We are our choices. Build yourself a great story.
Jeff BezosRead
If you have a business model that relies on customers being misinformed, you better start working on changing your business model.
Interpretation
Businesses should prioritize transparency and truthfulness over deception and misinformation.
Jeff Bezos emphasizes the significance of ethical business practices, suggesting that relying on customers' ignorance is unsustainable. If a company's model is based on misleading information, it is imperative for that business to reassess its strategies and make necessary changes to ensure integrity and build trust with its customers.
In practice
During a business ethics seminar.
We are our choices. Build yourself a great story.
Work hard, have fun and make history.
If you're not stubborn, you'll give up on experiments too soon. And if you're not flexible, you'll pound your head against the wall and you won't see a different solution to a problem you're trying to solve.
But there's so much kludge, so much terrible stuff, we are at the 1908 Hurley washing machine stage with the Internet. That's where we are. We don't get our hair caught in it, but that's the level of primitiveness of where we are. We're in 1908.
Because, you know, resilience - if you think of it in terms of the Gold Rush, then you'd be pretty depressed right now because the last nugget of gold would be gone. But the good thing is, with innovation, there isn't a last nugget. Every new thing creates two new questions and two new opportunities.
When you are eighty years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices.
Greatest risk is not development of new product, but development of customers and markets
The companies that survive longest are the one's that work out what they uniquely can give to the world-not just growth or money but their excellence, their respect for others, or their ability to make people happy. Some call those things a soul.
I've said it for four decades - work 'on' your business, not just 'in' your business!
It is more important to do what is strategically right than what is immediately profitable.
The single biggest reason companies fail is they overinvest in what is, as opposed to what might be.
I wasn't running toward the theater but running away from the sporting goods store. Of course now that I'm selling spaghetti sauce (with Newman's Own), I begin to understand the romance of business.. the allure of being the biggest fish in the pond and the juice you get from beating out your competitors.
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