demurred

screed

vociferously.

nascent

embroiled

malapropisms,

Manber’s time at Amazon was productive in other ways too: after three years, he had more than twenty patent applications, several of which carried Bezos’s name too.

The Innovator’s Dilemma, by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen. Christensen wrote that great companies fail not because they want to avoid disruptive change but because they are reluctant to embrace promising new markets that might undermine their traditional businesses and that do not appear to satisfy their short-term growth requirements.

They agreed on five core values and wrote them down on a whiteboard in a conference room: customer obsession, frugality, bias for action, ownership, and high bar for talent. Later Amazon would add a sixth value, innovation.