How to Lead: Wisdom from the World's Greatest CEOs, Founders, and Game Changers

With Prime, there were a couple of things. One of our board members, Bing Gordon, always wanted us to have a loyalty program. We were always wondering, “What could a loyalty program be?” A junior software engineer came up with this idea that we could offer people kind of an all-you-can-eat buffet of fast, free shipping. The finance team went and mo

Today you wouldn’t want to be in the PC business, right? That is actually the whole point of our reinvention. People associate tech with growth, growth, growth. But not all technology is high value. So that’s a key part of our reinvention, moving to areas where there’s profit, where there’s value.

I put a lot of my money into it, not because I thought the stock was cheap. I look at business like “I wear the jersey every day. I’m not a hired gun. I’m going to bleed for the company and give it everything I’ve got and then hand it off to someone else.” I don’t like people who work at a company and talk about it like it’s a third party. It’s not

For simplicity’s sake, I have divided the leadership experience of those in this book into six categories: Visionaries: Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Oprah Winfrey, and Warren Buffett Builders: Phil Knight, Ken Griffin, Robert F. Smith, Jamie Dimon, and Marillyn Hewson Transformers: Melinda Gates, Eric Schmidt, Tim Cook, Ginni Rometty, a

“If you’re willing to make all the trade-offs that you need to make, you can have it all.… There will be heartache, there will be pain, there will be some collateral damage underneath the surface. You have got to live with it.”

I did locate Amazon in Seattle because of Microsoft. I thought that big pool of technical talent would provide a good place to recruit talented people from. That did turn out to be true. So it’s not a complete coincidence.

I don’t think there’s an automatic rule that it’s seven years. When you look at the economy, you always look for the potholes. We did see potholes in 2007, in 2008, in leverage and mortgage. There are no real potholes there now. Fifteen million more people are working. Wages are going up. Stock prices are much higher than where they were. We need t

There’s a saying I like—I think about it in business a lot—“Success has a thousand parents, and failure is an orphan.”

At the time I was in college, the late 1980s, about 37 percent of college undergrads in computer science were women. We were on our way up, we thought, like in law and medicine. That has since dropped to about 17 or 18 percent. Now it’s on a slight uptick to 19 percent. One of the things I’ve learned about data and the data we collect is we think d