According to a report this morning on AlJazeera, Jeff Bezos will step down as Amazon’s Chairman later this year.
Bezos founded the company thirty years ago as an online bookstore, disrupting the traditional world of book sales. Amazon has since gone on to become the world’s largest online retailer, selling almost everything you can imagine and disrupting convention every step of the way.
Jeff Bezos has been the power behind the company, as well as its public face, since the beginning. Clearly, then, Amazon is his legacy. I believe that in the interests of protecting that legacy in the future annals of business, he should write his own book now, as he prepares to hand over the reins of his company to others.
Yes, books about Amazon have already been written by others, but those authors can see the company’s story only from the outside. They can’t see how Bezos’ mind and talents shaped the company from his early vision of the world’s biggest bookstore to what it is today. Only Bezos can do that.
It’s also true that last November saw the publication of Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos, With an Introduction by Walter Isaacson. This book is just what it says: a collection of articles and letters to shareholders written by Bezos over a period of years. So yes, these are his thoughts and ideas. However, they were written at different times and for different purposes, and therefore contain only parts of the story.
A quick search on the Amazon site brings up several other books about the company and its founder: The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, The Bezos Letters: 14 Principles to Grow Your Business Like Amazon, Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives, and What the World’s Best Companies Are Learning from It, Jeff Bezos: Biography of a Billionaire Business Titan. There are probably more, but I stopped on the first search page.
The fact remains, though, that these books are not written by the person who most intimately knows how the story unfolded from the beginning.
In my work as an executive book coach, my clients often relate anecdotes they had almost forgotten, but which came back to them in our conversation because they made a point. Those can be very telling contributions to a story, and are often known only to the subject.
What Jeff Bezos needs to do is to write his own book now. That is how the world will know the true Bezos/Amazon story from his viewpoint. That is how he can preserve and safeguard his legacy.
Known as The Executive’s Book Coach, Helen Wilkie sees herself as a personal trainer for book writing. Through a combination of accountability and encouragement, together with her knowledge of the publishing world, she helps senior business people and professionals get their books written.