我们
We have a vision of being the most customer-centric company on Earth.
I think we have a unique culture at Amazon that encourages both risk-taking and long-term thinking.
I ask senior leaders to not do anything unless they're willing to do it for 10 years.
When [competitors are] in the shower in the morning, they're thinking about how they're going to get ahead of one of their top competitors. Here in the shower, we're thinking about how we are going to invent something on behalf of a customer.
We innovate by starting with the customer and working backwards. That becomes the touchstone for how we invent.
We recently greenlit a particular Amazon Studios original. I told the team my view: debatable whether it would be interesting enough, complicated to produce, business terms aren't that good, we have lots of other opportunities. They had a completely different opinion and wanted to go ahead. I wrote back right away with 'I disagree and commit and hope it becomes the most watched thing we've ever made.' Consider how much slower this decision cycle would have been if the team had actually had to convince me rather than simply get my commitment.
'Jeff, what does Day 2 look like?' 'Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.' To be sure, this kind of decline would happen in extreme slow motion. An established company might harvest Day 2 for decades, but the final result would still come.
We are comfortable planting seeds and waiting for them to grow into trees.
Sometimes we measure things and see that in the short term they actually hurt sales, and we do it anyway.
We've done price elasticity studies, and the answer is always that we should raise prices. We don't do that, because we believe -- and we have to take this as an article of faith -- that by keeping our prices very, very low, we earn trust with customers over time, and that that actually does maximize free cash flow over the long term.
We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details.
There are two kinds of companies, those that work to try to charge more and those that work to charge less. We will be the second.
We've had three big ideas at Amazon that we've stuck with for 18 years, and they're the reason we're successful: Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient.
