Business Quotes
If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you're competing against a lot of people. But if you're willingto invest on a seven-year time horizon, you're now competing against a fraction of those people... Just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavors that you could never otherwise pursue. At Amazon we like things to work in five to seven years. We're willing to plant seeds, let them grow-and we're very stubborn. We say we're stubborn on vision and flexible on details.
Focus on the big decisions. "As a senior executive, what do you really get paid to do?" he asks. "You get paid to make a small number of high-quality decisions. Your job is not to make thousands of decisions every day.
Starter pack of essentials for Day 1 defense: customer obsession, a skeptical view of proxies, the eager adoption of external trends, andhigh-velocity decision making.
One area where I think we are especially distinctive is failure. I believe we are the best place in the world to fail (we have plenty of practice!), and failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it's going to work, it's not an experiment. Most large organizations embrace the idea of invention but are not willing to suffer the string of failed experiments necessary to get there.
As a company, one of our greatest cultural strengths is accepting the fact that if you're going to invent, you're going to disrupt.
The missionary is building the product and building the service because they love the customer, because they love the product, because they love the service. The mercenary is building the product or service so that they can flip the company and make money. Position yourself with something that captures your curiosity, something that you're missionary about.
The Post is famous for its investigative journalism. It pours energy and investment and sweat and dollars into uncovering important stories. And then a bunch of websites summarize that [work] in about four minutes and readers can access that news for free. One question is, how do you make a living in that kind of environment? If you can't, it's difficult to put the right resources behind it. ... Even behind a paywall, websites can summarize your work and make it available for free. From a reader point of view, the reader has to ask, 'Why should I pay you for all that journalistic effort when I can get it for free from another site?'
I'd rather interview fifty people and not hire anyone than hire the wrong person.
As organizations get larger, there seems to be a tendency to use the heavy-weight Type 1 decision-making process on most decisions, including many Type 2 decisions. The end result of this is slowness, unthoughtful risk aversion, failure to experiment sufficiently, and consequently diminished invention. We'll have to figure out how to fight that tendency.
I constantly remind our employees to be afraid, to wake up every morning terrified. Not of our competition, but of our customers.
We hold as axiomatic that customers are perceptive and smart... But there is no rest for the weary.
It's not easy to work here, but we are working to build something important, something that matters to our customers, something that we can all tell our grandchildren about.
"You've worn me down" is an awful decision-making process. It's slow and de-energizing. Go for quick escalation instead - it's better.
Those quarterly results were fully baked three years ago. So today I'm working on a quarter that will happen in 2020, not next quarter. Next quarter is done already and it's probably been done for a couple years.
Our judgment is that relentlessly returning efficiency improvements and scale economies to customers in the form of lower prices creates a virtuous cycle that leads over the long term to a much larger dollar amount of free cash flow, and thereby to a much more valuable Amazon.com.
It's always worth asking, do we own the process or does the process own us? In a Day 2 company, you might find it's the second.
In my view, Amazon's culture is unusually supportive of small businesses with big potential, and I believe that's a source of competitive advantage.
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