The Secrets of Bezos: How Amazon Became the Everything Store

Amazon.com rivals Wal-Mart as a store, Apple as a device maker, and IBM as a data services provider. It will rake in about $75 billion this year. For his book, Bloomberg Businessweek’s Brad Stone spoke to hundreds of current and former friends of founder Jeff Bezos. In the process, he discovered the poignant story of how Amazon became the Everything Store.

Within Amazon.com (AMZN) there’s a certain type of e-mail that elicits waves of panic. It usually originates with an annoyed customer who complains to the company’s founder and chief executive officer. Jeff Bezos has a public e-mail address, jeff@amazon.com. Not only does he read many customer complaints, he forwards them to the relevant Amazon employees, with a one-character addition: a question mark.

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Jeff Bezos’s 7 Secrets to Running the Internet Retail World

For those people outside the Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) employee world (read: most of us), CEO Jeff Bezos remains somewhat of an enigma. The man is, of course, known for his ability to take an online bookseller and turn it into a multi-billion-dollar “Everything Store,” but few really understand the nature of the executive and what goes on inside the walls of Amazon’s Seattle headquarters that make it so wildly successful.

the following are Bezos’s business strategy and how he operates with his employees and competitors.

1. Bezos is Ruthless
2. Bezos Recruits Talent, Doesn’t Stand for Complacency
3. Bezos Inspires Fear in Employees
4. Bezos Relies on Consumer Anecdotes
5. Bezos Relies on Numbers
6. Bezos Employs Competitive Intelligence
7. Bezos Nukes the Competition

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Jeff Bezos's Top 10 Leadership Lessons

This story appears in the April 23, 2012 issue of FORBES magazine, accompanying the cover story, Inside Amazon’s Idea Machine.

With the passing of Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos is now tech’s leading philosopher-CEO. His advice ranges from what to read (give the Declaration of Independence a shot) to how to deal with stress (“Laugh a lot”). Mostly, though, Bezos sticks to business.

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Amazon.com's domain power play: We want to control them all

If Amazon.com gets its way -- and that's still a big "if" -- it will soon control 76 new domain extensions on the Internet. Most observers had expected the company to apply for .amazon and .kindle, but it seems that was just for starters: Amazon's ambitions also include a host of generic terms, including the likes of .free, .like, .game, and .shop.

Amazon is looking to nab a slew of compelling names, and if things unfold the way Amazon hopes, the outcome of this power play could reshape the world of Internet commerce -- at least as it relates to the behemoth that is Amazon. Here's the roster of terms Amazon is hoping to grab, excluding some non-Latin names:....

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