Amazon Unbound

was a typical Bezos move—brilliant, and rather cruel.

His influence stemmed not from his 16 percent ownership stake but from twenty-five years of prophetic invention, strategic foresight, and disciplined management.

“principal engineers”: an elite squad of about a dozen technical wizards at the company who parachute into troubled projects to diagnose problems.

“Like a lot of things at Amazon, it was ready, fire, aim,”

The fifty-cent word “plenipotentiary” was used inside the team to describe what he wanted: an assistant invested with full powers to take action on behalf of users, like call for a cab or place a grocery order.

“Of all the services we added, it was the database portfolio that broadened AWS’s appeal,” said Taimur Rashid, a former AWS manager.

Jassy and his fellow managers asked searing questions of their underlings and hammered anyone without suitable answers or who didn’t embrace accountability for a problem within their purview.

“good intentions don’t work, but mechanisms do.”

Colleagues said he exhibited almost inhuman levels of discipline, sitting in meetings for ten hours a day and digesting dense and complex documents without flagging.