Bezonomics

Aneasy and engagingread...Quite often, though, it iseye-openingHugo Rifkind,The Times Does a valuable job of explaining how Amazon sees itselfFinancial TimesAmazon is the business story of the decade. Jeff Bezos, the richest man on the planet, has built one of the most efficient wealth-creationmachines in history. Like a giant squid, Amazon's tentacles are squeezing industry after industry and, in the process,upsetting the state of technology, the economy, job creation and society at large. So pervasive is Amazon's impact that businessleaders in almost every sector need to understand how this force of nature operates and how they can respond to it. Saying you can ignore Jeff Bezos is equivalent to saying you could ignore Henry Ford or Steve Jobs in the earlyyears of Ford and Apple. These titans monumentally changed how we do business, redefining the rules on aglobal scale. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is the new disruptor on the block. He has created a 21st century algorithm for businessand societal disruption. He has turned the retail industry inside out, is swiftly dominating cloud computing, media andadvertising, and now has his sights trained on every other domain where money changes hands and business is transacted. But the principles by which Bezos has achieved his dominance - customer obsession, extreme innovation and long-termmanagement, all supported by artificial intelligence turning a virtuous-cycle flywheel - are now being borrowed and replicated. Bezonomics is for some a goldmine, for others a threat, for still others a life-shaping force, whether they're in business or not.Brian Dumaine's Bezonomics answers the fundamental question: how are Amazon and its imitators affecting the way we live,and what can we learn from them?