SOURCE · [063] · READING LIST
fs.blog/jeff-bezoss-reading-list/ ↗
Recommended by Jeff Bezos
On this list
10 BOOKs-
Creation: Life and How to Make It
Farnam Street notes Bezos made Grand's book required reading for the early AWS team; the primitives framing maps directly onto AWS's decomposition into storage, compute, bandwidth, messaging, and payments.
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Lean Thinking
James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones
Farnam Street lists Lean Thinking on Amazon's internal canon, paired with The Goal as the source for Amazon's shift from batch processing toward one-piece-flow fulfillment.
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Sam Walton: Made in America
Farnam Street, citing Brad Stone's The Everything Store, documents that Bezos pressed copies of Walton's autobiography on early Amazon hires with passages on borrowing competitors' best ideas already underlined.
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The Goal
Farnam Street, summarizing Brad Stone, reports that The Goal was the working bible of Jeff Wilke and the operations team that rebuilt Amazon's fulfillment network around bottleneck throughput.
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The Innovator's Dilemma
Farnam Street's list quotes Stone calling Christensen's book 'an enormously influential business book whose principles Amazon acted on and that facilitated the creation of the Kindle and Amazon Web Services.'
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The Mythical Man-Month
Farnam Street identifies Brooks's essays as the intellectual basis for Amazon's two-pizza team rule and the decentralized, service-owning org structure Bezos built.
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Memos from the Chairman
On the curated 'Jeff's Reading List' that Amazon executives read; fs.blog documents the list.
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Data-Driven Marketing
On the curated 'Jeff's Reading List' tied to Amazon's data-driven culture; fs.blog documents the list.
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Built to Last
Farnam Street notes Bezos has named Built to Last his favorite business book, and that Jim Collins later visited Amazon's campus to brief the executive team on the principles that became Good to Great.
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The Black Swan
Farnam Street's compilation explains that Bezos circulates The Black Swan to senior leaders because 'experimentation and empiricism trumps the easy and obvious narrative' — the worldview behind Amazon's willingness to absorb multi-billion-dollar failures.