Business strategy Quotes

"If you aren't at the table, you may be on the menu"

"Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower."

"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."

"If you're watching your competitors, you're unlikely to invent a bunch of stuff on your own."

"We innovate by starting with the customer and working backwards. That becomes the touchstone for how we invent."

"Vision, guts and enthusiasm. Three qualities I feel you always gotta have to have a shot at success."

"Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow."

"I very frequently get the question, “What’s going to change in the next ten years?” And that is a very interesting question; it’s a very common one. I almost never get the question, “What’s not going to change in the next ten years?” And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two, because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time."

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

"Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning."

"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."

"Every startup should address a real and demonstrated need in the world. If you build a solution to a problem lots of people have, it's so easy to sell your product to the world"

"Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough."

"Most large organizations embrace the idea of invention, but are not willing to suffer the string of failed experiments necessary to get there."

"Friends congratulate me after a quarterly-earnings announcement and say, 'Good job, great quarter.' And I'll say, 'Thank you, but that quarter was baked three years ago.'"