The better part of a decade ago, I read Brad Stone’s account of the history of Amazon, The Everything Store. I highlighted this passage, and Readwise has just served it back to me:

Communication is a sign of dysfunction. It means people aren’t working together in a close, organic way. We should be trying to figure out a way for teams to communicate less with each other, not more.

Reading this brought back a vivid memory of walking to work along London’s South Bank and contemplating this idea. It struck me as completely misguided: close joint working seemed involve frequent, easy communication.

Re-reading it today, I understand it completely and have gained an insight into why I previously struggled with it.

These days, some areas of my work are characterised by close, organic working relationships. Each of the teams involved understands their role and that of others. Communication between the teams is relatively frequent and easy, but also specific and targeted. The parts of the team that need to communicate to move the process along do so, like a well-oiled machine. And each part of each team has a well-honed sense of when to ‘shout’, expanding the circle of communication and raising a concern that different teams need to come together to solve.

A decade ago, nearly every area of my work was like that: my frame of reference for ‘communication’ wasn’t wide enough to understand what Stone was getting at. My focus was on improving the accuracy and quality of the communications, not on reducing the overall quantity.

These days, a much larger proportion of my working week is taken up by meetings where people talk about their areas of work in the hope that someone else on the call might be doing something similar or adjacent. My email inbox is filled with ‘newsletters’ with a similar intent. This is the opposite of working in a close, organic way. This is ‘communication’ that ought to be engineered out: an organisation in which this sort of communication doesn’t need to occur would be a much more functional entity. A decade ago, I simply didn’t know that this sort of unproductive communication existed, let alone that organisation often actively promoted it.

It turns out that communication is indeed a sign of dysfunction.

The image at the top of this post was generated by Midjourney.

The Everything Store, by Brad Stone, is appropriately subtitled Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon. I understand that the veracity of the content of this book has been challenged, particularly by Amazon, and I have no way of assessing where the truth lies. With that in mind, I can only comment on the book as it stands.

The Everything Store is so named as Bezos expressed a desire to use the internet to build a store with limitless stock, where one could purchase anything. On reading this, I was immediately struck by the similarity to Harrod’s motto and goal – omnia omnibus ubique – but this is an aspect that is not discussed at all in the book, more’s the pity. I think it would have made a fascinating comparison – the modern retail behemoth and the Victorian equivalent, sharing much the same goals but approaching the problem in totally different ways. But I digress.

Stone’s book gives a comprehensive account of how the company has developed, from it’s small beginnings as a low volume book store, to it’s current world-leading status. It isn’t shy about discussing the financial difficulties Amazon has faced, and indeed still faces. It is difficult to turn a profit on narrow margins, and even more so when one is selling below cost price. It also doesn’t shy away from discussing some of the questionable ethics employed by Amazon, and appears to do so in an even handed manner that is genuinely enlightening.

One particularly good example is the discussion of Bezos’s simultaneous exploitation of and protest against patent law. A lesser author would present this as rank hypocrisy; Stone presents the facts and explains Bezos’s motivation as he understands it. He then allows the reader to determine whether Bezos is acting with reprehensible hypocrisy, or acting in the most logical way possible given the circumstances. I still haven’t quite made up my mind.

The book also gives a comprehensive pen portrait of Bezos as an individual. He is clearly exceptionally driven, possibly to the point of fault, much like his CEO contemporary Steve Jobs. By the end of the book, I was a little tired of reading descriptions of his laugh, but perhaps it is such a dominant feature of his personality that it bears repeating ad nauseam.

To my mind, the book fell down a little when discussing contemporaries and other Amazon executives. The balance between detail and length doesn’t feel quite right in these passages. We are told about many of their childhoods, for example, even though they play a relatively minor role in the story. It feels as though Stone wants to share the detailed background research he has done, rather than concentrating on crafting the broader story and characterisation.

I also found the timeline difficult to follow in some passages. Stone will often abberate from the main timeline to tell the story of how a particular feature or policy developed over time. This means that there is a fair amount of jumping around, and if one doesn’t fully concentrate, it’s easy to get lost.

Overall, though, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It was engaging, balanced, and informative. The story is told with a degree of page-turning drive that isn’t typical of business books. I’d highly recommend it.

The Everything Store is available now from amazon.co.uk in hardback and on Kindle.