Brad Stone

An interviewer once asked Bezos why he was motivated to accomplish so much, considering that he had already amassed an exceedingly large fortune. I have realized about myself that I'm very motivated by people counting on me, he answered. 'I like to be counted on.

That May, he surveyed what was then Amazon's Hot 100 bestseller list and had an epiphany - why not rank everything on the site, not just the top sellers? I chought, "Hey, why do we stop at a hundred? This is the Internet Not some newspaper bestseller list. We can have a list that goes on and on,' he told the Washington Post. 'The notion was not only to create a new kind of taxonomy of popularity but also to give authors, artists, and publishers a better idea of how they were doing - and to cater to some of their more neurotie impulses. 'Bezos knew sales rank would be like a drug to authors,' says Greg Linden, an early Amazon engineer. 'He insisted that it change whenever a new order came in.'

Could a Wal-Mart-type story still occur in this day and age? My answer is of course it could happen again. Somewhere out there right now there's someone - probably hundreds of thousands of someones - with good enough ideas to go all the way. It will be done again, over and over, providing that someone wants it badly enough to do what it takes to get there. It's all a matter of attitude and the capacity to constantly study and question the management of the business.