The Bezos Letters: 14 Principles to Grow Your Business Like Amazon
Amazon is a fascinating company. I mostly only shop on Amazon for Kindle reads nowadays (blame Taobao for that), and their attention to detail and reducing friction always blew me away. My admiration pales compared to what Anderson feels towards Amazon and Bezos (and I don’t blame him) because he gushes over the company in every anecdote possible.
Beginning with Bezos’s first annual shareholder letter from 1997, the author highlights “the Anderson 14 Growth Principles”, which are unnervingly similar to Amazon’s 14 “Leadership Principles” (that subsequently branched out to 16 in 2021).
“There’s an old saying in business: ‘If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional, wait until you hire an amateur.’”
I was fighting my way through the book by its second half. Its structure was reminiscent of how high school essays may be written, with excerpts regurgitated to fit the question and paragraphs highlighted to indicate the exact principle they were illustrating. There was also a lot of repetition – the same anecdotes would be repeatedly used to support the growth principles.
While the author recommends this book as a companion to digesting Bezos’s letters, it was an underwhelming read. Anderson has not previously worked for or with Amazon. Hence, the content is either public information or subjective interpretation on his behalf. Amazon’s backstory is fascinating, but reading the original letters themselves sans the fluff would be better.
In hindsight, this book doesn’t meet my usual criteria for picking something to read (e.g., a minimum of 2,000 reviews on Amazon). It just happened that someone recommended it, and it was available under Kindle Unlimited for a while.
I prefer to reread my notes instead of the book itself, and I’ve included the said principles below.
The 14 Principles:
Test
1. Encourage “successful failure”
2. Bet on big ideas
3. Practise dynamic invention and innovation
Build
4. Obsess over customers
5. Apply long-term thinking
6. Understand your flywheel
Accelerate
7. Generate High-Velocity Decisions
8. Make Complexity Simple
9. Accelerate Time with Technology
10. Promote Ownership
Scale
11. Maintain Your Culture
12. Focus on High Standards
13. Measure What Matters, Question What’s Measured, and Trust Your Gut
14. Believe It’s Always Day 1
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