Ulysse Sabbagh

It’s one of the contradictions of life inside Amazon: The company relies on metrics to make almost every important decision, such as what features to introduce or kill, or whether a new process will root out an inefficiency in its fulfillment centers. Yet random customer anecdotes, the opposite of cold, hard data, can also alter Amazon’s course.

And:

Amazon has a few well-known peculiarities—the desks are repurposed doors; meetings begin with everyone in the room sitting in silence as they read a six-page document called a narrative. It’s a famously demanding place to work. And yet just how the company works—and what Bezos is like as a person—is difficult to know.

Here are two excerpts from the book THE EVERYTHING STORE: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone and published on Business Week. The rest of the story reveals some interesting tidbits about life inside Amazon.