Quotes About Innovation

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

Bezos proclaimed at the time, according to numerous employees: "Developers are alchemists and our job is to do everything we can to get them to do their alchemy.

In 2017, Amazon spent $22.6 billion on R&D, compared to Alphabet ($16.6 billion), Intel ($13.1 billion), and Microsoft ($12.3 billion).

Developers are alchemists and our job is to do everything we can to get them to do their alchemy.

There are two kinds of retailers: there are those folks who work to figure how to charge more, and there are companies that work to figure how to charge less, and we are going to be the second, full-stop," he

What we are doing here is building a giant rocket ship, and we're going to light the fuse. Then it's either going to go to the moon or leave a giant smoking crater in the ground. Either way I want to be here when it happens.

Walton described borrowing the best ideas of his competitors. Bezos's point was that every company in retail stands on the shoulders of the giants that came before it.

If somebody else can sell it cheaper than us, we should let them and figure out how they are able to do it.

Bezos even wondered aloud whether Amazon could hire college students on every block in Manhattan and get them to store popular products in their apartments and deliver them on bicycles.

It is far better to cannibalize yourself than have

Para mim, a Amazon é a história de um fundador brilhante que promoveu pessoalmente a concretização de sua visão", diz Eric Schmidt, presidente executivo do Google,

stubborn on vision, flexible on details

He also exposed them to a steady stream of Jeffisms: about one-way and two-way doors; how double the experimentation equals twice the innovation; how "data overrules hierarchy" and there are "multiple paths to yes"—an Amazonian notion that an employee with a new idea who gets a negative reaction from one manager should be free to shop it to another, lest a promising concept get smothered in infancy.

Later Bezos recalled speaking at an all-hands meeting called to address the assault by Barnes & Noble. "Look, you should wake up worried, terrified every morning," he told his employees. "But don't be worried about our competitors because they`re never going to send us any money anyway. Let's be worried about our customers and stay heads-down focused."15

The confluence of those three initiatives—in the fulfillment centers, and with AWS and the Kindle—vaulted Amazon back into the graces of Wall Street. In 2008, Amazon surpassed eBay in market capitalization and was beginning to be mentioned in the same breath as Google, Apple, and a new Silicon Valley upstart, Facebook.

Thus did Jeff Bezos become one of the original investors in Google, his company's future rival,

He was a ravenous reader, leading senior executives in discussion of books like Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma, and he had an utter aversion to doing anything conventionally. Employees were instructed to model his fourteen leadership principles, such as customer obsession, high bar for talent, and frugality, and they were trained to consider them daily when making decisions about things like new hires, promotions, and even trivial changes to products.

Bezos and other startup founders were reacting to lessons from previous technology giants. Microsoft took a top-down management approach with layers of middle managers, a system that ended up slowing decisions and stifling innovation. Looking at the muffled and unhappy hierarchy of the software giant across Lake Washington, Amazon executives saw a neon sign warning them exactly what to avoid.