Editor’s note: This article was first published in August 2017. Bezos overtaking Bill Gates as the world’s richest man, with an estimated $90 billion, reflects late July 2017 and is no longer true.
Jeff Bezos has dethroned Bill Gates as the richest man in the world. Thanks to the rise in Amazon’s share price, Bezos’s fortune is currently estimated at $90 billion, and given how much growth is still expected from Amazon, it’s very likely that his fortune will keep growing at a dizzying pace.
Jeff Bezos owes his success to books in every sense. It was certain books that shaped his way of thinking, and, considering that his original business idea was selling books online (that’s what Amazon was at the start), we could say that the hours he spent reading were the best school the Amazon founder ever had.
In the biography The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (a book we recommend), author Brad Stone describes how books shaped Bezos’s leadership style and changed the way he thought, leading him to success.
Bezos’s books include a few autobiographies, business and technology reads and even a novel. According to Stone, these books have become required reading for Amazon executives.
1. How the Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In, by Jim Collins
A company’s decline can be detected, corrected and reversed. This book explains a series of stages we need to spot:
- Stage 1: hubris born of success
- Stage 2: undisciplined pursuit of more
- Stage 3: denial of risk and peril
- Stage 4: grasping for salvation
- Stage 5: capitulation to irrelevance or death
Better to be forewarned once we start a business.
2. Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation, by James Womack and Daniel Jones
This book explores how leading American, European and Japanese companies applied a set of “lean thinking” principles to cut costs while increasing their efficiency and creating value in the company in order to survive the 1991 recession, managing not only to avoid falling into crisis but to grow over the following ten years.
One of the go-to handbooks in the world of management.
3. The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement, by Eliyahu M. Goldratt
This book encourages companies to identify the biggest constraints in their operations and then structure the organisation to get the most out of those constraints.
According to Stone, this book has transformed large corporations and is highly recommended by business schools.
4. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Ironically, this book is about improbable events and about how big companies such as Facebook, Google and Amazon itself are black swans. Even so, as we’ve come to expect from Nassim, it’s a book I recommend.
5. The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro
This is Bezos’s favourite novel, and it was made into a film. It’s a first-person account by a butler who looks back on his time serving in the army during the First World War. It deals with the meaning of duty, the pursuit of greatness and the sacrifices that come with it.
(See: The 13 best finance and stock market books of all time)
6. Good to Great, by Jim Collins. The book is about running a business and how companies manage to build environments where employees who embrace the company’s core mission thrive.
7. Creation: Life and How to Make It, by Steve Grand
A video game designer argues that intelligent systems can be built from the bottom up if you design a set of primitive building blocks. This book influenced Jeff Bezos when he created Amazon Web Services.
8. The Innovator’s Dilemma, by Clayton Christensen
Michael Bloomberg once described this book as brilliant, and once again it’s a book that helped Bezos grow Amazon.
9. Sam Walton: Made in America, by Sam Walton
The autobiography of Sam Walton, founder of Walmart, a man with certain values that Bezos has built into Amazon’s corporate values.
Featured image: U.S. Department of Defense photo by Senior Master Sgt. Adrian Cadiz, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
