Quotes from Brad Stone

counterintuitive decision by Bezos that confounded his colleagues and looked smart only with the passage of time.

if the potential employees made the mistake of talking about wanting a harmonious balance between work and home life, Bezos rejected them.

Bezos invested tens of millions of Amazon's cash in a variety of dot-com hopefuls, including Pets.com, Gear.com, Wineshopper.com, Greenlight.com, Homegrocer.com, and the urban delivery service Kozmo.com. In exchange for its cash, Amazon took a minority ownership position and a seat on the board for each, and the company believed it was well positioned for the future if those product categories succeeded on the Internet.

Unlike traditional retailers, Amazon boasted what was called a negative operating cycle. Customers paid with their credit cards when their books shipped but Amazon settled its accounts with the book distributors only every few months. With every sale, Amazon put more cash in the bank, giving it a steady stream of capital to fund its operations and expansion.14 The company could also lay claim to a uniquely high return on invested capital. Unlike

tactical advantages of low margins and low prices, in order to win points of market share

Most execs, particularly first-time CEOs who get good at one thing, can only dance what they know how to dance.

The Kindle wasn't an overnight success, of course, but an avalanche of publicity and its prominent placement at the top of the Amazon website ensured that the company would quickly run through its stock of devices.

They were all outraged," Grella said. "And then they fell into line

Just as Clayton Christensen had predicted in The Innovator's Dilemma, technological innovation caused wrenching pain to the company and the broader industry

É mais fácil inventar o futuro do que prevê-lo.

You don't feel thirty percent smarter when the stock goes up by thirty percent so when the stock goes down you shouldn't feel thirty percent dumber" Jeff Bezos

he had shown me how to do that maybe a dozen times before. But that was the time that it stuck

Every time we hire someone, he or she should raise the bar for the next hire, so that the overall talent pool is always improving,

John Doerr, the venture capitalist who backed Amazon early and was on its board of directors for a decade, has dubbed Amazon's miserly public-relations style "the Bezos Theory of Communicating." He says Bezos takes a red pen to press releases, product descriptions, speeches, and shareholder letters, crossing out anything that does not speak simply and positively to customers.

You know, people can complain about that, but complaining is not a strategy.

They agreed on five core values and wrote them down on a whiteboard in a conference room: customer obsession, frugality, bias for action, ownership, and high bar for talent. Later Amazon would add a sixth value, innovation.

Every company creates its own origin myth. It's a useful tool for expressing the company's values to employees and to the world and for simplifying and massaging history to give due credit to the people who made the most important contributions when it all started.

Any process can be improved. Defects that are invisible to the knowledgeable may be obvious to newcomers. The

Any process can be improved. Defects that are invisible to the knowledgeable may be obvious to newcomers. The simplest solutions are the best. Repeating

As part of his ongoing quest for a better allocation of his own time, he decreed that he would no longer have one-on-one meetings with his subordinates. These meetings tended to be filled with trivial updates and political distractions, rather than problem solving and brainstorming. Even today, Bezos rarely meets alone with an individual colleague.

Roseman also put it: "Autonomous working units are good. Things to manage working units are bad.

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.

It's a tale that describes a period in business history when the old laws no longer seemed to apply to the world's most dominant companies.

The development of Fiona set the stage for this new phase in Amazon's history and revealed the company as relentlessly innovative and disruptive, as well as calculating and ruthless. Amazon's