Jeff Bezos
"A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.""We've had three big ideas at Amazon that we've stuck with for 18 years, and they're the reason we're successful: Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient.""If you're competitor-focused, you have to wait until there is a competitor doing something. Being customer-focused allows you to be more pioneering.""You can have the best technology, you can have the best business model, but if the storytelling isn't amazing, it won't matter. Nobody will watch.""Your margin is my opportunity.""I strongly believe that missionaries make better products. They care more. For a missionary, it's not just about the business. There has to be a business, and the business has to make sense, but that's not why you do it. You do it because you have somethin""All businesses need to be young forever. If your customer base ages with you, you're Woolworth's.""In the old world, you devoted 30% of your time to building a great service and 70% of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts.""There are two kinds of companies, those that work to try to charge more and those that work to charge less. We will be the second.""We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details.""If you only do things where you know the answer in advance, your company goes away.""If you're long-term oriented, customer interests and shareholder interests are aligned.""A company shouldn't get addicted to being shiny, because shiny doesn't last.""All of my best decisions in business and in life have been made with heart, intuition, guts... not analysis.""Sometimes we measure things and see that in the short term they actually hurt sales, and we do it anyway.""We are comfortable planting seeds and waiting for them to grow into trees.""Friends congratulate me after a quarterly-earnings announcement and say, 'Good job, great quarter.' And I'll say, 'Thank you, but that quarter was baked three years ago.'""Day 2 companies make high-quality decisions, but they make high-quality decisions slowly. To keep the energy and dynamism of Day 1, you have to somehow make high-quality, high-velocity decisions.""We recently greenlit a particular Amazon Studios original. I told the team my view: debatable whether it would be interesting enough, complicated to produce, the business terms aren’t that good, and we have lots of other opportunities. They had a completel""We innovate by starting with the customer and working backwards. That becomes the touchstone for how we invent.""When [competitors are] in the shower in the morning, they're thinking about how they're going to get ahead of one of their top competitors. Here in the shower, we're thinking about how we are going to invent something on behalf of a customer.""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 musi""I very frequently get the question, “What’s going to change in the next ten years?” And that is a very interesting question; it’s a very common one. I almost never get the question, “What’s not going to change in the next ten years?” And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two, because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time.""Failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it's going to work, it's not an experiment.""I think frugality drives innovation, just like other constraints do. One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out.""There'll always be serendipity involved in discovery.""You have to be willing to be misunderstood if you're going to innovate.""If you double the number of experiments you do per year, you're going to double your inventiveness.""Invention requires a long-term willingness to be misunderstood. You do something that you genuinely believe in, that you have conviction about, but for a long period of time, well-meaning people may criticize that effort. When you receive criticism from we""One common pitfall for large organizations – one that hurts speed and inventiveness – is 'one-size-fits-all' decision making...The end result of this is slowness, unthoughtful risk aversion, failure to experiment sufficiently, and consequently diminished i""To get something new done you have to be stubborn and focused, to the point that others might find unreasonable.""If you decide that you’re going to do only the things you know are going to work, you’re going to leave a lot of opportunity on the table.""If you're watching your competitors, you're unlikely to invent a bunch of stuff on your own.""Me-too companies have not done that well over time.""Sometimes (often actually) in business, you do know where you’re going, and when you do, you can be efficient. Put in place a plan and execute. In contrast, wandering in business is not efficient ... but it’s also not random. It’s guided – by hunch, gut, i""No customer was asking for Echo. This was definitely us wandering. Market research doesn’t help.""Development of the Fire phone and Echo was started around the same time. While the Fire phone was a failure, we were able to take our learnings (as well as the developers) and accelerate our efforts building Echo and Alexa.""Staying in Day 1 requires you to experiment patiently, accept failures, plant seeds, protect saplings, and double down when you see customer delight.""Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow.""To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment.""Most large organizations embrace the idea of invention, but are not willing to suffer the string of failed experiments necessary to get there.""We take risks all the time, we talk about failure. We need big failures in order to move the needle. If we don't, we're not swinging enough. You really should be swinging hard, and you will fail, but that's okay.""We all know that if you swing for the fences, you’re going to strike out a lot, but you’re also going to hit some home runs.""The difference between baseball and business, however, is that baseball has a truncated outcome distribution. When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four. In business, every once in a while, when you step""If you're not stubborn, you'll give up on experiments too soon.""If you're not flexible, you'll pound your head against the wall and you won't see a different solution to a problem you're trying to solve.""If you never want to be criticized, for goodness' sake don't do anything new.""Companies are rarely criticized for the things that they failed to try. But they are, many times, criticized for things they tried and failed at.""We understand that and believe in failing early and iterating until we get it right. When this process works, it means our failures are relatively small in size (most experiments can start small), and when we hit on something that is really working for cus""When you look at something like, go back in time when we started working on Kindle almost seven years ago…. There you just have to place a bet. If you place enough of those bets, and if you place them early enough, none of them are ever betting the company""As a company grows, everything needs to scale, including the size of your failed experiments. If the size of your failures isn’t growing, you’re not going to be inventing at a size that can actually move the needle. Amazon will be experimenting at the righ""When you think about the things that you will regret when you’re 80, they’re almost always the things that you did not do. They’re acts of omission. Very rarely are you going to regret something that you did that failed and didn’t work or whatever.""You can have a job, or you can have a career, or you can have a calling. If you can somehow figure out how to have a calling, you have hit the jackpot, cause that’s the big deal.""If you can make a decision with analysis, you should do so. But it turns out in life that your most important decisions are always made with instinct and intuition, taste, heart.""Where you are going to spend your time and your energy is one of the most important decisions you get to make in life.""The smartest people are constantly revising their understanding, reconsidering a problem they thought they'd already solved. They're open to new points of view, new information, new ideas, contradictions, and challenges to their own way of thinking.""People who are right a lot listen a lot, and they change their mind a lot. People who are right a lot change their mind without a lot of new data. They wake up and reanalyze things and change their mind. If you don’t change your mind frequently, you’re goi""Life's too short to hang out with people who aren't resourceful.""In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story.""Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy -- they're given after all. Choices can be hard.""If I have three good decisions a day, that’s enough. They should just be as high quality as I can make them.""We all know that distinctiveness – originality – is valuable. We are all taught to “be yourself. What I’m really asking you to do is to embrace and be realistic about how much energy it takes to maintain that distinctiveness. The world wants you to be typi""You have to pay a price for your distinctiveness, and it’s worth it. The fairy tale version of ‘be yourself’ is that all the pain stops as soon as you allow your distinctiveness to shine. That version is misleading. Being yourself is worth it, but don’t ex""Luck plays an outsized role in every endeavor, and I can assure you we’ve had a bountiful supply.""We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.""The best customer service is if the customer doesn’t need to call you, doesn’t need to talk to you. It just works.""The balance of power is shifting toward consumers and away from companies… The right way to respond to this if you are a company is to put the vast majority of your energy, attention and dollars into building a great product or service and put a smaller am""We don't focus on the optics of the next quarter; we focus on what is going to be good for customers.""We invent before we have to. These investments are motivated by customer focus rather than by reaction to competition. We think this approach earns more trust with customers and drives rapid improvements in customer experience – importantly – even in those""One advantage — perhaps a somewhat subtle one — of a customer-driven focus is that it aids a certain type of proactivity. When we're at our best, we don't wait for external pressures. We are internally driven to improve our services, adding benefits and fe""Great innovations, large and small, are happening everyday [at Amazon] on behalf of customers.""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 protectiv""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 somethin""Good inventors and designers deeply understand their customer. They spend tremendous energy developing that intuition. They study and understand many anecdotes rather than only the averages you’ll find on surveys. They live with the design.""I’m not against beta testing or surveys. But you, the product or service owner, must understand the customer, have a vision, and love the offering. Then, beta testing and research can help you find your blind spots. A remarkable customer experience starts ""Just be patient. Let the game come to you. Don't rush. Be quick, but don't hurry.""You can't win unless you learn how to lose.""The gambling known as business looks with austere disfavor upon the business known as gambling.""The only way to prove that you're a good sport is to lose.""To me, it doesn't matter how good you are. Sport is all about playing and competing. Whatever you do in cricket and in sport, enjoy it, be positive and try to win.""What other people may find in poetry or art museums, I find in the flight of a good drive.""The doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will interest her or his patients in the care of the human frame, in a proper diet, and in the cause and prevention of disease.""To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.""Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.""I never did anything worth doing by accident, nor did any of my inventions come by accident""There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the labor of thinking.""I never did a day's work in my life. It was all fun.""Reflect on your present blessings, of which every man has many; not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.""We need never be ashamed of our tears.""Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won't work.""We don't know a millionth of one percent about anything.""Minds, like bodies, will often fall into a pimpled, ill-conditioned state from mere excess of comfort.""Faith, as well intentioned as it may be, must be built on facts, not fiction--faith in fiction is a damnable false hope.""If I find 10,000 ways something won't work, I haven't failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.""Train up a fig tree in the way it should go, and when you are old sit under the shade of it.""I do not know the American gentleman, god forgive me for putting two such words together.""As a cure for worrying, work is better than whisky.""If we all did the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.""Genius is one per cent inspiration, ninety-nine per cent perspiration.""Hell, there are no rules here-- we're trying to accomplish something.""Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits.""Subdue your appetites, my dears, and you've conquered human nature.""No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.""It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.""I never teach my pupils. I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn.""Gravitation cannot be held responsible for people falling in love. How on earth can you explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love? Put your hand on a stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with ""The ideals which have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth. The trite subjects of human efforts, possessions, outward success, luxury have always seemed to me contempti""Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish.""Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.""My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.""Laws alone can not secure freedom of expression; in order that every man present his views without penalty there must be spirit of tolerance in the entire population.""I never think of the future - it comes soon enough.""Imagination is more important than knowledge...""It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.""Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.""If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor.""Ethical axioms are found and tested not very differently from the axioms of science. Truth is what stands the test of experience.""If I had only known, I would have been a locksmith.""Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater.""Every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving.""Perfection of means and confusion of ends seems to characterize our age."
