Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

by Jeff Bezos

Realizing that it was prudent to start with one product, he chose books—partly because he liked them and also because they were not perishable, were a commodity, and could be bought from two big wholesale distributors. And there were more than three million titles in print—far more than a bricks-and-mortar store could possibly keep on display.

“I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have,” he explains. “I knew that when I was eighty, I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. I knew that if I failed, I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. I knew that that would haunt me every day.”

“You know the business plan won’t survive its first encounters with reality,” he says. “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.”

Focus on the long term. “It’s All About the Long Term,”

“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.”

Focusing on the long term allows the interests of your customers, who want better and faster services cheaper, and the interests of your shareholders, who want a ...

long-term thinking permits innovation.

Focus relentlessly and passionately on the customer.

“The core of the company is customer obsession as opposed to competitor obsession,”

“The advantage of being customer focused is that customers are always dissatisfied. They always want more, and so they pull you along.

Avoid PowerPoint and slide presentations.

power of storytelling means that he thinks that his colleagues should be able to create a readable narrative when they pitch an idea.

Focus on the big decisions.

“As a senior executive,

“You get paid to make a small number of high-qu...

Hire the right people.

There are three criteria he instructs managers to consider when they are hiring: Will you admire this person? Will this person raise the average level of effectiveness of the group he or she is entering? Along what dimension might this person be a superstar?

we had served more than 1.5 million customers,

this is Day 1 for the Internet and, if we execute well, for Amazon.com.

saves customers money and precious time.

Amazon.com uses the Internet to create real value for its customers