Business Strategy Quotes

"One common pitfall for large organizations – one that hurts speed and inventiveness – is 'one-size-fits-all' decision making...The end result of this is slowness, unthoughtful risk aversion, failure to experiment sufficiently, and consequently diminished i" "Me-too companies have not done that well over time." "Sometimes (often actually) in business, you do know where you’re going, and when you do, you can be efficient. Put in place a plan and execute. In contrast, wandering in business is not efficient ... but it’s also not random. It’s guided – by hunch, gut, i" "No customer was asking for Echo. This was definitely us wandering. Market research doesn’t help." "The difference between baseball and business, however, is that baseball has a truncated outcome distribution. When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four. In business, every once in a while, when you step" "Companies are rarely criticized for the things that they failed to try. But they are, many times, criticized for things they tried and failed at." "We understand that and believe in failing early and iterating until we get it right. When this process works, it means our failures are relatively small in size (most experiments can start small), and when we hit on something that is really working for cus" "When you look at something like, go back in time when we started working on Kindle almost seven years ago…. There you just have to place a bet. If you place enough of those bets, and if you place them early enough, none of them are ever betting the company" "As a company grows, everything needs to scale, including the size of your failed experiments. If the size of your failures isn’t growing, you’re not going to be inventing at a size that can actually move the needle. Amazon will be experimenting at the righ" "The best customer service is if the customer doesn’t need to call you, doesn’t need to talk to you. It just works." "The balance of power is shifting toward consumers and away from companies… The right way to respond to this if you are a company is to put the vast majority of your energy, attention and dollars into building a great product or service and put a smaller am" "We don't focus on the optics of the next quarter; we focus on what is going to be good for customers." "One advantage — perhaps a somewhat subtle one — of a customer-driven focus is that it aids a certain type of proactivity. When we're at our best, we don't wait for external pressures. We are internally driven to improve our services, adding benefits and fe" "Great innovations, large and small, are happening everyday [at Amazon] on behalf of customers." "There are many ways to center a business. You can be competitor focused, you can be product focused, you can be technology focused, you can be business model focused, and there are more. But in my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the most protectiv" "There are many advantages to a customer-centric approach, but here’s the big one: customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great. Even when they don’t yet know it, customers want somethin" "I’m not against beta testing or surveys. But you, the product or service owner, must understand the customer, have a vision, and love the offering. Then, beta testing and research can help you find your blind spots. A remarkable customer experience starts " "It’s far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price" "The lifeblood of our success for the future is the ability to provide an experience for our customers that makes us a destination." "Any conversation I have about innovation starts with the ultimate goal"