The first is to be curious, passionately curious. Take Leonardo. In his delight-filled notebooks we see his mind dancing across all fields of nature with a curiosity that is exuberant and playful. (Location 83)
“I have no special talent,” Einstein once said. “I am only passionately curious.” That’s not fully true (he certainly did have special talent), but he was right when he said, “Curiosity is more important than knowledge.” (Location 88)
A second key trait is to love and to connect the arts and sciences. (Location 90)
People who love all fields of knowledge are the ones who can best spot the patterns that exist across nature. (Location 99)
Another characteristic of truly innovative and creative people is that they have a reality-distortion field, a phrase that was used about Steve Jobs and comes from a Star Trek episode (Location 103)
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One final trait shared by all my subjects is that they retained a childlike sense of wonder. (Location 114)
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That trifecta—humanities, technology, business—is what has made him one of our era’s most successful and influential innovators. (Location 126)
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To make the decision, Bezos used a mental exercise that would become a famous part of his risk-calculation process. He called it a “regret minimization framework.” (Location 205)
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“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.” (Location 212)
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“It formed a culture of customer service in every department of the company,” he says. “Every single person in the company, because we had to work with our hands so close to the customers, making sure those orders went out, really set up a culture that served us well, and that is our goal, to be Earth’s most customer-centric company.” (Location 254)
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“There has to be risk taking. You have to have instinct. All the good decisions have to be made that way,” he says. “You do it with a group. You do it with great humility.” (Location 300)
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I won’t list all of our failed experiments, but the big winners pay for thousands of failed experiments.” (Location 303)
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Eventually Bezos hopes to integrate the Amazon online store, Amazon Prime, Echo, and Amazon’s customer data analytics with the Whole Foods Market grocery chain, which Amazon bought in 2017. (Location 341)
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When he meets with the founder or chief executive of a company that Amazon is thinking of buying, Bezos tries to assess whether he or she is in it merely to make money or because of a true passion for serving customers. (Location 343)
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Bezos did some soul searching and, as always, relied on intuition as well as analysis. (Location 385)
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Focus on the long term. “It’s All About the Long Term,” (Location 406)
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Focus relentlessly and passionately on the customer. (Location 421)
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I constantly remind our employees to be afraid, to wake up every morning terrified. Not of our competition, but of our customers.” (Location 423)
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Avoid PowerPoint and slide presentations. (Location 434)
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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.” (Location 441)
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Hire the right people. “We will continue to focus on hiring and retaining versatile and talented employees,” (Location 448)
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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? (Location 451)
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“You can work long, hard, or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose two out of three.” (Location 454)
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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 we are working to build something important, something that matters to our customers, something that we can all tell our grandchildren about. Such things aren’t meant to be easy. (Location 589)
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We will have to make many conscious and deliberate choices, some of which will be bold and unconventional. Hopefully, some will turn out to be winners. Certainly, some will turn out to be mistakes. (Location 616)
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Our customers tell us that they choose Amazon.com and tell their friends about us because of the selection, ease-of-use, low prices, and service that we deliver. (Location 648)
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We’ll listen to customers, invent on their behalf, and personalize the store for each of them, all while working hard to continue to earn their trust. (Location 749)
Operational excellence: To us, operational excellence implies two things: delivering continuous improvement in customer experience and driving productivity, margin, efficiency, and asset velocity across all our businesses. (Location 768)
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One point worth emphasizing: the quality of customer experience a partner delivers is the single most important criteria in our selection process—we simply won’t build a partnership with any company that does not share our passion for serving customers. (Location 783)
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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.” (Location 822)
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We at Amazon.com remain grateful to our customers for their business and trust, to each other for our hard work, and to our shareholders for their support and encouragement. (Location 858)
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Until July, Amazon.com had been primarily built on two pillars of customer experience: selection and convenience. In July, as I already discussed, we added a third customer experience pillar: relentlessly lowering prices. (Location 886)
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If you could know for certain just two things—a company’s future cash flows and its future number of shares outstanding—you would have an excellent idea of the fair value of a share of that company’s stock today. (Location 912)
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One of our most exciting peculiarities is poorly understood. People see that we’re determined to offer both world-leading customer experience and the lowest possible prices, but to some this dual goal seems paradoxical if not downright quixotic. (Location 943)
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At Amazon.com, we use the term customer experience broadly. It includes every customer-facing aspect of our business—from our product prices to our selection, from our website’s user interface to how we package and ship items. The customer experience we create is by far the most important driver of our business. (Location 1004)
Among the most expensive customer experience improvements we’re focused on are our everyday free shipping offers and our ongoing product price reductions. Eliminating defects, improving productivity, and passing the resulting cost savings back to customers in the form of lower prices is a long-term decision. (Location 1017)
MANY OF THE important decisions we make at Amazon.com can be made with data. There is a right answer or a wrong answer, a better answer or a worse answer, and math tells us which is which. These are our favorite kinds of decisions. (Location 1162)
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Math-based decisions command wide agreement, whereas judgment-based decisions are rightly debated and often controversial, at least until put into practice and demonstrated. (Location 1200)
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The foundation of our decision-making philosophy was laid out in our 1997 letter to shareholders, a copy of which is attached: 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. We will continue to measure our programs and the effectiveness of our investments analytically, to jettison those that do not provide acceptable returns, and to step up our investment in those that work best. We will continue to learn from both our successes and our failures. We will make bold rather than timid investment decisions where we see a sufficient probability of gaining market leadership advantages. Some of these investments will pay off, others will not, and we will have learned another valuable lesson in either case. (Location 1203)
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You can count on us to combine a strong quantitative and analytical culture with a willingness to make bold decisions. As we do so, we’ll start with the customer and work backward. In our judgment, that is the best way to create shareholder value. (Location 1211)
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If we can identify a customer need and if we can further develop conviction that that need is meaningful and durable, our approach permits us to work patiently for multiple years to deliver a solution. (Location 1329)
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Working backward from customer needs often demands that we acquire new competencies and exercise new muscles, never mind how (Location 1334)
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uncomfortable and awkward-feeling those first steps might be. (Location 1335)
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we take these financial outputs seriously, but we believe that focusing our energy on the controllable inputs to our business is the most effective way to maximize financial outputs over time. (Location 1414)
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