Given how ubiquitous and pervasive Amazon is nowadays, one tends to forget its humble origin - that it has grown into this mammoth enterprise from an online bookstore. I picked this up because it comprises the letters @jeffbezos wrote to his shareowners from 1997 to 2019. As an English teacher who’s focused on imparting Purpose, Audience & Context in writing communications, I found this an insightful foray into the art of writing. Jeff Bezos sustains reader engagement sincerely by attributing to the outsized role of luck (letter 2015) and thanking everyone from customers to Amazonians to shareowners in his conclusion (letter 2001, 2008, 2016, etc). We know that storytelling is a great tool to humanize hard business - a technique he leverages to great effect in letter 2011 - but he does not shun away from explaining in laborious detail about some of the groundbreaking technologies that underpin Amazon’s products, concepts such as service-oriented architecture and machine learning. It’s thus intriguing how letters in more recent years never even went on to report figures and other statistical data that exemplify Amazon’s progress. Which does serve to back up his “heads-down focus on customers” (letter 1998).

Detractors of this book may point out that his letters to shareowners get repetitive and rehash the same points after a while. I agree with them but I think this predictable consistency with which he emphasises his business philosophies actually adds to the strength of this book. Like it or hate it, you can’t deny that Jeff Bezos presents a rock solid branding of himself and Amazon. I will end this with his trademark conclusion: It remains Day 1.¹