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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Jeff Bezos
Read between
August 15 - September 5, 2021
“Curiosity is more important than knowledge.”
Einstein
“A free market economy, which by necessity involves a lot of liberty, just happens to work well in terms of allocating resources,”
Jeff Bezos
I think the American Dream is about liberty.
Jeff Bezos
“It’s All About the Long Term,”
Bezos
“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.”
Bezos says. “We make money when we help customers make purchase decisions.”
I constantly remind our employees to be afraid, to wake up every morning terrified. Not of our competition, but of our customers.
The more frequently customers visit our store, the less time, energy, and marketing investment is required to get them to come back again.
Focus on cost improvement makes it possible for us to afford to lower prices, which drives growth. Growth spreads fixed costs across more sales, reducing cost per unit, which makes possible more price reductions.
To be sure, you may find reasons to shop in the physical world—for instance, if you need something immediately—but, if you do so, you’ll be paying a premium. If you want to save money and time, you’ll do better by shopping at Amazon.com.
Working backward from customer needs often demands that we acquire new competencies and exercise new muscles, never mind how uncomfortable and awkward-feeling those first steps might be.
we can assure you that we’ll continue to obsess over customers. We have strong conviction that that approach—in the long term—is every bit as good for owners as it is for customers.
unstructured descriptions, allowing customers to narrow
The most radical and transformative of inventions are often those that empower others to unleash their creativity—to pursue their dreams.
even well-meaning gatekeepers slow innovation. When a platform is self-service, even the improbable ideas can get tried, because there’s no expert gatekeeper ready to say, “That will never work!”
Failure comes part and parcel with invention. It’s not optional.
We want to be a large company that’s also an invention machine. We want to combine the extraordinary customer-serving capabilities that are enabled by size with the speed of movement, nimbleness, and risk-acceptance mentality normally associated with entrepreneurial start-ups.
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.
A remarkable customer experience starts with heart, intuition, curiosity, play, guts, taste. You won’t find any of it in a survey.
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!). No business could thrive without that kind of customer obsession.
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.”
Cleverness is a gift; kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy—they’re given, after all. Choices can be hard.
THE WAY YOU earn trust, the way you develop a reputation is by doing hard things well over and over and over.
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.
The most important factor for nimbleness is decision-making speed. The second-most important factor is being willing to be experimental. You have to be willing to take risks. You have to be willing to fail, and people don’t like failure.
Innovative people will flee an organization if they can’t make decisions and take risks. You might recruit them initially, but they won’t stay long. Builders like to build.
When it comes to competition, being one of the best is not good enough.
It is a huge advantage to any company if you can stay focused on your customer instead of your competitor. You have to identify who your customer is.
Unlike many other countries around the world, this great nation we live in supports and does not stigmatize entrepreneurial risk-taking.
Customer trust is hard to win and easy to lose. When you let customers make your business what it is, then they will be loyal to you—right up to the second that someone else offers them better service. We know that customers are perceptive and smart.
