Description
Amazon is the most extraordinary business story of our time. In 25 years, it's become a $280 billion multi-sector giant, and within 5 years, Amazon may be the biggest company in America. Behemoth, Amazon Rising explains how Amazon built five interlocking rings logistics, Amazon Prime, the Amazon Marketplace, everyday low pricing, and constant innovation. The rings work together to create a moat too deep to scale around Amazon's retail empire.
But Amazon is not just any company. It's brilliant, agile, cold, efficient, amoral, incredibly innovative, secretive, scary, seductive. It's entirely customer-obsessed - which is great for customers, but not necessarily for producers. And there is no end to Amazon's ambitions, as it marches into logistics, cloud services, publishing, groceries and much more.
That relentless growth will test us profoundly. Behemoth describes those challenges and shows how to handle them - if we are smart, committed, and prepared to match Amazon's long-term perspective with an equally bold vision of our own.
About the Author
Dr. Robin Gaster is president of Incumetrics Inc. (a data and program evaluation consultancy), a visiting scholar at George Washington University, and a nationally recognized expert on innovation and small business. Following a PhD from UC Berkeley and a BA from Oxford University, Gaster taught at the University of Virginia, and worked in the IMF board room. He was awarded a Congressional Fellowship. He has since developed a consulting business serving clients seeking to understand the intersection of technology, innovation, economics, and politics. Clients include thinktanks like Brookings and the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy; foreign governments (Sweden, Finland); big companies like Houghton Mifflin and Deloitte; firms with interests in specific sectors like education, publishing, and energy; and a host of smaller bespoke projects as well. His work has been published in Foreign Policy and the Atlantic, he edited a book on international telecommunications, and he has testified before Congress. In 2004, he joined a major project at the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine where he was lead researcher and principal writer on a multi-volume series of reports that became the gold standard for assessing US government innovation programs for small businesses. Dr. Gaster also started a local online information service in partnership with the Electric Power Research Institute, was CEO of a small software company that made business software, and partnered with Deloitte and Touche to build a cutting edge information service covering the internet and telecoms in the mid-1990s.
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