The Amazon Way — 2nd Edition Released

by | Nov 16, 2016 | Blog

The second edition of The Amazon Way:  14 Leadership Principles Behind the World’s Most Disruptive Company was published by Clyde Hill Publishing.  Terry Jones, founder of Travelocity, founding chairman of Kayak.com and founder of Wayblazer.com wrote a new foreword for the book (see below).  I met Terry at a speaking event where we were both keynote speakers.  I’ve also included a new prologue, Lessons Learned Along the Amazon Way.  A new leadership principle, Learn and Be Curious, was also added.  I’ve posted the foreword below.  Enjoy!

I’m thrilled to have this edition published by Clyde Hill Publishing.

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Purchase The Amazon Way HERE

Foreword
by Terry Jones
Founder of Travelocity.com, Founding Chairman of
Kayak.com, Chairman of WayBlazer

We’ve all seen those ubiquitous company posters that pontificate about a company’s mission, yet it is clear to all that no one, including the CEO, has read them, much less lived them. Amazon is different. It inculcates its values in every meeting and in every process. They are the basis for its incredible success because they guide almost everything Amazon does. Consequently, The Amazon Way is an insightful look at a very rare beast indeed, an American corporation that actually lives its values. John Rossman didn’t “grow up” at Amazon but rather came from the outside and had to quickly get up to speed on Amazon’s “gladiator culture” and Jeff Bezos’s constant probing, questioning, and, yes, at times, screaming at his team. Through his experiences, you can learn how the team at Amazon obsesses over the customer, invents, simplifies, and thinks big while practicing frugality. He also explains how its values are supported by a microscopic set of measurements and well-defined service level agreements that instantly show when things veer off track. Being an innovative company means you can never stopinnovating. It means you must challenge the innovation that got you where you are today. Amazon faced a similar challenge when they decided to sell used books. A radical idea? Certainly. Did it upset the publishers who sold them books? Absolutely. But it was an idea that worked for consumers, and paved the way for Amazon to create a multibillion dollar third-party seller business.We made a similar decision at American Airlines with the creation of Travelocity. Although we had a multibillion dollarbusiness automating travel agents around the globe,we saw that future success required going direct to consumers with our own online travel agency. Travel agents were furious, but it was the right decision. Innovators who change industries are not always easy to work for. Rossman’s portrait of Bezos reveals him as an innovator who is as irascible and creative as Henry Ford or Steve Jobs but one who at the same time has created an empire as complex and efficient as Sloane’s GM or Crandall’s American Airlines. Having worked for Robert Crandall at American
Airlines, I understand a boss with a towering temper and fanatical attention to detail, one who will take a customer call at midnight to find a lost wedding dress and then put his team through the wringer to find the root cause for the loss of the dress in the first place. I also know how much I
learned from working for such a leader. Now you can learn from Bezos and Amazon and put those lessons to work.

Terry Jones is founder of Travelocity.com, founding Chairman of Kayak, and Chairman of WayBlazer. He’s worked in the travel industry for forty years. For the last ten years, he’s been speaking and consulting with companies on innovation and change.

Purchase The Amazon Way HERE

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