The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone

It’s one thing to have a good idea, but it’s another to have confidence in a person to execute it, “Communication is a sign of dysfunction. It means people aren’t working together in a close, organic way. We should be trying to figure out a way for teams to communicate less with each other, not more.” Around that same time, Amazon filed for a patent on what it called its 1-Click ordering process. The system stemmed from a lunch Bezos had with Shel Kaphan and interface engineer Peri Hartman back in 1997, during which he declared that he wanted to make it as easy as possible for customers to buy things on the site. Hartman, a computer science graduate from the University of Washington, devised a system that preloaded a customer’s credit card information and preferred shipping address and then offered the opportunity to execute a purchase with a single press of a button when he or she ordered a product.

Bezos’s counterintuitive point was that coordination among employees wasted time, and that the people closest to problems were usually in the best position to solve them.