More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Jeff Bezos
Read between
December 28 - December 30, 2023
“Curiosity is more important than knowledge.”
People who love all fields of knowledge are the ones who can best spot the patterns that exist across nature.
“But the discipline of writing the plan forces you to think through some of the issues and to get sort of mentally comfortable in the space. Then you start to understand, if you push on this knob, this will move over here and so on. So, that’s the first step.”
“I’m always trying to figure out one thing first and foremost: Is that person a missionary or a mercenary?” Bezos says. “The mercenaries are trying to flip their stock. The missionaries love their product or their service and love their customers and are trying to build a great service.
We will continue to focus relentlessly on our customers. We will continue to make investment decisions in light of long-term market leadership considerations rather than short-term profitability considerations or short-term Wall Street reactions.
When forced to choose between optimizing the appearance of our GAAP accounting and maximizing the present value of future cash flows, we’ll take the cash flows.
It’s not easy to work here (when I interview people I tell them, “You can work long, hard, or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose two out of three”),
But there is no rest for the weary. I constantly remind our employees to be afraid, to wake up every morning terrified. Not of our competition, but of our customers.
As the famed investor Benjamin Graham said, “In the short term, the stock market is a voting machine; in the long term, it’s a weighing machine.”
Why focus on cash flows? Because a share of stock is a share of a company’s future cash flows, and, as a result, cash flows more than any other single variable seem to do the best job of explaining a company’s stock price over the long term.
Start with customers and work backward. Listen to customers, but don’t just listen to customers—also invent on their behalf.
We do work to pay attention to competitors and be inspired by them, but it is a fact that the customer-centric way is at this point a defining element of our culture.
We lower prices and increase value for customers before we have to. We invent before we have to. These investments are motivated by customer focus rather than by reaction to competition.
You can write down your corporate culture, but when you do so, you’re discovering it, uncovering it—not creating it. It is created slowly over time by the people and by events—by the stories of past success and failure that become a deep part of the company lore.
Some decisions are consequential and irreversible or nearly irreversible—one-way doors—and these decisions must be made methodically, carefully, slowly, with great deliberation and consultation. If you walk through and don’t like what you see on the other side, you can’t get back to where you were before. We can call these Type 1 decisions. But most decisions aren’t like that—they are changeable, reversible—they’re two-way doors. If you’ve made a suboptimal Type 2 decision, you don’t have to live with the consequences for that long. You can reopen the door and go back through. Type 2 decisions
...more
“Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day
Here’s a starter pack of essentials for Day 1 defense: customer obsession, a skeptical view of proxies, the eager adoption of external trends, and high-velocity decision making.
There are many ways to center a business. You can be competitor focused, you can be product focused, you can be technology focused, you can be business model focused, and there are more. But in my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of Day 1 vitality.
There are many advantages to a customer-centric approach, but here’s the big one: customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great. Even when they don’t yet know it, customers want something better, and your desire to delight customers will drive you to invent on their behalf. No customer ever asked Amazon to create the Prime membership program, but it sure turns out they wanted it, and I could give you many such examples.
Staying in Day 1 requires you to experiment patiently, accept failures, plant seeds, protect saplings, and double down when you see customer delight. A customer-obsessed culture best cr...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Speed matters in business—plus a high-velocity decision-making environment is more fun too.
never use a one-size-fits-all decision-making process.
most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70 percent of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90 percent, in most cases, you’re probably being slow.
Consider how much slower this decision cycle would have been if the team had actually had to convince me rather than simply get my commitment.
recognize true misalignment issues early and escalate them immediately.
One thing I love about customers is that they are divinely discontent.
I believe high standards are domain specific, and that you have to learn high standards separately in every arena of interest.
We don’t do PowerPoint (or any other slide-oriented) presentations at Amazon. Instead, we write narratively structured six-page memos.
(As a side note, by tradition at Amazon, authors’ names never appear on the memos—the memo is from the whole team.)
the four elements of high standards as we see it: they are teachable, they are domain specific, you must recognize them, and you must explicitly coach realistic scope.
It’s critical to ask customers what they want, listen carefully to their answers, and figure out a plan to provide it thoughtfully and quickly (speed matters in business!).
The biggest needle movers will be things that customers don’t know to ask for. We must invent on their behalf. We have to tap into our own inner imagination about what’s possible.
No customer was asking for Echo. This was definitely us wandering. Market research doesn’t help. If you had gone to a customer in 2013 and said “Would you like a black, always-on cylinder in your kitchen about the size of a Pringles can that you can talk to and ask questions, that also turns on your lights and plays music?” I guarantee you they’d have looked at you strangely and said, “No, thank you.”
AWS is also inherently more efficient than the traditional in-house data center. That’s primarily due to two things—higher utilization, and the fact that our servers and facilities are more efficient than what most companies can achieve running their own data centers.
A study by 451 Research found that AWS’s infrastructure is 3.6 times more energy efficient than the median US enterprise data center surveyed.
Reflect on this from Theodor Seuss Geisel: “When something bad happens you have three choices. You can either let it define you, let it destroy you, or you can let it strengthen you.”
it’s harder to be kind than clever.”
What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift; kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy—they’re given, after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you’re not careful, and if you do, it’ll probably be to the detriment of your choices.
MOST OF THE inventing we do at Amazon goes like this: somebody has an idea, other people improve the idea, other people come up with objections for why it can never work, and then we solve those objections. It’s a very fun process.
As a senior executive, what do you really get paid to do? You get paid to make a small number of high-quality decisions.
You need to be thinking two or three years in advance, and if you are, then why do I need to make a hundred decisions today? If I make, like, three good decisions a day, that’s enough, and they should just be as high quality as I can make them.
Traditionally, if you were a company and needed computation, you would build a data center, and you’d fill that data center with servers, and you’d have to upgrade the operating systems of those servers and keep everything running, and so on. None of that added any value to what the business was doing. It was kind of a price-of-admission, undifferentiated heavy lifting.
When you pioneer, if you’re lucky, you get a two-year head start.
When I meet with the entrepreneur who founded the company, I’m always trying to figure out one thing first and foremost: Is this person a missionary or a mercenary? The mercenaries are trying to flip their stock. The missionaries love their product or their service and love their customers, and they’re trying to build a great service. By the way, the great paradox here is that it’s usually the missionaries who make more money, and you can tell really quickly just by talking to people.
We had to switch from a business model where we made a lot of money per reader with a relatively small number of readers to a tiny bit of money per reader with a very large number of readers, and that’s the transition we made.
We live in a big democracy with lots of opinions, and I want to live in that world. I want to live in a place where people can disagree. What I want, too, is to live in a place where people can disagree and still work together. I don’t want to lose that.
In my view, if big tech is going to turn its back on the Department of Defense, this country is in trouble. That just can’t happen.
if I am energized at work, happy at work, feeling like I’m adding value, part of a team, whatever energizes you, that makes me better at home.
