BEZONOMICS

HOW AMAZON IS CHANGING OUR LIVES, AND WHAT THE WORLD’S BEST COMPANIES ARE LEARNING FROM IT

BRIAN DUMAINE

Simon & Schuster, 325pp, £20, ebook £9.99

Is Jeff Bezos, richest man in the world, a villain or a visionary? Reviewing Bezonomics in the FT, Andrew Edgecliffe-johnson wrote: ‘his fans will never agree, but one thing is clear to both: Amazon’s growth, from selling its first book in 1995 to joining the elite club of trillion-dollar companies, is one of our era’s most compelling business stories.’

The Scotsman’s Emma Newlands was blown away by the Amazon epic: ‘An addictive read – one of the most compelling business books I’ve ever read.’ Dumaine outlines, wrote Newlands, ‘how Bezos has created a 21st century algorithm for business and societal disruption, shaken retail to its foundations, is rapidly dominating cloud computing, media and advertising, and now has his sights trained on a wealth of new areas – including healthcare and financial services’.

Nick Curtis in the Evening Standard was gripped by the stats: ‘51 per cent of Americans go to church and 52 per cent have an Amazon Prime account.’ Curtis thought it ‘painstakingly even-handed’ but for Edgecliffe-johnson it was ‘overwhelmingly flattering’.

In the Times, Hugo Rifkind was interested in Dumaine’s theory that Amazon’s success was built on the ‘flywheel’ idea developed by leadership guru Jim Collins. ‘First, understand Amazon as a cycle, with a better customer experience leading to more traffic, which leads to more sellers using the service, which in turn leads to more products, which itself leads back where we started, to a better customer experience.’ Rifkind reflected that Bezonomics at the time of writing had no reviews on Amazon, but the first one would be worth a lot more than a review in the Times.