"Birth of a Salesman"

Jeffrey Preston Bezos was 4 years old when he first arrived at his grandfather's cattle ranch in Cotulla, Texas. The Lazy G is a sprawling 25,000-acre spread in the southwest part of the state—an unspoiled habitat of mesquite and oak trees, the home of whitetail deer (popular among local hunters), wild turkeys, doves, quail, feral hogs and sheep.

Jeff's maternal grandfather, Lawrence Preston Gise, was a just-retired rocket scientist who was ready to trade in his missile research for the simple and demanding life at the ranch, and he wanted to share that life with his grandson. Until he was 16 years old, Jeff spent every summer there.

Keith Webb

Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com chairman and founder

At the ranch he learned to clean stalls, to brand and castrate cattle, to install plumbing and to handle other ranch-hand tasks. One day, his grandfather towed in a dilapidated D6 Caterpillar bulldozer with a stripped transmission. Fixing it would be tough: He would have to remove a 500-pound gear from the engine. No problem; he simply built himself a small crane. Jeff helped.

"One of the things that you learn in a rural area like that is self-reliance," Mr. Bezos said. "People do everything themselves. That kind of self-reliance is something you can learn, and my grandfather was a huge role model for me: If something is broken, let's fix it. To get something new done you have to be stubborn and focused, to the point that others might find unreasonable."

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In the summer of 1994, Mr. Bezos quit his job in New York as a vice president at the financial-services firm D.E. Shaw. He and his wife, MacKenzie, moved to Seattle to take advantage of the explosive growth of the Internet and to start Amazon. The company's original name, Cadabra, was nixed after someone misheard it as "cadaver."

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When the site first launched in 1995, everyone at the company was working until 2 or 3 in the morning, kneeling on a concrete floor, to get the books packed, addressed and shipped. Jeff Bezos in 1998, above.

Their first rental, a three-bedroom house in the suburb of Bellevue, cost $890 a month. Mr. Bezos chose it in part because it had one crucial requirement—a garage, so that he could boast of having a garage start-up like Silicon Valley legends from Hewlett-Packard on. The garage had actually been converted into a recreation room, but Mr. Bezos figured it was close enough.

The site was launched on July 16, 1995—just as masses of people started moving onto the Internet and before many competitors had created strong commercial sites.

Mr. Bezos moved the company to an industrial neighborhood that it shared with a needle-exchange program and a shuttered pawnshop. He had 1,100 square feet of office space on the second floor and 400 square feet in the basement to use as a warehouse. The desks were made from cheap doors, with sawed-off two-by-fours for legs. The warehouse could store just a few hundred books on their way from the distributor to customers.

Thanks to discounts of 10% to 30%, orders started coming in as soon as the site launched. At first, there were a half-dozen orders per day. One of the programmers set up the computers so that a bell would ring every time an order came in. A great novelty at first, it quickly got annoying and had to be turned off.

Charis Tsevis

Jeff Bezos

Three days after launch, Mr. Bezos got an email from Jerry Yang, one of the founders of Yahoo. "Jerry said, 'We think your site is pretty cool; would you like us to put it on the What's Cool page?' " Mr. Bezos later recalled. "We thought about it some, and we realized it might be like taking a sip from a fire hose, but we decided to go ahead and go for it." Yahoo put the site on the list, and orders soared.

By the end of the week, Amazon took in over $12,000 worth of orders. It was hard to keep up. That week, the company shipped just $846 worth of books. The following week brought in nearly $15,000 worth of orders, and the team was able to ship just over $7,000 worth of them.

At launch, the site wasn't even truly finished. Mr. Bezos's philosophy was to get to market quickly, in order to get a jump on the competition, and to fix problems and improve the site as people started using it. Among the early mistakes, according to Mr. Bezos: "We found that customers could order a negative quantity of books! And we would credit their credit card with the price and, I assume, wait around for them to ship the books."

During the first few weeks, everyone at the company was working until two or three in the morning to get the books packed, addressed and shipped. Mr. Bezos had neglected to order packing tables, so people ended up on their knees on the concrete floor to package the books. He later recalled in a speech that, after hours of doing this, he commented to one of the employees that they had to get knee pads. The employee, Nicholas Lovejoy, "looked at me like I was a Martian," Mr. Bezos said. Mr. Lovejoy suggested the obvious: Buy some tables. "I thought that was the most brilliant idea I had ever heard in my life," he said.

Despite what seemed to be a pathetically amateurish operation, Amazon grew up very quickly once it was launched. By October, the company had its first day logging in 100 book sales. In less than a year, it had its first hour with an order of 100 books. Word kept spreading, despite the fact that the company did virtually no advertising its first year. The one exception: Mr. Bezos hired mobile billboards to cruise by Barnes & Noble stores displaying the question, "Can't find that book you wanted?" along with Amazon's website address.

The company's customer service—which Mr. Bezos later called "the cornerstone of Amazon.com"—started with the founder himself answering emails. By 1999 it was manned by 500 representatives packed into cubicles and answering customers' questions.

The people handling these emails were generally overqualified and underpaid, with no experience in bookselling. Disaffected academics were popular because they were well-read and could supposedly help find books on a huge variety of topics. They were paid about $10 to $13 an hour, but with the possibility of promotions and stock options dangled before their glazed eyes. The best of them could answer a dozen emails a minute. Those who dropped below seven were often fired.

One customer-service manager recalled that, when the staff got a week and a half behind in answering emails—despite putting in 12-hour days, seven days a week—Mr. Bezos called her to complain. When she told him they couldn't work any harder, he came up with a solution: They dedicated one weekend to competing with each other to see who could get through the most unanswered emails.

During that 48-hour period, everyone worked at least 10 hours beyond their regular shifts. Each person was given a cash bonus of $200 for every thousand messages he or she could answer. It cleared out the backlog.

In the very early days, Mr. Bezos had employees pick out the 20 strangest titles sold every week and awarded a prize for the strangest. Some of the winners: "Training Goldfish Using Dolphin Training Techniques," "How to Start Your Own Country" and "Life Without Friends."

One of his more controversial early decisions was to allow customers to post their own book reviews on the site, whether they were positive or negative. Competitors couldn't understand why a bookseller would allow such a thing. Within a few weeks, Mr. Bezos said, "I started receiving letters from well-meaning folks saying that perhaps you don't understand your business. You make money when you sell things. Why are you allowing negative reviews on your Web site? But our point of view is [that] we will sell more if we help people make purchasing decisions."

Over time, Mr. Bezos's unusual management style began to develop. He's not always a "nice" CEO. He can inspire and cajole but also irritate and berate. He can see the big picture—and micromanage to distraction. He's quirky, brilliant and demanding.

One former executive recalled that, at an offsite retreat where some managers suggested that employees should start communicating more with each other, Mr. Bezos stood up and declared, "No, communication is terrible!"

He wanted a decentralized, even disorganized company where independent ideas would prevail over groupthink. He instituted, as a company-wide rule, the concept of the "two-pizza team"—that is, any team should be small enough that it could be fed with two pizzas.

From the beginning, Mr. Bezos was fanatical about squeezing from Amazon.com every incremental degree of usefulness. New features were often simple things, like 1-Click ordering—whose notorious patent was called by one law journal "probably the most memorable example of an unoriginal software patent." It forbids any other online retailer from using a one-click purchasing option without paying a royalty to Amazon.

An elderly woman once sent an email to the company saying that she loved ordering books from the site but had to wait for her nephew to come over and tear into the difficult-to-open packaging. Mr. Bezos had the packaging redesigned to make it easier to open.

He continues to try to improve the site. In June 2008, Amazon filed a patent application titled "Movement recognition as input mechanism." Customers may soon be able to make purchases simply by nodding their heads at their computer, Kindle or cellphone. Industry wags have dubbed it the "1-Nod patent."

Last December, word leaked out about another new patent, for a system that enables people who get gifts through Amazon to return them even before they arrive. If Aunt Mildred has a habit of sending unwanted gifts, the patent says, the site will include an option to "convert all gifts from Aunt Mildred." (The patent includes the name of the presumably fictitious relative.) It allows the receiver to track when the well-meaning relative buys a gift for him and to change it to something more desirable before it ships. Gift recipients can also apply other rules such as, "No clothes with wool."

The idea is not only to please fussy would-be gift recipients; it also could save Amazon millions of dollars in purchases that don't have to be exchanged. The patent lists Mr. Bezos as the inventor.

" The Collected Wisdom of Warren Buffett"

There is no greater advertisement for the potent combination of formidable intelligence, commonsense, consistency and self-discipline than Warren Buffett. Tap Dancing to Work, Warren Buffett on Practically Everything, 1966 – 2012, a collection of articles about and by Omaha’s most famous citizen, drawn from an archive of Fortune magazine that spans almost half a century, is a wonderful reminder of those virtues.

Disciples of Buffett who devour the shareholder letters that he sends to owners of Berkshire Hathaway stock, or who have read The Snowball by Alice Schroeder and The Making of an American Capitalist by Roger Lowenstein, will not be startled by anything in this compilation assembled by longtime Fortune writer (and Buffett confidante) Carol Loomis. Instead they will be reminded of the qualities that have made Buffett the most successful investor (as opposed to inventor or entrepreneur) in American history and a man whose pronouncements immediately appear on the front pages and are tweeted hither and yon.

Buffett has achieved the inconceivable as an investor. He is not just respected for his prowess (which might also be said of other investors whose achievements are far less significant) or admired for his approach (which could be said of far fewer) but his genial disposition and ready wit have helped him achieve the impossible: as an investor he is much loved. In all these articles it is hard to uncover a detractor (beyond perhaps a shareholder who disliked his support of the pro-choice movement) let alone a collection of people who harbor deep grudges or feel mistreated by him. Instead tens of thousands of Berkshire Hathaway shareholders make the annual pilgrimage to Omaha for the company’s annual weekend celebration of capitalism, during which Buffett and his partner, Charlie Munger, patiently answer questions for five or six hours with the stamina of thirty year olds rather than the octogenarians they allegedly happen to be.

Buffett, born during the year of the Great Crash, bought his first stock at the age of eleven and has never wanted to do anything else but invest. He has pursued this with the purposeful dedication usually associated with artists who work in the same studio for their entire life, or the writer who has employed (or at least used to employ) one typewriter for decades.

Buffett has been successful in part because of what he chooses not to do. He has not got side-tracked by the baubles of the 1% club: multiple homes (and wives); art collections; sports teams and society balls. Impatient with the world of non-profits and intimidated by the time required to intelligently give money away, hefamously delegated his philanthropic activities to his close friends, Bill and Melinda Gates. Buffett has been clear about what he likes: living in Omaha, sleeping in his own bed, driving an American car, traveling infrequently, eating burgers and ice-cream, drinking cokes, playing bridge and – buying stocks.

Berkshire Hathaway, despite a market value now approaching one quarter of a trillion dollars, is managed from a tiny office with a staff smaller than a soccer team’s starting roster. Buffett is not the slave to a corporate calendar jammed with the humdrum inanities of business life like performance assessments, facilities planning, analyst meetings, compliance training, budget reviews and travel. This leaves him time to read and think so that for Buffett the only real difference between a weekday and the weekend is that for for two days the markets are closed. Buffett is no fan of spreadsheets or reams of analytical mumbo-jumbo. Facts, a pen, a sheet of paper and an agile mind are his tools. He made a $3.5 billion profit some years ago after investing $500 million in PetroChina having only read its annual report.

Buffett is both an investor and first-rate manager. As an investor he has leavened the slant towards value espoused by his first mentor, Ben Graham, with an appreciation for the qualities of a first-rate business. While he began by buying bad businesses because they were cheap he later gravitated towards buying good businesses when they were cheap. That makes things much easier. He once bought portions of businesses but after the float generated by his insurance operations furnished him with the firepower, he began buying entire businesses. Those are now housed within Berkshire Hathaway and that is where his management skills are on display.

As the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett does what great leaders (and managers) do. He sets an ethical example for others to emulate; demonstrates a level of performance that his juniors can only aspire to; carefully picks people and designs their rewards; allocates capital and decides how much risk is prudent. But he doesn’t meddle, dwell on details that don’t matter or micro-manage. He readily admits that people inside the Berkshire Hathaway operating companies are far more versed in their businesses.

When Berkshire Hathaway’s interests are trampled upon or a CEO leads a good business into the muck, Buffett acts – no matter how much he dislikes confrontation. Just ask, among others, Doug Ivester, John Gutfreund, Richard Santulli (deposed heads of Coca Cola, Salomon Brothers and NetJets respectively); Irene Rosenfeld, CEO of Kraft, whose takeover of Cadbury appalled Buffett; or David Sokol, a senior Berkshire Hathaway officer, who blotted his copybook. When Buffett buys stocks, the interests of Berkshire Hathaway’s shareholders come first and his investments frequently contain preferential terms that only he can command. There is nothing he values more than the underlying value of Berkshire Hathaway which – on occasion – causes him to buy back stock as he has done recently. This lets his shareholders own more of the business they all cherish.

The reader of this compilation will be treated to Buffett’s views on topics dear to his heart. These include the lunacy of pension fund accounting; the tendency of investors to hunt in packs; the self-dealing ways of intermediaries and buyout firms (ludicrously now labeled private equity funds when they should be called public debt firms); the way in which securitization (the bundling of hundreds of different loans) conceals the seeds of destruction; the toxic nature of derivatives; self-serving annual reports; the crippling consequences of the federal deficit; and the legacy of the Wright brothers – billions of dollars lost in airline investments. Even the tartest of Buffett’s observations are coated in honeyed analogies. Best of all, Buffett’s lessons about complicated subjects are delivered in a way that a precocious 11 year old, contemplating his first stock purchase, can understand.

"5 Insider Tips for a Better Social Media Strategy"

1. Viral content on Twitter lasts longer than it does on Facebook. “When content goes viral on Twitter, you have an influencer picking it up and then another influencer picking it up and it trends that way,” said Kamdar, whose company tracks 3.5 billion page views from content and digital media websites. “On Facebook, you’re going to hit more people but the life cycle is going to be shorter.”

Speiser added that businesses shouldn’t “beg influencers” to re-tweet their content, but instead produce “tweets” that are likely have utility for their audience.

2. LinkedIn is emerging as a distribution mechanism for content. “Right now, what we see is that business and education related items tend to do really well on LinkedIn,” Kamdar said. “I think more and more traffic is going to be coming from LinkedIn, as they start to have their own organic content and push their own editorial strategies.”

3. Don’t ignore your search strategy. While Speiser’s company focuses on Twitter data and algorithms to help companies engage users, he said companies should still value search. “There’s no way I’m going to convince you to stop spending money on search because it works,” he said. Kamdar agreed: “For any website, there’s some SEO that you just need to do.”

4. The worth of an individual "like" is not a good measure. “If you don’t build your audience with the contextual intention for them to consume that type of content, the 'likes' work against you,” said Speiser. “The 'like' itself is hard to value because the way you got it matters more than the fact that you have it.”

5. Social data is only one piece of the puzzle. Because social functions have spread across all company operations, Kamdar said social media data should be married with other data to present the best opportunities for businesses. “You want to combine social media on the brand side with sales or on the media side with users,” he said. “Businesses should really try to build social data back into other areas of their organization.”