When Jeff Bezos created Amazon’s long-term strategy, a key element was a lower cost structure. So a cultural attentiveness to frugality made perfect sense. For a company like Apple, whose strategy depended on building the most beautiful, perfectly designed products in the world, frugality would have been counterproductive. In fact, John Scully nearly destroyed the company when he fired Steve Jobs for, in part, his lack of cost consciousness. Not every virtue fits every strategy. If you want to create strategic advantage by being the fastest-innovating company in the world, then Facebook’s
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