Books Recommended by Jeff Bezos
When you’re talking about shopping online, you’re automatically talking about Amazon. And you can’t mention Amazon without thinking about the man behind the most valuable retailer in the United States. And that’s Jeff Bezos.
Born in 1964 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, showed his interest in science and technology from an early age. In 1986 he graduated from Princeton and then had several jobs in New York in the computer science field.
In 1994, attracted by the rapid growth of Internet, Bezos quit his job as VP of D.E. Shaw & Co. and moved to Seattle. During the cross-country drive from New York to Seattle he wrote the business plan for an online book store that was called Cadabra. After a lawyer pointed out to him that the name sounds pretty similar to “cadaver”, he decided to change the name to Amazon, inspired by the Amazon river. It’s the biggest river in the world and he planned for his store to become the biggest in the world.
More than 20 years later, Amazon became a tech giant that sells almost anything you can think of. It’s considered the largest retailer in the world by both revenue and market cap. It also produces electronic devices (such as Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV and Echo).
Other business ventures include Blue Origin, a human spaceflight company that Bezos founded in 2000. In 2017, they were expected to start commercial space flights in 2018. In 2013 he bought The Washington Post for $250 million. He’s also an investor, being one of the early investors in Google. By 2017, his investment of $250,000 was valued at $3.3 billion. Through his personal investment company, Bezos Expeditions, he helped fund companies like Airbnb, Basecamp, Behance, Business Insider, Twitter and Uber.
Even though his media presence is nowhere near other top level entrepreneurs such as Bill Gates, Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, on several occasions Jeff Bezos has talked about books that he finds time to read.
Also, here are two collections of books curated by the best entrepreneurs in the world here:
Here are the books recommended by Jeff Bezos:
12 books recommended by Jeff Bezos
Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t
by Jim Collins
"Collins briefed Amazon executives on his seminal management book before its publication. Companies must confront the brutal facts of their business, find out what they are uniquely good at, and master their fly wheel, in which each part of the business reinforces and accelerates the other parts," Stone writes.
The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail
Brad Stone's new book, The Everything Store, describes how Bezos developed this strategy after reading another book called The Innovator's Dilemma by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen.
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
[From the book "The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon"]
“The scholar argues that people are wired to see patterns in chaos while remaining blind to unpredictable events, with massive consequences. Experimentation and empiricism trumps the easy and obvious narrative,” Stone writes.
Sam Walton: Made in America
by Sam Walton, John Huey
"In his autobiography, Walmart's founder expounds on the principles of discount retailing and discusses his core values of frugality and a bias for action — a willingness to try a lot of things and make many mistakes. Bezos included both in Amazon's corporate values," Brad Stone writes.
Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies
[From the book "The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon"]
"A core ideology guides these firms, and only those employees who embrace the central mission flourish; others are 'expunged like a virus' from the companies," Stone wrote.
Creation: Life and How to Make It
by Steve Grand
“A video-game designer argues that intelligent systems can be created from the bottom up if one devises a set of primitive building blocks. The book was influential in the creation of Amazon Web Services, or AWS, the service that popularized the notion of the cloud,” Stone writes.
Data-Driven Marketing: The 15 Metrics Everyone in Marketing Should Know
by Mark Jeffery
“A guide to using data to measure everything from customer satisfaction to the effectiveness of marketing. Amazon employees must support all assertions with data, and if the data has a weakness, they must point it out or their colleagues will do it for them,” Stone writes.
Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation
by James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones
Jeff Bezos is known as an authoritarian leader. He has established rules, processes and methods that are strictly followed. Jeff’s Reading List is a list of 12 books Bezos expects Amazon employees to read. Many are related to business, but there are other themes as… Read the full quote
Jeff Bezos is known as an authoritarian leader. He has established rules, processes and methods that are strictly followed. Jeff’s Reading List is a list of 12 books Bezos expects Amazon employees to read. Many are related to business, but there are other themes as well.
Author Brad Stone who wrote the Bezos biography The Everything Store lists those 12 books. The author says the books have shaped Bezos’ leadership style and way of thinking. Lean Thinking is one of those 12 books.
Memos from the Chairman
"[The book is] a collection of memos to employees by the chairman of the now defunct investment bank Bear Stearns," Stone writes. "In his memos, Greenberg is constantly restating the bank's core values, especially modesty and frugality."
The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering
[From "The Everything Store", written by Brad Stone] “An influential computer scientist makes the counterintuitive argument that small groups of engineers are more effective than larger ones at handling complex software projects. The book lays out the theory behind Amazon’s two pizza teams,” Stone writes.
The Remains of the Day
If you read The Remains of the Day, which is one of my favorite books, you can't help but come away and think, I just spent 10 hours living an alternate life and I learned something about life and about regret. You can't do that in a blog post.
