Behemoth, Amazon Rising

Amazon is the most extraordinary business story of our time. In 25 years, it’s become a $280 billion multi-sector giant, and within 5 years, it may be the biggest company in America. Behemoth – Amazon Rising explains how Amazon built five interlocking defensive moats: logistics, Amazon Prime, the Amazon Marketplace, everyday low pricing, and constant innovation. Together, they let Amazon steamroll the competition.

But Amazon is not just any company. It’s brilliant, agile, cold, efficient, amoral, creative, secretive, incredibly innovative, scary, and seductive. It’s entirely customer-obsessed, which is great for customers but not necessarily for producers. And there is no end to Amazon’s ambitions, as it marches into logistics, cloud services, publishing, groceries, satellites, drones, and much more.

That relentless growth will test us profoundly. Directly, Amazon is becoming more powerful in new sectors every day. Indirectly, its tight focus and relentless ambition are also a model for modern managers and corporations. But there is steep to be price paid, in the massive collateral damage Amazon inflicts on partners, workers, competitors, and communities. 

Behemoth – Amazon Rising describes the challenges that Amazon presents, and shows how to handle them – if we are smart, committed and prepared to match Amazon’s long-term perspective with an equally bold vision of our own.

Bio:

Dr. Robin Gaster is president of Incumetrics Inc. (a data and program evaluation consultancy), a visiting scholar at George Washington University, and a nationally recognized expert on innovation and small business. Following a PhD from UC Berkeley and a BA from Oxford University, Dr. Gaster taught at the University of Virginia, and worked in the IMF board room. He was awarded a Congressional Fellowship. He has since developed a consulting business serving clients seeking to understand the intersection of technology, innovation, economics, and politics. Clients include thinktanks like Brookings and the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy; foreign governments (Sweden, Finland); big companies like Houghton Mifflin and Deloitte; firms with interests in specific sectors like education, publishing, and energy; and a host of smaller bespoke projects as well. His work has been published in Foreign Policy and the Atlantic, he edited a book on international telecommunications, and he has testified before Congress. In 2004, he joined a major project at the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine where he was lead researcher and principal writer on a multi-volume series of reports that became the gold standard for assessing US government innovation programs for small businesses. Dr. Gaster also started a local online information service in partnership with the Electric Power Research Institute, was CEO of a small software company that made business software, and partnered with Deloitte and Touche to build a cutting edge information service covering the internet and telecoms in the mid-1990s.