Bezonomics by Brian Dumaine

BEZONOMICS by Brian Dumaine (an award-winning Fortune magazine writer) describes the various facets of Amazon’s business, including its online retail operations and focus of its Prime program, its cloud computing resources, and forays into businesses as diverse as media streaming, healthcare, and voice recognition technology (Alexa and Echo).  While discussing warehousing, robotics, and machine learning, Dumaine explores “How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning from It.”  He acknowledges three main principles – customer obsession (as evidenced by low prices, fast delivery, and big data manipulation), extreme innovation, and long-term investment – and asserts that Bezos “has created the next-generation corporation.” 

Early on in BEZONOMICS, Dumaine comments that “when a person creates one of the most valuable companies in the world and has more money than every other human on earth, their life doesn’t lend itself to a tidy story line.” Given all of the challenges with COVID (note the new advertising campaign, as one small example) just since this book went to press, that is certainly true. Dumaine writes, “my hope is that readers of this book will grow to understand this complexity and recognize the ways Amazon both helps or harms business and society.” He supports his research with over ten percent of the book devoted to notes and bibliographic source information. Readers will likely pause to contemplate the attention to detail (e.g., reference to Amazon-branded packing tape) and broader integration of Amazon into everyday life. In fact, Dumaine refers to a poll where Amazon was amongst the top institutions in which Americans believe – he says, “51 percent of American households attend church, 52 percent have Amazon Prime memberships.”  We also own the older, award-winning text titled The Everything Store by Brad Stone and given the size, management intensity, and far-reaching impact of this company, there will be many more analyses of Bezos and Amazon.