Jeff Bezos on Winning Quotes

"Long-term thinking is both a requirement and an outcome of true ownership."

"The world will always try to pull you toward being normal. Do not let it happen."

"Wandering is an essential counterbalance to efficiency. You need to employ both. The wandering phases are not efficient... but they are also not random."

"Frugality drives innovation, just like other constraints do."

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

"One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out."

"The great thing about factual decisions is that they overrule hierarchy."

"If you don't understand the details of your business you are going to fail."

"If you want to be inventive, you have to be willing to fail."

"Focus on the things that don't change. Customers will always want low prices and fast delivery."

"High-velocity decision making is the key to staying a Day 1 company."

"Winning is about being missionaries, not mercenaries. Missionaries have more passion and build better products."

"High standards are contagious. If you put a new person into a high standards team, they will adapt."

"It’s not an experiment if you know it’s going to work."

"We can’t be in survival mode. We have to be in growth mode."

"We are all truth-seekers. If you can't have a culture where you can disagree and commit, you can't win."

"Slow is smooth and smooth is fast."

"If you can't tolerate critics, don't do anything new or interesting."

"The most important single thing is to focus obsessively on the customer. Our goal is to be earth's most customer-centric company."

"If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends."

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

"We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details."

"The best customer service is if the customer doesn't need to call you, doesn't need to talk to you. It just works."

"Invention is the root of our success. We do things that are hard and we stay with them."

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

"In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story."

"A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well."

"The most important thing is to be customer obsessed. Don't satisfy your customers, figure out how to absolutely delight them."

"If you're going to invent, it means you're going to fail, and when you fail, you have to get back up and try again."

"I knew that if I failed I wouldn't regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not trying."

"What we need to do is always lean into the future; when the world changes around you and when it changes against you, you have to lean into that and figure out what to do."

"If you decide that you're going to do only the things you know are going to work, you're going to leave a lot of opportunity on the table."

"The death of a company happens when you stop being customer-obsessed and start being process-obsessed."