Jeffrey Bezos is the founder, president, chief executive officer (CEO), and chairman of the board of Amazon.com. Prior to founding Amazon in 1994, he worked as a financial analyst for D. E. Shaw & Co. Time magazine named Bezos the Person of the Year in 1999. Jeff has shared his thoughts on business, leadership and startups in various interviews and business discussions.The following are some lessons shared.
- You know the business plan won’t survive its first encounters with reality. It will always be different.
- The reality will never be the plan, 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.
- A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.
- If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.
- 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.
- Cultures aren’t so much planned as they evolve from that early set of people.
- We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details…. We don’t give up on things easily.
- What’s dangerous is not to evolve.
- For intuitive decisions, on the other hand, you have to rely on experienced executives who’ve honed their instincts.
- If you look at our corporate culture, we’ve always had a customer obsession, and we’ve always been pioneering.
- We’ll ferociously manage the products we carry so that we sell only products that are profitable
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