Top 273 Quotes & Sayings by Jeff Bezos - Page 4

I've not seen an effective manager or leader who can't spend some fraction of time down in the trenches... If they don't do that they get out of touch with reality, and their whole thought and management process becomes abstract and disconnected.

When you are eighty years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices.

Are you lazy or just incompetent?

Read the Declaration of Independence to your children as a tradition every Fourth of July. Make sure they understand why the word "pursuit" precedes the word "happiness."

People loved their horses, too. But you don't keep riding your horse to work just because you love it.

I have a strongly held belief that one of the reasons that Amazon has been successful is because we do not obsess over competitors. Instead we obsess over customers.

In Seattle you haven't had enough coffee until you can thread a sewing machine while it's running.

It's harder to be kind than clever

If you look at academic studies, you can see that stock prices are most closely correlated with cash flow. It's such a straightforward number. Cash flow is what will drive shareholder returns.

The people who are right a lot often change their minds.

One of the things that I hope will distinguish Amazon.com is that we continue to be a company that defies easy analogy. This requires a lot of innovation, and innovation requires a lot of random walk.

Lowering prices is easy. Being able to afford to lower prices is hard.

Effective process is not bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is senseless process.

All businesses need to be young forever. If your customer base ages with you, you're Woolworth's.

I love my life. I love being an inventor.

If you're truly obsessed over customers, it'll cover a lot of errors.

If you're long-term oriented, customer interests and shareholder interests are aligned.

What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy - they’re given after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you’re not careful, and if you do, it’ll probably be to the detriment of your choices.

If we can keep our competitors focused on us while we stay focused on the customer, ultimately we'll turn out all right.

You have to use your judgment. In cases like that, we say, 'let's be simple minded. We know this is a feature that's good for customers. Let's do it.

Any business plan won't survive its first encounter with reality. The reality will always be different. It will never be the plan.

I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, ‘OK, I’m looking back on my life. I want to minimise the number of regrets I have.’ And I knew that when I was 80, I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. I knew that if I failed, I wouldn’t regret that. But I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. I knew that that would haunt me every day.

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.

I think if people read more, that is a better world.

You want to look at what other companies are doing. It's very important not to be hermetically sealed. But you don't want to look at it as if, 'OK, we're going to copy that.' You want to look at it and say, 'That's very interesting. What can we be inspired to do as a result of that?' And then put your own unique twist on it.

It's perfectly healthy-encouraged, even- to have an idea tomorrow that contradicted your idea today

I think one of the things people don't understand is we can build more shareholder value by lowering product prices than we can by trying to raise margins. It's a more patient approach, but we think it leads to a stronger, healthier company. It also serves customers much, much better.

We innovate by starting with the customer and working backwards. That becomes the touchstone for how we invent.

E-mail has some magical ability to turn off the politeness gene in a human being.

We're not competitor obsessed, we're customer obsessed. We start with the customer and we work backwards.

If there’s one reason we have done better than of our peers in the Internet space over the last six years, it is because we have focused like a laser on customer experience.

I never worked on the school newspaper.

My grandfather taught me that it is harder to be kind than it is to be clever.

We've done price elasticity studies, and the answer is always that we should raise prices. We don't do that, because we believe -- and we have to take this as an article of faith -- that by keeping our prices very, very low, we earn trust with customers over time, and that that actually does maximize free cash flow over the long term.

I'm going to go do this crazy thing. I'm going to start this company selling books online.

Not the outcome any of us wanted.

Our vision is every book ever printed in any language [fetched and viewable on our eBook Kindle device] in under 60 seconds.

I try to spend my time on areas that I think are important for the future, and where I think I can add value.

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 amount into shouting about it, marketing it.

People don't want gadgets, they want services.

Teachers, who are really good create that environment where you can be very satisfied by the process of learning. If you do something and you find it a very satisfying experience then you want to do more of it. The great teachers somehow convey in their very attitude and their words and their actions and everything they do that this is an important thing you're learning. You end up wanting to do more of it and more of it and more of it. That's a real talent some people have to convey the importance of that and to reflect it back to the students.

We are pioneers and the history of pioneers is not that good.

What characteristics do I look for when hiring somebody? That's one of the questions I ask when interviewing. I want to know what kind of people they would hire.

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

We change our tools and then our tools change us.

The world is littered with corpses that predicted technology in a particular arena was done. If there's another gigantic step change out there, we don't yet know what it is.

A lot of people – and I’m just not one of them – believe that you should live for the now. I think what you do is think about the great expanse of time ahead of you and try to make sure that you’re planning for that in a way that’s going to leave you ultimately satisfied. This is the way it works for me.

Market leadership can translate directly to higher revenue, higher profitability, greater capital velocity and correspondingly stronger returns on invested capital.

We watch our competitors, learn from them, see the things that they were doing for customers and copy those things as much as we can.

I don't buy stocks, I make stocks.

The Internet is disrupting every media industry...people can complain about that, but complaining is not a strategy. And Amazon is not happening to book selling, the future is happening to book selling.

Our garage was basically science fair central.

If you have a business model that relies on customers being misinformed, you better start working on changing your business model.

Am I going to regret leaving Wall Street? No. Will I regret missing the beginning of the Internet? Yes.

For every leader in the company, not just for me, there are decisions that can be made by analysis. These are the best kinds of decisions!

Part of company culture is path-dependent. It’s the lessons you learn along the way.

If you're going to invest in an Internet stock, you must be a long-term investor.

It’s very important for entrepreneurs to be realistic. So if you believe on that first day while you’re writing the business plan that there’s a 70 percent chance that the whole thing will fail, then that kind of relieves the pressure of self-doubt.

Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?

You don't chose your passion, your passion choses you