We are genuinely customer-centric, we are genuinely long-term oriented and we genuinely like to invent. Most companies are not those things. They are focused on the competitor, rather than the customer. They want to work on things that will pay dividends in two or three years, and if they don’t work…
Catalog
Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos (/ˈbeɪzoʊs/; born Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen; January 12, 1964) is an American engineer, technology and retail entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist who is best known as the founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Amazon.com, which is the world's largest online shopping retailer. The company began as an Internet merchant of books and expanded to a wide variety of products and services, most recently video streaming and audio streaming. Amazon.com is currently the world's largest Internet sales company on the World Wide Web. Bezos’s other diversified business interests include aerospace and newspapers. He is the founder and manufacturer of Blue Origin (founded in 2000) with test flights to space beginning in 2015, and plans for commercial suborbital human spaceflight beginning in 2018. In 2013, Bezos purchased The Washington Post newspaper. A number of other business investments are managed through Bezos Expeditions. With an estimated net worth of US$78.4 billion as of March 2017,Bezos is currently the third-richest person in the world just behind Bill Gates and Amancio Ortega in first and second places, and just ahead of Warren Buffet in fourth place. His rise to this position occurred after Amazon registered a 67% jump in share price. 2Early life and education Bezos was born Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen to Jacklyn (née Gise) and Ted Jorgensen in Albuquerque, New Mexic
Maintain a firm grasp of the obvious at all times.
I’m a big fan of all-you-can-eat plans, because they’re simpler for customers.
We are culturally pioneers. We like to disrupt even our own business. Other companies have different cultures and sometimes don’t like to do that. Our job is to bring those industries along.
Building a culture of high standards is well worth the effort, and there are many benefits. Naturally and most obviously, you’re going to build better products and services for customers – this would be reason enough! Perhaps a little less obvious: people are drawn to high standards – they help with…
We don’t do PowerPoint (or any other slide-oriented) presentations at Amazon. Instead, we write narratively structured six-page memos. We silently read one at the beginning of each meeting in a kind of “study hall.”
“Most people,” he said, “think that if they work hard, they should be able to master a handstand in about two weeks. The reality is that it takes about six months of daily practice. If you think you should be able to do it in two weeks, you’re just going to end up quitting.” Unrealistic beliefs on…
What do you need to achieve high standards in a particular domain area? First, you have to be able to recognize what good looks like in that domain. Second, you must have realistic expectations for how hard it should be (how much work it will take) to achieve that result – the scope.
Another important question is whether high standards are universal or domain specific. In other words, if you have high standards in one area, do you automatically have high standards elsewhere? I believe high standards are domain specific, and that you have to learn high standards separately in…
[H]igh standards are teachable. In fact, people are pretty good at learning high standards simply through exposure. High standards are contagious. Bring a new person onto a high standards team, and they’ll quickly adapt. The opposite is also true. If low standards prevail, those too will quickly…