Books Recommended by Jeff Bezos

Jeff Bezos is the founder, largest shareholder, President, and CEO of Amazon.com. He is also the man behind the growth of Blue Origin space venture, born in 2000. Starting off as an online bookstore, Amazon has grown into one of the world’s largest retailers. And much of that can be attributed to Bezos’ vision.

Here are 4 books Jeff Bezos recommends, with reviews from avid readers like me and you.

If you want to purchase any of the books listed below, click on the titles. They are affiliated links that will take you directly to the store.

The Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The first book that I read in the four-volume "Incerto" set by Nassim Kaleb was "Antifragile," so my reading of "The Black Swan" is out of sequence. However, I am glad that I came to it in its second edition, with footnotes addressing some of the criticisms made of it (tip: flip to the footnote as soon as you come across the symbol identifying it rather reading on to the end of the chapter where they are listed).

While highly relevant to the dismal science of economics, it is far from a dismal tome. Some of the anecdotes will have you chuckling or even laughing out loud! It is a highly stimulating and entertaining book and will particularly delight those who enjoy the debunking of wrong-headed purveyors of elaborate academic theories that are not just useless but actually harmful.

If this sounds like a book you might enjoy, be aware that the four-volume Incerto series is available as a set, something I found out too late to profit from the knowledge. I intend to purchase the other two volumes and recommend the set. His treatment of the devastating events known as Black Swans ought to be required reading for all who would like to avoid causing or experiencing them.

Data-Driven Marketing, by Mark Jeffery

The book Data Driven Marketing, portrays the difficult reality of the company leaders in managing the budget correctly. Therefore, the goal of this book is to give to the reader transparent metrics, tools, examples and a road map to actually do data driven marketing and apply marketing metrics in your organization. More advanced tools and techniques exist for linking marketing to sales.

According to the author, a marketing divide exists between organizations that do data driven marketing and use marketing metrics, and those that do not. It shows researches that firms that “keep score” for marketing have significantly better financial and market performance compared with those that do not.

The writer concentrates in 15 metrics that capture the most value for marketing. 5 for Nonfinancial metrics: Brand awareness, Test drive, Churn, Customer satisfaction (CSAT) and Take rate. Also, another 10 for Financial metrics: Profit, Net present value (NPV), Internal rate of return (IRR), Payback, Customer lifetime value (CLTV), Cost per click (CPC), Transaction conversion rate (TCR), Return on ad dollars spent (ROA), Bounce Rate and Word of mouth (WOM).

As an example, I’ll talk a little bit about the Brand Awareness: Measured by asking. A strong brand drives initial preference in a purchasing decision and enables a price premium over nonbranded products or services. Use nonfinancial metrics from surveys to track brand awareness and the impact of brand marketing. This is very important to position the brand within the desired level.

This book is focused to help the reader to master the latest analytical techniques while maximizing your Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI).

It gives us access to surveys with CMOs and CEOs of big and renowned companies, showing real data, metrics and results. These surveys make clear the differences between leaders and laggards. The leaders spend less on demand generation marketing and more on branding and customer equity and on infrastructure to support data driven marketing. As a result, leaders have significantly better sales growth and financial performance compared with laggards that spend more on demand generation marketing (marketing activities to drive revenues in relatively short time period, after marketing campaign).

The book also covers 5 main obstacles to data driven marketing:

1. Getting started (we don’t know how to start).

2. Causality (effect of campaigns and financial ROI).

3. Lack of data (not able to collect data for some reason)

4. Resources and tools (don’t have an infrastructure to support data driven marketing)

5. People and Change (don’t have people with skills, organization resistant to new ideas).

The writer covers the main metrics to radically improve marketing performance and also make it clear, that, financial metrics quantify more than 50% of marketing activities and when the financial metrics do not work, define marketing metrics that are leading indicators of sales.

Lean Thinking, by James P. Womack

Lean is a specific management technique to make an organization more efficient (and a private sector company more profitable). This book is a well written introduction to the subject. The authors, James Womack and Daniel Jones, provide lots of examples to illustrate their basic points. Thus, this is a very useful introduction to the subject, for those of us who are not experts on this matter.

To start at the beginning. . . . The enemy is "Muda," a Japanese word that means "waste," in all of its manifestations. Lean is an approach to reducing Muda. Pie in the sky? Toyota is one of the pioneers in this movement, and it is now the # 1 automaker in the world--so, maybe, we ought to pay some attention to the concept. As the authors note (Page 15): ". . .Muda is everywhere." And the antidote to muda is lean.

The Introduction itself does a nice job of laying out the key concepts of Lean. Then, each part of the book builds on that foundation. Key points: (1) Value. Value is defined by the ultimate customer. The problem? Corporations and other organizations often think that they know best and do not really understand what the end user wishes as value. As the authors note (Page 19): "Lean thinking therefore must start with a conscious attempt to precisely define value in terms of specific products with specific capabilities offered at specific prices through as dialogue with specific customers." (2) The Value Stream. This is the actions needed to bring (Page 19) ". . .a specific product (whether a good or a service. . .) through the three critical management tasks of any business." (3) Flow. Outline the step-by-step process by which goods and services are delivered and identify muda, so that waste can be reduced/eliminated. (4) Pull. Develop a process such that customers pull the product from the source/supplier. (5) Perfection.

Made in America, by Sam Walton

Good ol’ Sam Walton. During my university years, whenever I visit any book store this book will always be in the top 5 books there, if not the 1st. No matter if it’s the biggest Borders (don’t you just miss Borders?) or a tiny airport bookshop. But I always thought what could this book - one that is written by the owner of Wal-Mart - possibly teach me?

And throughout the years this book kept being mentioned by some of the brightest and most successful people as one of their main inspirations, a must read business classic, with the latest one (that I read) referred to by Jeff Bezos. So after more than a decade wondering, I finally decide to read the book. And what could it possibly teach me, someone who isn’t in the retail industry? As it turns out, quite a lot.

This book was written at the last few moments of Sam Walton’s life when he became ill, with him reminiscing about his journey in building his ultimate baby, the merchant giant Wal-Mart. And there’s so much to learn from this humble billionaire. First and foremost, there are many lessons about the business: on supply chain, logistics, accounting stuff, how to size up your competitors, how to expand, all the way to their choice of locations and addressing some of the infamous stigmas, such as the one that claim Wal-Mart kills small mom and pop stores, and provide answers that make perfect sense.