Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos, With an Introduction by Walter Isaacson

I constantly remind our employees to be afraid, to wake up every morning terrified. Not of our competition, but of our customers. Our customers have made our business what it is, they are the ones with whom we have a relationship, and they are the ones to whom we owe a great obligation. And we consider them to be loyal to us—right up until the seco... See more

There are three criteria he instructs managers to consider when they are hiring: Will you admire this person? Will this person raise the average level of effectiveness of the group he or she is entering? Along what dimension might this person be a superstar?

“The initial start-up capital came primarily from my parents, and they invested a large fraction of their life savings in what became Amazon.com,” Bezos says. “That was a very bold and trusting thing for them to do.”

“We believe that it’s technology married with the humanities that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.” Einstein, likewise, realized how important it is to interweave the arts and the sciences. When he felt stymied in his quest for the theory of general relativity, he would pull out his violin and play Mozart, saying that the music helpe... See more

WE PAY VERY competitive compensation at Amazon, but we have not created that kind of country club culture where you get free massages and whatever the perks of the moment are. And I have always had a bit of skepticism about those kinds of perks because I always worry that people will stay with a company for the wrong reasons. You want people to sta... See more

Avoid PowerPoint and slide presentations. This is a maxim that Steve Jobs also followed. Bezos’s belief in the power of storytelling means that he thinks that his colleagues should be able to create a readable narrative when they pitch an idea. “We don’t do PowerPoint (or any other slide-oriented) presentations at Amazon,” he wrote in a recent shar... See more

“We’ve made mistakes, doozies like the Fire Phone and many other things that just didn’t work out. I won’t list all of our failed experiments, but the big winners pay for thousands of failed experiments.”

How do you hire great people and keep them from leaving? By giving them, first of all, a great mission—something that has real purpose, that has meaning. People want meaning in their lives. And this is a giant advantage that the US military has because its people have a real mission. They have meaning.

“We will continue to make investment decisions in light of long-term market leadership considerations rather than short-term profitability considerations or short-term Wall Street reactions.” Focusing on the long term allows the interests of your customers, who want better and faster services cheaper, and the interests of your shareholders, who wan... See more