Quotes from Brad Stone

that, "as unlikely as this string of events is, we are evaluating options to make this case even less likely." After those incidents, employees had to write a

Whenever Jeff Bezos roamed a fulfillment center or his own Seattle headquarters, he looked for defects—flaws in the company's systems or even its corporate culture.

Type Relentless.com into the Web today and it takes you to Amazon.

I really can't say," the teacher replied. "Except that there is probably no limit to what he can do, given a little guidance.

Bezos announced that employees could no longer use such corporate crutches and would have to write their presentations in prose, in what he called narratives.

a small bike shop north of Phoenix, in Glendale, Arizona. It's called the Roadrunner Bike Center.

These were typically Amazonian names: geeky, obscure, and endlessly debated inside AWS, since according to an early AWS exec, Bezos had once mused, "You know, the name is about 3 percent of what matters. But sometimes, 3 percent is the difference between winning and losing.

Bezos didn't believe anyone could make a good decision about a feature or a product without knowing precisely how it would be communicated to the world—and what the hallowed customer would make of it.

Miller knew nothing about toy retailing, but in a pattern that would recur over and over, Bezos didn't care. He was looking for versatile managers—he called them "athletes"—who could move fast and get big things done. Miller was given

If you're not good, Jeff will chew you up and spit you out. And if you're good, he will jump on your back and ride you into the ground.

Wilke subscribed to the principles laid out in a seminal book about constraints in manufacturing, Eliyahu M. Goldratt's The Goal, published in 1984.

The Innovator's Dilemma, by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen. Christensen wrote that great companies fail not because they want to avoid disruptive change but because they are reluctant to embrace promising new markets that might undermine their traditional businesses and that do not appear to satisfy their short-term growth requirements.

Bezos liked to say that "good intentions don't work, but mechanisms do.

Your job is to kill your own business," he told him. "I want you to proceed as if your goal is to put everyone selling physical books out of a job.

At least one anointed bar raiser would participate in every interview process and would have the power to veto a candidate who did not meet the goal of raising the company's overall hiring bar.

Bezos insisted the company needed to master anything that touched the hallowed customer experience, and he resisted any efforts to project profitability.

For the first time, Amazon was spoken in the same breath as Google and Apple—not as an afterthought, but as an equal. It had blasted off into high orbit.

Dearest Amabot, If you only had a heart to absorb our hatred... Thanks for nothing, you jury-rigged rust bucket. The gorgeous messiness of flesh and blood with prevail!

maximizing the Internet's ability to provide a superior selection of products as compared to those available at traditional retail stores.

You've built this lovely castle, and now all the barbarians are going to come riding on horses to attack the castle," Bezos said, according to a former AWS exec who reports hearing the comment. "You need a moat; what is the moat around the castle?" (Amazon denied that Bezos said this.)

saw D. E. Shaw as a highly secretive hedge fund, the firm viewed

later published a trove of these documents, which revealed Amazon execs strategizing back in 2009 to run the company's diapers business at a loss to combat the company that operated Diapers.com, and to buy the internet doorbell company Ring in 2018—not for its technology, but to gain a dominant position in the market.

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In August 1997, Dalzell started his new job as Amazon's chief information officer and became a key member of the J Team.