Jeff Bezos on Planning Quotes

"Everything we do starts with the customer and works backward."

"Working backwards from customer needs is the most important part of our planning process."

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

"I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you're going to do anything new or innovative."

"The most important thing is to be customer obsessed. Don't be competitor obsessed."

"Strategy is about identifying the things that are not going to change."

"I very frequently get asked: 'What's going to change in the next 10 years?'... I almost never get asked: 'What's not going to change in the next 10 years?'"

"The narrative structure of a memo forces better thought and better understanding of what's important."

"We want to be a large company that's also an invention machine."

"Speed matters in business. Many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study."

"One-way doors are decisions that are hard to reverse. You have to plan those very carefully."

"If you can't feed a team with two pizzas, it's too large."

"A lot of people... believe that you should maximize for the short term. I think that's a mistake."

"Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1."

"You should be afraid of our customers, because those are the folks who have the money."

"We are willing to plant seeds and wait for them to grow into trees."

"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."

"To keep the energy of Day 1, you have to experiment patiently and accept failures."

"We don't do PowerPoint at Amazon. We write six-page narratives."

"You can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time."

"Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice."

"You have to be willing to be misunderstood if you're going to innovate."

"If you're going to invent, it means you're going to fail, and you have to plan for that."

"The death knell for any enterprise is to glorify the past."

"Our planning process is designed to find the truth, not to reach a consensus."

"Wandering is an essential counter-balance to efficiency. You need to employ both."

"If you double the number of experiments you do per year you’re going to double your inventiveness."

"If we think about the long term, we can accomplish things that we couldn't otherwise accomplish."

"Maintain a firm grasp of the obvious."

"Focusing on the customer makes a company more resilient."

"If you're not flexible, you'll pound your head against the wall and you won't see a different solution."

"Two-way doors can be walked through, and if you don't like it, you can walk back through."

"You need a culture that self-selects for people who are long-term thinkers."