Favorite business writing linked to - on Amazon (including Zappos)

With my having done half a dozen posts over the past few weeks on favorite business writing I've linked to, with each post containing links grouped under the subjects of writing on health care, venture capital, manufacturing and/or resource utilization, power generation and management, Tesla Motors / electric cars & Google (including Nest), this post is on great writing come across about another influential company in Amazon (including Zappos, which Amazon acquired in 2009):

"The Everything Book: Reading in the Age of Amazon" by Casey Newton for The Verge in Dec 2014 – on the company, it’s Lab126 in Northern California, the Kindle and Amazon’s influence on reading and books. Really a fascinating story that echoed points from the 2013 Brad Stone book The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, in particular that Amazon still begins meetings by having someone read a six-page narrative of what the meeting to discuss. Just such an interesting concept utilized at Amazon.

"Amazon's Drone Fleet Delivers What Bezos Wants: An Image of Ingenuity" by Brad Stone for Businessweek in Dec 2013.

"The Secrets of Bezos: How Amazon Became the Everything Store" by Brad Stone by Businessweek in Oct 2013 – excerpted from his book The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon.

"Amazonfresh is Jeff Bezos' Last Mile Quest for Total Retail Domination" by J.J. McCorvey for Fast Company in Aug 2013 – on the company and its efforts around the connected areas of same-day delivery and groceries. As McCorvey wrote in the piece, "it's the so-called last-mile problem--you can ship trucks' worth of packages from a warehouse easily enough, but getting an individual package to wind its way through a single neighborhood and arrive at a single consumer's door isn't easy. The volume of freight and frequency of delivery must outweigh the costs of fuel and time, or else this last mile is wildly expensive." Amazon has already been moving forward in this effort, with huge investments in warehouses (and willingness to no longer fight state sales taxes that typically get incurred with warehouse presence a state) as well as local delivery options that complete with existing carriers. As I read the piece by McCorvey, it looks as if Amazon building a hyper-efficient network around fulfillment of goods, just as they built networks around the cloud and running the websites of other companies with Amazon Web Services and networks around self-publishing with Kindle Direct Publishing.

"Why the Amazon Naysayers Should Be Scared" by Brad Stone for Businessweek in Apr 2012 – looks at the recent excellent financial results from the retailer, with improving margins while at the same time making large investments in infrastructure (facilities and people). Pretty interesting stuff from Stone that also makes reference to Amazon focusing efforts on publishing and the Kindle with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos recently saying that "16 of our top 100 bestselling titles are exclusive to our store."

"Amazon vs. Publishers: The Book Battle Continues" by Brad Stone for Businessweek in Apr 2012 – on Amazon wanting to move towards print-on-demand publishing and the traditional publishing houses fighting them.

"Las Vegas: Startup City" by Brad Stone for Businessweek in Feb 2012 – on Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh and his backing of development efforts in the area around headquarters for the Amazon division. It’s an interesting look at personal for-profit efforts that also have an altruistic bent.

"Amazon's Hit Man" by Brad Stone for Businessweek in Jan 2012 – details the new in-house publishing imprint at the web retail giant, with the concept having Amazon hold tighter control over book pricing and distribution by cutting out traditional publishing houses and signing agreements with the authors themselves. It’s an interesting approach led within Amazon by Larry Kirshbaum, the former head of Time Warner Book Group and has already resulted in agreements with Tim Ferriss, James Franco and Penny Marshall.

"Amazon, the Company That Ate the World" by Brad Stone for Businessweek in Sept 2011 – on the company's tablet entry, the Kindle Fire. The company as a whole has done a lot right over the years and early indications are that they've created a compelling offering.

"Why I Sold Zappos" by Tony Hsieh for Inc. in June 2010 – excerpted from his book Delivering Happiness and contains some fascinating info about the requirements of investors. This idea of running a company for shareholders brought to mind two different posts that I wrote which were less about stories I came across and more about my views, one I wrote in 2010 about running a public company (and which links to this piece by Hsieh) and one I wrote in 2012 about stock valuation.

Businessweek Pieces: on Amazon / Zappos / United Airlines & Hearsay Social

There was some interesting content from the last few issues of Businessweek starting off with the Jan 30-Feb 5 cover story.



Written by Brad Stone, "Amazon's Hit Man" details the new in-house publishing imprint at the web retail giant. Concept is for Amazon to hold tighter control over book pricing and distribution by cutting out traditional publishing houses and signing agreements with the authors themselves. Its an interesting approach led within Amazon by Larry Kirshbaum, the former head of Time Warner Book Group and has already resulted in agreements with Tim Ferriss, James Franco and Penny Marshall.

The Feb 6-12 issue as well featured an interesting cover story along with a few other pieces of note.



"Making the World's Largest Airline Fly" was a solid look at integration work out of the United-Continental merger. The piece was written by Drake Bennett and details the thousands of needed decisions around areas such as customer care systems and coffee to provide. Additionally, "Las Vegas: Startup City" is on Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh and his backing of development efforts in the area around headquarters for the Amazon division. Its an interesting look from Brad Stone at personal for-profit efforts that also have an altruistic bent. Also of note from this issue was the short piece "Clara Shih's Hearsay Social" on the writer behind The Facebook Era: Tapping Online Social Networks to Market, Sell, and Innovate. Shih was working at Salesforce.com is 2007, then built herself into a Social Media expert and in 2009, wrote her book and started the consulting company Hearsay Social... and more recently was named to the Starbucks board of directors.

Inc. Magazine - Zappos / TOMS Shoes / 37signals CEO... on how to hire

Never really have been an Inc. Magazine reader, but will likely become one after seeing a couple of good pieces from the June 2010 issue.



I decided to read Inc. after seeing a link on Twitter to the contained in this issue book excerpt "Why I Sold Zappos" from CEO Tony Hsieh. Compelling enough stuff that I went and got Hsieh's book ""Delivering Happiness" and posted about it here.

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Also from this issue of Inc. was "The Way I Work: Blake Mycoskie of Toms Shoes" about the CEO. It's an interesting piece that charts how the 33 year old founder spends his time. Mycoskie appears quite the fascinating guy who has built a growing company which is also doing good... as evidenced by it's policy of giving away a pair of shoes for each one sold. I found myself interested in his mention of being a reader of business biographies given that Mycoskie's personal story is one I'd want to read.

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One other compelling piece from this issue was from Jason Fried, the head of a software firm called 37signals. Titled "Never Read Another Resume", it's about Fried's views on staffing a company and has a couple really solid insights. The first is that someone hiring for a position should spend time actually doing that role. One reason is this helps ensure that the hire is based on actual rather than just perceived need for another resource. Additionally, this idea of a hiring manager doing the job being hired for helps determine exactly what's needed in someone.

Another insight from Fried is the driver behind the piece's title and all about cover letters. Idea is that they should be a bigger determiner in hiring decisions than actual resumes. Reason being that the cover letter reveals more about the applicant. In particular, the cover letter can reveal how well someone can write and how much they really want the job. To that end, Fried links to a website all about wanting to work for 37signals put together by a recent hire.

Solid and very interesting stuff.

"Delivering Happiness" by Tony Hsieh

Recently finished reading "Delivering Happiness" from Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh.



Good book... I wouldn't call it great, but definitely good and features insight into Zappos and the building of a company.

I first heard about the book from this extremely interesting Inc. Magazine piece from Hsieh titled "Why I Sold Zappos" (which I wrote about here). Regardless of whether or not someone reads the book, I recommend the Inc. story. Just an excellent tale of running a company in a desired way... and having to reconcile that with the interests of outside investors (which in this case were Venture Capital, but could also be shareholders of a public corporation).

From both the Inc. story and book, I've got quite a bit of respect for Hsieh and his approach... with additional credit going to the rest of the leadership at Zappos.


The book and what it covers

Hsieh was an extremely smart kid, and also one who had an interest at a young age in running businesses. His intelligence helped him get into Harvard and from there land a programming job at Oracle. After quickly becoming bored with corporate life, Hsieh quit to embark on running his own show.

What started out as a web design business turned into the banner ad company LinkExchange. Several months into the venture, Hsieh turned down half a million dollars for the company and then a few years later sold to Microsoft for $32M. Rather than remaining at Microsoft for a year to collect an $8M retention bonus, Hsieh realized he wasn't doing what he wanted and left the company.

He started an investment fund and early on put money into an online shoe website. Before long, the fledgling company reached a point of either failing or needing more investment. Hsieh then put in personal money and got actively involved in helping run things. It was certainly a struggle at times, but the company carried through.

If the first part of the book is the background of the author and what led to Zappos reaching it's current point, the second part is about many of the core beliefs that Hsieh and the other managements have made a part of Zappos. The evangelizing of Zappos was a bit much for my taste, but I can't take great exception with it... Hsieh believes in what he created at Zappos and wanted to write about that in this book.


Most interesting stuff for me

The decision was made to have Zappos be about the best customer service... as well as best workplace culture. I've written about these dual topics before and they're definitely easier said well than done well, but Hsieh seems to have genuinely built a company that tries hard to nail both goals.

This has been done through things such as a learning library of books that employees could borrow and more importantly, a general transparency within the company culture. Biggest manifestation of this openness is The Culture Book which is an actual unedited hardcover book with employees saying what the culture means to them.

I love this idea of an actual book with unedited content and this idea of transparency makes me think beyond just companies and to how the same openness can lead to effective writing (as I made note of in this review of "The Tender Bar" by J.R. Moehringer).

Back to Zappos... from reading the book (and particularly the Inc. Magazine piece), I think they probably made the best move possible with the Amazon deal, but suspect they would have preferred to continue on their own... which couldn't be done with Venture Capital investment looking to cash out and move on (an idea I wrote about in the same blog post in which I linked to the Inc. piece).

All in all, a good book about a guy that's built a solid company in what appears to be the best way he possibly could.

A Loss of Control: Running (or Hoping to Run) a Public Company

So... you start a company and want to run it a certain way... and take venture capital fund and go public. Sounds like a logical (though still challenging) goal.

However, there's a few different things I've seen lately that make me think about this idea of public companies (and ones that may hope to become public) and what's expected/required of their leaders.

In a Inc. Magazine book adaptation piece, Tony Hseih wrote "Why I Sold Zappos" about his perspective on what made the company and what then compelled him to agree to a 2009 sale to Amazon (with Hseih still running Zappos as an Amazon owned business).

In short, Hseih built Zappos on the belief that Zappos was primarily a customer service company... and the best way to have great customer service is to have really really satisfied employees. This belief came into some conflict, though, with Sequoia Capital... the source of some $50M in VC funding for Zappos. As a VC firm, Sequoia's charter (presumably) is to maximize return on investments and while satisfied employees can help grow a company, extraordinary expenses around things like employee development and health care can also reduce that return on investment.

It's not a knock on Sequoia, but I took from reading this article (which made me want to read Hseih's book) that the money they provided Zappos both helped fund the company's growth and prevented it's founder and CEO from running it how he wanted to.

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Also in this category of running a business (in this case one that's already public) was this DSCC (Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committe) ad against Senate hopeful Carly Fiorina:



As a Democrat (perhaps even a liberal), I hope that Barbara Boxer gets reelected and Forina defeated. Furthermore, as someone that worked at the company she was fired from, I heard a common refrain from people describing her as "great on vision and getting people excited, poor on execution" and don't think this experience (which is what she seems to hang her hat on) is enough to qualify her for work in the Senate).

This said, I viewed the ad as related to the Zappos piece in that Fiorina is criticized for getting tons of money from the company and laying off a large number of employees. While neither thing endears her to me, I don't view them as character flaws, but rather functions of good contract negotiating on her part and following the mandates of the market and board.

In terms of a mandate, she to my knowledge was basically required as the CEO of a public company to have her actions all be towards the ultimate goal of maximizing shareholder value... i.e. bumping up the stock price. One primary way to do that (at least in the short term) is to cut expenses through the form of employee headcount. Doesn't make it fun for the people being pushed out the door, but Fiorina could certainly make the argument that if laying people off looked to drive up the stock, she was compelled in her role as CEO to do so.

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Thinking about this topic reminded me of a book I was required to read upon starting business school over a decade ago. From Eliyahu Goldratt, "The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement" is told in parable form and makes the argument that a company exists for one reason... to make money. The concept is that if the company doesn't make money, then any altruistic purposes it may serve don't matter because a money losing company isn't a self-sustaining enterprise.

My thought from this is that the idea may well be true, but perhaps there's an additional statement that could be made about companies that are traded publicly. The presence of shareholders (whether they be of the public corporation or venture capital variety) often compel a leader to take on the singular goal of making as much money as possible. In most cases this is still a fine goal, but starts one down a slippery slope if that's neither the be all end all intent of the business or if the founder/leader wants to invest now in a fashion that shareholders don't agree with.

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One avenue that could be pursued to help a leader run a company in a certain way is benefit corporation status (as described in the BusinessWeek piece "New Legal Protections for Social Entrepreneurs"), but this is only going to be applicable in a limited number of cases.

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None of this unequivocally says that public companies or the people that work at them are bad places, but it does say to me that people either working at a public company or one aspiring to become public need to have their eyes open about what they're getting into.

Apple vs. Google, Zappos, & Salesforce.com BusinessWeek Pieces

Interesting cover story in the Jan 25 issue of BusinessWeek.

Titled "Apple vs. Google", the piece is about... well, that, and details how the prior close "work friends" have had their relationship move at least into the "frenemies" if not "enemies" status. This increased competition has come in the mobile space as Apple has entrenched themselves in the category with the success of the iPhone and Google has gone beyond simply the Android Operating System to now the Nexus One phone by Google. This competition is about much more than the hardware, but also poised for huge growth mobile ad market.

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In addition to the above piece about a couple of really good companies now battling it out, I wanted to link to a few additional BW articles about some interesting efforts from Zappos and Salesforce.com (well, from it's founder and CEO)...

From the Jan 11 issue of BusinessWeek came "Zappos Retails Its Culture" about efforts at the (recently purchased by Amazon) company to sell as a service it's management culture through an offering called Zappos Insights.

The Nov 30 issue featured a review of the book "Behind the Cloud" by Marc Benihoff... Salesforce.com CEO.

Fast Company 2009 "50 Most Innovative Companies" List

Interesting stuff from the March 2009 issue of Fast Company Magazine. With Jason Kilar of Hulu on the cover, the issue contains Fast Company's list of the "50 Most Innovative Companies" in the world.

Granted, a list such as this is compiled entirely at the discretion of Fast Company writers and staff, but in interesting nonetheless.

Some of what I found most interesting from the piece (with links to the FC write-ups!)...

* not that I don't find other companies from the list like Apple or Google to be interesting, but maybe I just now view their "innovativeness" as a given.

#1: Team Obama - pretty self-explanatory.

#3: Hulu - interesting in that it's the first example I've seen of someone making a professional video site (as opposed to YouTube whose content is largely populated by amateurs) work.

#5 & #7: Cisco Systems & Pure Digital Technologies (maker of the Flip video recorder) - I find each company interesting by itself... with Cisco's foray into the consumer and technology for sporting venue (yea, I made up the category name) markets and Pure Digital making an incredibly cool product with it's ultra simple and small camcorders. Now with the announcement of Cisco acquiring Pure Digital... that takes things a step further.

#9: Amazon - Amazon as a company appears to be at the forefront of two terribly innovative (and different) businesses. One is Cloud Computing where they rent out server space to other companies looking to store data and use Amazon computing power... putting them in the league of other tech heavyweights like Google, IBM and HP doing this. The second is with their Kindle electronic book reader... which looks like the best option anyone has put out to date for reading books electronically. The only solid competitor I've seen in this area is actually Apple, which offers various apps enabling the reading of books on the iPhone (which I posted about here).

#12: Hewlett-Packard - Particularly interesting to me with HP's focus on design (highlighted by the new Mini 1000 netbook computer) and touchscreen technology (highlighted by the Touchsmart PC).

#20: Zappos - From personal experience, it's a great place to locate hard to find shoes and a company that offers outstanding customer support.

Well, that's it for companies from the Top 50. There was also mention of some interesting companies that didn't quite make the aforementioned list:

- Ausra: solar energy
- Netflix: well, derr...
- Participant Media: Jeff Skoll's movie production company
- Twitter: microblogging
- Meebo: instant messaging across multiple platforms
- Ning: custom social networking
- Yelp: user-submitted reviews of businesses

Fortune Magazine 100 Best Companies to Work For

Fortune Magazine recently came out with it's annual "100 Best Companies to Work For" list and there's quite a few interesting views of the information.

The list itself can be found here (with the ability to select each company for a snapshot view) and a look at each of the 20 companies with over 350 job openings is here. There's also an interesting look at the online shoestore Zappos (#23 on the list) as well as info on the new #1 best company to work for... NetApp in Sunnyvale, CA.