Elliot Ritzema

Month: June 2014

  • Tales from the Amazon: A Review

    Everyone who uses the Internet has heard of Amazon, a business that since its small Seattle beginnings has had the audacious goal of selling virtually everything it is possible to buy. However, not everyone is familiar with the story of how it grew to what it is today. Brad Stone’s The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon is a fascinating look at Amazon and its founder, moving from Bezos’s childhood, to his work at D. E. Shaw in New York, to the present day (actually fall 2013, so it doesn’t discuss the Fire TV or the Fire Phone).

    Perhaps what I found most interesting about the book was its presentation of the genealogy of some of Amazon’s cultural practices. For example:

    • Bezos has long admired Walmart founder Sam Walton, and incorporated Walmart’s values of frugality and a bias for action into Amazon’s own corporate values.
    • Bezos decided to have Amazon match their competitors’ lowest prices after meeting with Costco founder Jim Sinegal in 2001 (125).
    • Drawing on the concept of a virtuous cycle from Jim Collins’s Good to Great, Amazon sketched out its own version: “Lower prices led to more customer visits. More customers increased the volume of sales and attracted more commission-paying third-party sellers to the site. That allowed Amazon to get more out of fixed costs like the fulfillment centers and the servers needed to run the website. This greater efficiency then enabled it to lower prices further” (126).
    • Amazon’s embracing of disrupting technology in its development of the Kindle and Amazon Web Services can be traced to the influence of Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma.
    • Bezos believes using slide presentations in meetings can conceal lazy thinking, so Amazon employees present their ideas using six-page prose narratives rather than PowerPoint. New features and products have to be written up in mock press releases, ensuring that they are customer-focused (175-76).

    The book’s depiction of Amazon is not entirely positive. Especially in later chapters, it delves into the company’s tactics for gaining market share and forcing recalcitrant publishers to cooperate (e.g., “Amazon had an easy way to demonstrate its market power. When a publisher did not capitulate and the company shut off the recommendation algorithms for its books, the publisher’s sales usually fell by as much as 40 percent,” 243). Most of the book’s main subjects are still living and heavily invested in the company, so it is not surprising that it has been criticized—see the negative reviews by MacKenzie Bezos (Jeff’s wife) and Rick Dalzell (former Chief Information Officer at Amazon). On the other hand, Shel Kaphan, Amazon’s first employee, has reviewed it positively. I don’t envy the task Stone carved out for himself: it’s hard to tell the story of a company that is still at the height of its influence, and I suppose the full story will have to await the day that Bezos wants to tell it himself or authorize someone to do it. But I’m glad Stone decided to tell the story now, however incomplete it may turn out to be in retrospect.

    In the future, it will be interesting to see how Amazon balances its power with its customer focus. On the one hand, its hardball tactics with suppliers and competitors are usually explained as being in the interest of lowering prices, which are ostensibly for the benefit of customers. But on the other hand, while customers may like convenience and low prices, people often like to see themselves as righteous. In other words, people are not always ideal customers—self-interested actors who go for the low price every time. The more sinister the public perception of Amazon becomes, the harder it may be for people to do business with them in good conscience. How that actually affects Amazon’s bottom line (or not) remains to be seen.

  • Life Lessons from a Cartoonist: A Review

    If you have ever heard of Scott Adams, odds are you know him as the creator of the workplace comic strip Dilbert. You may not know (as I did not) that he has also written two philosophical novels as well as this foray into the self-help genre, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life.

    I read it because I thought the idea of a cartoonist writing an advice book was novel; perhaps he would have a unique and funny spin on the genre. Maybe there would be a few cartoons thrown in as well. It turned out that the book was not as funny as I thought. Also, while it was unique, it was not unique in a way that I particularly appreciated. The presence of a few cartoons throughout did meet my expectations, however.

    In chapters that vary wildly in length and subject matter (ranging from those that dispense fitness advice to those that narrate his struggle with a voice problem called spasmodic dysphonia), Adams doles out wisdom that he has picked up over the years. For example:

    * Create systems, not goals.
    * Get proficient in a broad range of skills, from business writing to proper voice technique.
    * Get your diet right so you can have enough energy.
    * Work toward having a flexible schedule so you can perform different tasks at the times when your mind is best suited for those tasks.
    * Failure is your friend if you can learn from it.

    A lot of the practical advice Adams gives is useful. However, I found that I disagreed with his worldview and his understanding of the nature and purpose of human life. First, he instructs his readers to see their basic nature as “moist robots” that “can be programmed for happiness if you understand the user interface” (65). This advice is helpful within limits; our diet and environment has a lot more to do with how we function than we sometimes understand. However, I think his understanding of human nature is unnecessarily reductionistic. (Also, many people are put off by the word “moist,” and so it would probably have behooved Adams to not include that word in one of the main messages of his book.) Second, he also writes, “My worldview is that every element of your personality, from your perseverance to your risk tolerance to your ambition to your intelligence, is a product of pure chance. You needed the genes you were born with and the exact experiences of your life to create the person you are with the opportunities you have. Every decision you make is a simple math product of those variables” (218). This is not only reductionistic but deterministic. Explaining why I disagree with this naturalistic determinism would go well beyond the purposes of this review. I only want to point out that if the above statement bothers you as it did me, this may not be the book for you.

    Here’s my final takeaway: Adams is very clever and has useful advice to give. Sometimes this advice is presented in a way and as part of a worldview that may be off-putting to some readers. Even if you fall into that category, you can still get a lot out of this book if you read it for the practical advice and leave the rest behind.

  • The Power of Weakness and Weakness of Power: A Review

    Malcolm Gladwell has become famous for writing entertaining and story-driven works of pop sociology beginning with The Tipping Point. I heard last year that he had returned to faith while writing his latest book, David and Goliath, so I was curious to read it and see if it was any different from his earlier writing. He has always attempted to draw lessons from stories, and in that way even his earlier books had a kind of sermonic quality. Would that be more evident this time around?
     
    The book comes in three parts. In the first, Gladwell argues that “the powerful and the strong are not always what they seem” (15). For example, Goliath was bigger and stronger than David, so he had all the advantages in hand-to-hand combat. But because David chose to fight him with artillery rather than at close range, David actually wasn’t as much of an underdog as we often think. In the second, he argues that “There are such things as ‘desirable’ difficulties’” (102). In other words, “advantages” are not always as advantageous as they seem, and “disadvantages” are not always as disadvantageous as they seem. The third part is about the limits of power and how the weak are more powerful than they seem, and so combines the lessons of the first two in a way. Each part is divided into chapters that tell the stories of individuals who illustrate these arguments. 
     
    I found the last two chapters particularly interesting in light of Gladwell’s return to faith, since one is about how a Canadian Mennonite family responded to their daughter’s murder, and the other is about how two pastors led the residents of the village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in sheltering Jews during World War II. This book is just as entertaining as his other writing, and I thought its themes were particularly well-developed. Perhaps I’m reading into it too much, but I thought there was more of an inspirational quality to this book that I hadn’t seen in his earlier writing.