonomics or get crushed. A must read for anyone considering business. A great peek into the future, which is closer than we think.

The industry standard for all future business!

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Interesting and easy to digest. Amazon is currently the company to follow if any.

Great book about Amazon.

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It’s not the best researched book, some key info is left out like how Besos pays almost no personal tax - far less than you and I, but the book still an interesting read.

The author is in Love with Besos, he tries to give both sides of the argument but it’s still highly slanted.

The author explains that Amazon’s strategy is to invest massively in a sector they don’t understand, and is willing to loose money for years until the competition can’t keep up. They were subsidised by UPS for delivery, food stamps for their employees etc for their first decade or so. Items were and are often sold at a loss. So items are cheap but the tax payer subsidised every item sold, oh and in the US they mostly didn’t pay sales tax for years. The Besos economic strategy is to rely on the stock market for working capital while you weed out all competitors and then attracting short term market place sellers while you steal their data and employees / delivery whom eventually they will eventually replace with Robots.

Some scary stories about Amazon competing with their market sellers, who then borrow money directly from Amazon to try to get economies of scale to survive and then Amazon cut their credit line once they have own branded the product hence removing the partner / now competitor from the equation. The Seller in the story lost everything they had earned over years, Amazon added some more numbers (at a loss most likely) to their top line. Wonder why the seller couldn’t compete? The book tells that Amazon offer Chinese sellers cheaper shipping to their us ment centres than the US sellers using their service (in exchange for knowing which factory to collect from incase they want to use the data to cut out the seller).

At times the book feels like the writer had a word number target so did a find / replace to include the word “fly wheel” everywhere unnecessarily. It’s annoying.

Overall being a retail entrepreneur in a world of Amazon is far more risky, but thereare opportunities. If you have a business that Amazon can compete with, consider Pivoting now or make a strategy of being the seller of second choice (ie raise your prices and provide better service and hope some of the customers will appreciate that enough not to take the advice and then not being willing to pay enough to cover the advice givers wages).

Saying that the book makes you feel buying from Amazon makes sense as buying from another company means your are paying more as they will be subject to more taxes - so you are opting to contribute more tax and to pay more. If they are willing to sell at a loss, your gain right? For now. And what person living on the normal (taxed) average wage thinks with Besos economics, if Amazon spend more than they make for a decade they go up in value and have an end game in mind, if a person does it their house is repossessed and their end game is homelessness and working in an Amazon fulfilment chain.

Could be in the horror section …

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