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The Bezos Letters: 14 Principles to Grow Your Business Like Amazon Kindle Edition

by Steve Anderson (Author), Karen Anderson (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.5 684 ratings

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“A perceptive look at [the] Amazon founder’s annual shareholder letters, extracting 14 key ‘growth principles’ that [businesses] can use to scale up.” —Publishers Weekly

Jeff Bezos created Amazon, the fastest company to reach $100 billion in sales ever, making him the richest man in the world. Business owners marvel at Amazon’s success, but don’t realize they have the answers right at their fingertips as Bezos reveals his hidden roadmap in his annual letters to shareholders. For the first time, business analyst Steve Anderson unlocks the key lessons, mindset, principles, and steps Bezos used, and continues to use, to make Amazon the massive success it is today. Steve shows business owners, leaders, and CEOs how to apply those same practices and watch their business become more efficient, productive, and successful?fast!

“So much of what Steve Anderson has uncovered about Jeff Bezos and Amazon reminds me of the legacy of Walt Disney. Walt had a vision and made it happen; Jeff had a vision and made it happen; and you, too, can make your vision happen—and make it happen faster and easier using the principle’s Steve has laid out in The Bezos Letters.” —Lee Cockerell, former executive Vice President of Walt Disney World Resorts and author of Creating Magic: Common Sense Business Strategies from a Life at Disney

“If you ever wanted a manual for building and growing your business, this is it.” —Dan Miller, New York Times–bestselling author of 48 Days to the Work You Love

Editorial Reviews

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"Anderson, a professional speaker on tech and business, takes a perceptive look at Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s annual shareholder letters, extracting 14 key “growth principles” that both the large corporation and “solopreneur” can use to scale up. Asserting that, “in some form or another,” every principle can be found in each of the 21 letters issued to Amazon shareholders since 1997, Anderson begins with the intriguing “Encourage ‘Successful Failure,’ ” a point made by Bezos in explaining why he doesn’t regret high-profile flops like Pets.com. Principle 4, “Obsess Over Customers,” is illustrated by how Amazon pushed third-party merchants hosted on the site to prioritize customer care via its advocacy for “Frustration-Free Packaging.” Other principles include “Make Complexity Simple” (which led to Frustration-Free Packaging) and “Promote Ownership,” which involves the dramatic differences in mindset between an owner and a “tenant,” and the importance of getting employees to adopt the mindset of the former. Whether businesspeople can generate growth by adopting Anderson’s recommendations will have to be seen, but they should certainly enjoy the stories and observations he shares about one of the world’s most influential companies."

Anderson wants businesses to know their markets so that they can dominate their markets. He wants CEOs to know where to invest to create momentum that will sustain itself (a concept called the flywheel) and above all else he wants companies to take big swings that may or may not pay off. Because if they don’t pay off, there’s always another innovation. And if they do… well, that’s how the Jeff Bezos of the world are made.

For the budding entrepreneur, The Bezos Letters takes the framework of a company that took risks at every turn and even faltered at times and applies it to 14 indispensable principles that will transform your startup if applied properly.

Anderson knows the value of a calculated risk; reading this book is hardly a risk in itself. If you do pick it up, though, and your business grows into a powerhouse like Amazon, be sure to always remember the “early days.” - Jeff Daugherty, BookTrib ― Publishers Weekly

About the Author

Karen Anderson, M.S. is an author, publisher, and direct response marketer whose fingerprints are all over New York Times, USA Today, and other bestselling books. For the past 30+ years, she’s helped entrepreneurs and businesses clarify and communicate their messages, grow their businesses, and increase their reach using the power of a book. She grew up as an “insurance brat” and spent weekends with her dad looking behind buildings and parking lots checking for potential risks.

Steve Anderson has spent his 35+ year career helping the insurance industry understand, integrate, and leverage current and emerging technologies. From business management systems to social media, Steve analyzes what’s happening now and explains its implications for the future. He was invited to be one of the original 150 “thought leaders/influencers” on LinkedIn and has over 300,000 followers. Steve currently resides in Franklin, Tennessee.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07VD2XMHQ
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Morgan James Publishing (July 23, 2019)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ July 23, 2019
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 3796 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 263 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #359,657 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #430 in Business Motivation & Self-Improvement (Kindle Store)
- #482 in Motivational Business Management
- #1,033 in Business Leadership

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4.5 684 ratings

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Steve Anderson
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Steve Anderson, M.A., is a trusted authority on Risk, Technology, Productivity, and Innovation and has over 35 years of experience in the insurance industry. He holds a master’s degree in Insurance Law. Anderson is a professional speaker, consultant, and “futurist.” From business management systems to social media, Steve analyzes what’s happening now and explains its implications for the future. His speaking portfolio includes presentations on the future of technology, how businesses can leverage the online world, and how any business can assess and use strategic risk to their advantage. He was chosen to be one of the original 150 “thought leaders/influencers” on LinkedIn and has over 340,000 followers. Steve currently resides in Franklin, Tennessee.
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Mitch Axelrod

So much more than a book... really a “Trillion Dollar Business Blueprint”

Reviewed in the United States on August 7, 2019

Verified Purchase

The Bezos Letters is so much more than a book. It’s a “Trillion Dollar Blueprint” you can follow to start, grow and scale any business. Steve and Karen Anderson brilliantly frame out the letters into 4 “Growth Cycles” – test, build, accelerate and scale – and 14 “Growth Principles.”

They take us on a private behind the scenes journey of Amazon’s unprecedented success and shine a light on these trillion dollar principles that are “hidden in plain sight.”

The authors skillfully lay out the book so that each principle stands alone as its own chapter. You don’t have to read this linearly or sequentially. You don’t even have to finish the book… although you are cheating yourself if you don’t.

You can pick any Principle, read that chapter and apply it to your business… right now. Then come back for another.

What’s great is you get all the meat up front. Anderson highlights each of the 14 growth principles in Bezos’ original 1997 letter to shareholders. He provides thorough examples of how companies apply each of the principles.

His instructions about how to get the most from this book are so good they could stand alone as Principle 15. There’s even a simple info-graphic to follow.

He makes a key distinction between measuring traditional ROI and what he calls ROR - Return on Risk! This one insight is priceless. The nuggets in this book are too numerous to count.

If you divide Amazon’s $1 trillion valuation by 14 you get $71,428,571,428. I’m not suggesting each principle is worth $71 billion.

I am suggesting that if you integrate any one principle and it generates a fraction of what it has been worth to Amazon, it can fundamentally transform your business and enrich your life.

I would not be surprised if Anderson’s principles in The Bezos Letters impact the business world as Deming and Kaizen did. This will ignite a new wave of entrepreneurs eager to follow and implement these principles.

Read the Bezos Letters if you’re in business, want to start one or you simply want to learn the principles he used to build the worlds biggest marketplace. This book will deepen your business acumen and up your game.

Just don’t read this passively. Devour it. Deconstruct it. Highlight it and take notes. Then design or redesign your business using one or more of these principles as your new “Day 1!”

As they say all you need is one good strategy and tactic to change your game. The Bezos Letters provides 14 opportunities to find your one.

Disclosure: Steve and Karen Anderson are friends and colleagues for 30 years. I know the depth and strength of their work. That might bias me. It’s doesn’t alter or influence my review of this book. I’d be writing the same words if I didn’t know them.

Don’t take my word for it. Read this book and discover for yourself.

Mitch Axelrod
Author - The NEW Game of Selling™

2 people found this helpful

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Jesse Cole

Imagine the Impossible

Reviewed in the United States on March 24, 2020

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No book goes deeper into the mind of Jeff Bezos on how he created the most innovative and customer focused company of our time. Steve and Karen Anderson dissect every letter to break down steps that any company can implement to build a culture like Amazon. The book finishes with Bezos 2018 letter where he shares how Amazon has been Imagining the Impossible. With Bezos Letters, the tools were given on how to make the impossible practical.

This book will now become our next Book Club book for my team as a tool to inspire innovation, speed of decision making and even greater customer obsession. Ideas that stood out for me: betting little on big ideas, becoming the best place in the world to fail, the 70% rule to innovation, Type 1 vs Type 2 decisions and the Amazon hiring process to building higher standards in the workplace.

One of the key growth principles laid out in the book is to "make the complexity simple." Steve and Karen Anderson did just that in this book. What Amazon has done in every sector of their business is aboslutely remarkable, but this book has broken it down into practical action steps that can be implemented today. To be successful, every company needs to test and experiment like Amazon. As Steve and Karen share “Businesses don’t have the same amount of time today than they did, even a few years ago, to evaluate the risks and opportunities they face because not doing something is a bigger risk than doing something.”

"Bezos plays to learn," and every leader and company should do the same, starting with this book.

3 people found this helpful

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Ian Mann

Ian Mann's book reviews

Reviewed in the United States on April 1, 2020

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In July 1994, 30-year old Jeff Bezos left his job on Wall Street to start a little online bookstore called Amazon.com.
This decision was triggered by the fact that Web usage was growing at 2,300% per year! Additionally, an online bookstore with millions of titles was something that simply couldn’t exist in the physical world. Bezos’ plan, from the beginning, was to diversify the offering beyond books.
These are the bones of what has proven to be an extraordinarily brilliant strategy. Amazon is the fastest company ever to reach $100 billion in sales and now employs over 647,000 people!
I have long held the view that how a company is run is far more significant than its ‘strategic plan’. In fact, I titled my approach to strategy ‘Functional Strategy’ for this reason– because how you function is the key determinant of success. Full stop. (See my book, ‘Strategy That Works’.)
What makes this book so important for everyone who leads a business (the subtitle must be taken lightly,) is that it is an analysis of Bezos’ Shareholder Letters. These letters reveal his thinking from the start, and the principles on which this business is run. These are not leadership principles: leadership principles focus on people. These are growth principles that focus on the business as a whole.
The author has never met Bezos, and the 14 principles articulated in this book are borne out by his analysis of 21 Shareholder Letters (1997- 2018), when read as a single document.
I will focus on only three: Encourage successful failure; obsess over customers; and apply long-term thinking.
Bezos identified early in Amazon’s history that unless the company takes risks, invests in risks, and intentionally creates opportunities for ‘failure’, it would never grow big enough. The idea of a ‘successful failure’ is an essential part of his thinking and he intentionally built failure into his business model. He looks for ways not only to make it work, but also to make it worth it.
These ‘failures’ aren’t the result of incompetence or laziness. Amazon has an “intolerance for incompetence.” Rather, these failures are the inevitable result of not knowing what you cannot know in advance.
Applying this principle, Amazon lost major money in failures, some of which ultimately became successful. The team that created the Fire Phone, an attempt to create a phone and a convenient way to shop on Amazon, took the teachings of that failure and eventually put it into the Echo hardware and Alexa, a voice-activated virtual assistant, and that has generated billions of dollars of revenue.
zShops was a creative attempt to monetize Amazon’s large and growing platform by allowing third-party sellers to use it to sell their goods. Customers didn’t like the additional steps required, and zShops was closed as a failure.
However, the idea of allowing third parties to sell on Amazon would survive—and thrive into billions of dollars—as ‘Amazon Marketplace’. Launched in November 2000, it has experienced a meteoric rise. Now a third-party sellers’ item appears on the same page as an Amazon item to customers looking to buy something. On average, sellers pay Amazon about 15 percent of every item sold. The Amazon Marketplace has led to billions in sales.
Where people are unafraid of failure being career-limiting, creativity is accelerated.
Amazon’s customer obsession starts with the customer and works backward to obsess about how to earn and keep the customer’s trust. They chose as their focus “low prices, best selection and fast, convenient delivery “. The rationale for Bezos was that is difficult to imagine that ten years from now, customers will want higher prices, less selection, or slower delivery.
Bezos realized that one of the biggest obstacles keeping people from shopping online was the cost of delivery. So early on, Amazon offered free delivery on orders over $25. It was so successful Amazon bet heavily on and launched Amazon Prime – free delivery for subscribers. In 2018 it had more than 100 million members, and these members spent an average of $1,400 per year versus $600 per year for non-Prime customers.
In a 1997 Letter, Bezos wrote: “We believe that a fundamental measure of our success will be the shareholder value we create over the long term.”
Bezos owns the property in Texas where the first full-scale version of a ‘10,000 Year Clock’ is being housed. Unlike most clocks that tick at one-second intervals, this clock ticks only once a year. It has a century hand that advances once every 100 years, with a cuckoo that comes out once in 1,000 years.
For Bezos the clock is not just the ultimate prestige timepiece. Rather, it is a symbol of the power of long-term thinking. Wall Street doesn’t like long-term thinking, their timeframe is the next quarter’s results. As a consequence, a lot of pressure is exerted on quarterly earnings and monthly sales targets.
The famed investor Benjamin Graham said, “In the short term, the stock market is a voting machine; in the long term, it’s a weighing machine.” Bezos talks of Amazon having “our heads down working to build a heavier and heavier company.”
Long-term thinking allows Amazon to focus on metrics that matter, and these metrics are customers and revenue growth.
None of the 14 principles are Bezos ‘originals’, but that is not where the value lies. The real learning from this book is how seriously these 14 principles are applied in practice. Like the author, I am convinced that the 14 Growth Principles could help any business in any industry, provided they are applied with equal vigour.

Readability Light --+--- Serious
Insights High -+--- Low
Practical High +---- Low

*Ian Mann of Gateways consults internationally on strategy and implementation, is the author of ‘Strategy that Works’ and a keynote speaker.

20 people found this helpful

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Marcos A.

Ideias interessante para uma administração eficiente e prática

Reviewed in Brazil on March 7, 2023

Verified Purchase

Este livro traz visões interessantes sobre como são administrados os projetos na Amazon, a importância que o Bezos aplica ao "detalhamento das ideias" (six-page memos), além de muitos outros insights para o uso no dia a dia.

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Gabriela Casineanu

Powerful strategies!

Reviewed in Canada on April 29, 2022

Verified Purchase

No wonder why the Amazon company keeps getting stronger! The 14 guiding principles distilled by the author from Bezos’ letters to stakeholders throughout the years lay out a valuable blueprint that many businesses can draw upon (mine too). Bezos didn’t invent them all. But the way he put together and continued to implement them at Amazon, along with the results they brought, is so inspiring!

2 people found this helpful

linda

really informative

Reviewed in Germany on January 17, 2024

Verified Purchase

its a great book for students studying in business area. strongly recommended

Fabien Raynaud

Des principes à copier pour faire décoller sa boîte

Reviewed in France on February 20, 2023

Verified Purchase

C’est au travers de la culture Amazon, et de son fondateur Jeff Bezos, qu’on découvre tous les principes exposés dans cet ouvrage qui décrivent étape après étape comment tester, construire et faire grandir une idée. L’expérimentation est reine, et la vision long terme constamment présente. Le tout avec une efficacité maximale pour garantir une capacité d’exécution sans faille.
C’est toute cette stratégie que l’auteur nous fait découvrir pour comprendre tous les rouages de la formidable machine Amazon.
Un très bon livre, bien écrit, facile à lire, qui intéressera tous les entrepreneurs qui veulent réussir leur croissance.

A vous de lire maintenant…

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JK

Good reading.

Reviewed in Mexico on July 14, 2020

Verified Purchase

It’s a good read with good tips to apply a customer centric mindset albeit personally I would have wanted to see more use cases and insights on how Amazon actually uses Internally/ behind scenes the vast amount of technology they have developed over the years.

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