Amazon

Teachings from the best in the business world

As an employee, you function mostly as a solitary unit. You do your part, produce your “output,” and the work is done. But as a manager (or more precisely, a leader—managers manage tasks, leaders lead people), everything changes. Your success is no longer about your own output, it’s about other people’s — the most important work you do is often what enables other people to do their jobs. But finding your way can be difficult. So in honor of National Book Month, here are three books that every leader should read to succeed.

High Output Management by Andy Grove

Key points: Grove’s book, reflecting on his time as Intel CEO in the 1970s, remains relevant today because of the basic principles it outlines: As a leader, you are an enabler of others. Your team’s performance, not your own output, is what you are judged on. Grove also shares five key things that should inform and govern your time: decision making, information gathering, information sharing, nudging and role modeling. If you are spending significant time doing things outside of those five key areas, it might be worth rethinking your schedule.

Best quote: “The art of management lies in the capacity to select from the many activities of seemingly comparable significance the one or two or three that provide leverage well beyond the others and concentrate on them.”

Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? Inside IBM’s Historic Turnaround by Lou Gerstner

Key points: Compared to High Output Management, which can read a little like a textbook, Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? is practically a thriller. Gerstner’s well-known memoir about the turnaround of IBM is a vibrant book on leadership during a challenging time. It’s about transformation. Gerstner touches on the importance of speed and a clearly communicated set of principles—especially across a company as large as IBM was at the time. Gerstner also talks about the issues big companies run into with mid-level talent: “People do what you inspect, not what you expect.”

Best quote: “I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn’t just one aspect of the game, it is the game. In the end, an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value.”

The Amazon Way: 14 Leadership Principles Behind the World’s Most Disruptive Company by John Rossman

Key points: This is by far the easiest read of the three in this post, but it’s also the most effective at providing prescriptive and actionable leadership advice. Rossman, a former Amazon executive, decodes a lot of the behind the scenes at Amazon and points to what is most important at a company that complex: decision making and ownership. The owner of a project or product doesn’t have to be the most senior person at the organization. In fact, it can be a very junior person. But this person is the sole person responsible for the project’s outcome.

Best quote: “Amazon.com employees quickly learn that the phrase ‘That’s not my job’ is an express ticket to an exit interview.”

Have your own favorite leadership books? I’d love to hear them—tweet at me @cschweitz.

Read next: 4 Biggest Myths About Being a Great Leader

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This NASA footage shows show dust from the Sahara winds up in the Amazon rainforest

Consolidation means would-be deal hunters must turn to new sites for savings

One of the ways the TV show The Americans makes it clear that it’s a period piece is by showing its Soviet spies working at a travel agency. Yes, those were indeed different times when a family could support a decent lifestyle by booking trips for tourists. When the web emerged in the 90s, travel agencies were one of the first to fall by the wayside.

A generation of web startups emerged helping travelers to quickly find the cheapest fares on their own PCs: Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz. Priceline offered its distinctive “name your own price” model before giving in and adopting the basic discount business model of the others. Meanwhile, independent travel agents in North America and Europe closed up shop.

After a while, consolidation became inevitable and it grew harder to differentiate between the myriad travel sites. A generation of younger startups like Kayak and Trivago emerged to improve on things, by offering meta-search engines that searched the travel search engines for deals that were getting harder to find. Airlines and hotels wised up to the game, inserting add-on fees onto their posted fares or offering deals available exclusively through their own sites.

In time, consolidation gobbled up the young startups: Priceline bought Kayak and Expedia acquired Trivago. Many of the older sites are still around , for anyone loyal to them–Travelocity, Hotels.com, Cheaptickets.com–only they’re owned by either Expedia and Priceline.

And earlier this month, when Expedia said it would pay $1.3 billion for Orbitz, it left basically two major online-travel sites. There are a few mid-sized travel companies remaining but some, like TripAdvisor, have seen their stocks rise on speculation that its shares could soon be in play.

For consumers, the trend probably isn’t a positive one. It may well make finding the best travel deals that much harder, now that there’s less incentive for Expedia and Priceline to compete with others for the best deals. The Justice Department may review the proposed Expedia-Orbitz deal for antitrust concerns. If regulators act to derail the transaction, Expedia will owe Orbitz $115 million, so Expedia has a strong incentive to see the acquisition go through.

In the meantime, competition from other web giants hasn’t really emerged. There have been reports that Amazon would enter the online-travel space in January, but they haven’t panned out yet, and Amazon’s plans may be as modest as some package deals as part of Amazon local. Google’s purchase of ITA hasn’t made it a huge presence in online travel, but it allowed it to create a spiffier interface for the same flight data that can be found on Kayak, Orbitz and others.

If there’s any hope for bargain-hunting travelers, it may come from the ever flowing emergence of new travel startups. The clearest example is Airbnb, the accommodation-rental marketplace that more than any other startup of the past decade has shown there’s still growth for new entrants. Airbnb was recently valued around $13 billion, or slightly less than the combined market value of Expedia and Orbitz and about a fifth of Priceline’s.

For airfares–or for hotels and vacation rentals that can’t be found in the lodging-sharing economy pioneered by Airbnb–there are mostly smaller players. HomeAway, which offers through VRBO.com and other sites vacation rentals that avoid Airbnb, has a $2.9 billion market cap. CheapOair and Skyscanner represent a new, more-meta kind of airfare engine that scours fares available to online travel agents.

In the end, consolidation may simply push budget-minded travelers away from the biggest companies and toward new startups that are figuring out new angles for finding travel values. Vayable, for example, connects travelers with locals who can act as tour guides, while Gogobot uses a social model to help tourists plan trips based on their interests.

And then there’s Flightfox. The San Francisco-based startup, sensing the difficulty of finding the best travel deals online in an era of consolidation, uses crowdsourcing to tap the expertise of others who know the tricks of finding deals. In a way, Flightfox has brought the online-travel industry back full circle to the traditional travel agent. After two decades of online travel sites, having a human book your itinerary may be the once again the best option.

It's not some new, slick gadget or big idea

With the bulk of the earnings season behind us, the stock market appears to be in a much better mood than it was a month ago. The S&P 500 is up 3.8% over the past month, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 is up an even healthier 5.9%. Tech, it seems, is a popular sector refuge in the sea of uncertainty facing 2015.

But a closer look at the tech earnings from the past month shows a more complex story as not all tech names are being favored equally. In fact, some of the companies that dished out disappointing forecasts were hammered hard. If there is one key trend that emerged from the recent parade of fourth-quarter earnings, it’s that 2015 is turning into a stockpicker’s market for tech shares.

This is in contrast to the past couple of years, when waves of enthusiasm or caution swept across the tech sector at large. Last year, for example, an early rally for tech led to concerns that another bubble would emerge–concerns that were quickly dispelled by a brutal selloff come April. By June, stocks were recovering, and the Nasdaq 100 ended last year up 18.5% and the S&P 500 up 11.8%.

One trend from 2014 that’s continuing into this year is the outperformance of larger-cap tech stocks. Smaller tech shares tend to do well in the several months following their IPOs, then have a harder time pleasing investors. A good example is GoPro, which went public at $24 a share in June, surged as high as $98 in October and and fell back to $43 last week in the wake of its earnings report.

GoPro’s post-earnings performance illustrates the selective mood of investors. The company blew past analyst expectations with revenue growth of 75% and higher profit margins. But the stock plummeted 15% the following day as analysts raced to lower price targets. Why? GoPro’s outlook was seen as too weak to support its lofty valuation and its chief operating officer was leaving.

That pattern played out in other smaller tech companies. Yelp slid 20% after its own earnings report that beat forecasts but that showed worrisome signs of slower growth and slimmer profits this year. Pandora fell 17% to a 19-month low after disappointing revenue from the holiday quarter. Zynga finished last week down 18% after warning this quarter will be much slower than expected.

What all of these companies also have in common are uncomfortably high valuations. Even after the post-earning selloff, GoPro is trading at 37 times its estimated 2015 earnings. Pandora is trading at 75 times its estimated earnings, while Yelp is trading at an ethereal 371 times. The S&P 500 has an average PE of just below 20.

So which companies did the best this earnings season? As a rule, it was big cap names serving the consumer market: Apple, Twitter, Amazon and Netflix. What these four companies have in common beyond strong earnings last quarter is that all were seen as struggling by investors during some or all of 2014.

Compare them to big-cap tech names that posted decent financials in the fourth quarter but that weren’t seen as struggling before, but instead were seen as thriving tech giants. Google, for example, is up 6% over the past month, while Facebook is up 1%. Both are enjoying steady growth that was so consistent with their past performance it has a ho-hum quality to it.

By contrast, Apple, which had been portrayed by critics as a gadget giant past its prime, has seen its stock rally 21% in the past month to a $740 million market cap, the first US company to be worth more than $700 billion. Amazon, which investors feared would suffer prolonged losses because of its expansion plans, is up 29%. So is Twitter, another object of investor worry in 2014. Netflix, a perennial target of bears, is up 40%.

So what have we learned about the technology sector so far this year? On the whole, investors are favoring tech stocks in a world of uncertainty – where negative interest rates have become bizarrely commonplace, and where the next market crisis could come from a crisis involving the Euro’s value, or China’s economy, or oil’s volatility, or Russia’s military aggression.

But at the same time, investors have grown more selective about the tech names they invest in. They might snap up hot tech IPOs, but they’ll drop them quickly if those companies can’t deliver over time. They prefer big tech, especially companies that cater to consumers. And if those tech giants can engineer a turnaround, they’re golden.

Drone operators would need to be at least 17 years of age

"We are committed to realizing our vision."

Amazon said Monday it remains committed to developing unmanned aerial devices to deliver products to customers, even as proposed federal regulations seemed to rule out the possibility of a drone delivery service.

The proposed rules governing small drones, released by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Sunday, would require that operators pilot the vehicles with “unaided vision” and would prohibit them from flying over people. Both seem to conflict with Prime Air, Amazon’s vision of flying automated drones to the homes of customers.

But Amazon said it would continue to work on drone deliveries while the FAA proposals were under consideration. “The FAA needs to begin and expeditiously complete the formal process to address the needs of our business, and ultimately our customers,” said Amazon executive for public policy Paul Misener. “We are committed to realizing our vision.”

A press release from the FAA announcing the regulations stressed that the agency “tried to be flexible in writing these rules.” The agency said it still seeking comment on the proposals, which are expected to take up to two years to become law, particularly the potential requirement that operators be able to see the craft they are operating.

“We want to maintain today’s outstanding level of aviation safety without placing an undue regulatory burden on an emerging industry,” said FAA Administrator Michael Huerta.

Amazon suggested that it would fight a regulation that effectively banned the service.”[We] are committed to realizing our vision for Prime Air and are prepared to deploy where we have the regulatory support we need,” said Misener.