Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.