I watched the video. My sense is that now I don’t have to read the book. (And I don’t feel bad about that. For consultants, books are loss leaders.) I recommend the video to all of you (and, yes, some of you recommended it to me before, but I didn’t get around to it until a few days ago).

But I would be wary about getting overly awed by market capitalization numbers. For example, Galloway says that after Amazon announced that it was purchasing Whole Foods, Amazon’s market cap went up by more than the cost of the acquisition, and to Galloway this says that the acquisition was “paid for.” But having a higher stock price does not give Amazon more capital to deploy. It makes it cheaper to float new stock, but unless and until they do that, I do not think you can say that they acquired Whole Foods for nothing.

There is a disconnect between Amazon’s share value and its near-term profit prospects. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. To me, it looks like a consensual-hallucination Ponzi scheme. Galloway thinks otherwise. In any case, Amazon certainly refutes the notion that having to answer to shareholders necessarily creates “short termism.”

Speaking of consultants, I was a fan of Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersma’s taxonomy of firms that focus on operational excellence, customer intimacy, or product leadership. These are three strategies for creating advantage. Operational excellence means that you offer the best quality/price option. Think of Walmart. Customer intimacy means that you create lock-in relationships with customers. Think of your doctor or your dentist. Product leadership means that competitors cannot catch up with the improvements in your products. Think of Intel.

The claim of these consultants is that while a firm wants to try to be good at all three, there are trade-offs, so that the emphasis has to be on just one of the three. As an example of a trade-off, consider customer intimacy vs. operational excellence. If a big share of your business is “one-offs” to meet the peculiar needs of specific customers, this is going to compromise your operational efficiency.

Within that framework, where do the Four fit?

I’m not sure that any of them really has a customer intimacy strategy. Facebook wants to make it so that you cannot resist checking your feed all the time, and at some point that may require following a customer intimacy strategy. Right now, though, I think I would say that they are focused on product leadership.

Google strikes me as having a product leadership strategy. If they can create a product that is in the top tier in its category, then fine. But if it’s clearly never going to break into the top tier, then they’ll give up on it.

Apple, too, strikes me as having a product leadership strategy.

Amazon is the weird one. As Galloway points out, they seem to want to do everything. But it strikes me that the must-have for Amazon is operational excellence. Whether it’s the cloud service or the logistics for delivering goods from the producers to your doorstep, they cannot afford to get sloppy.

I’m not as convinced as Galloway that Amazon Echo and Alexa are such resounding successes that they prove that Amazon is also a product leadership company.