We are our choices. Build yourself a great story.
Jeff BezosRead
Market leadership can translate directly to higher revenue, higher profitability, greater capital velocity and correspondingly stronger returns on invested capital.
Interpretation
Being a market leader can lead to increased profits and better returns on investment.
Jeff Bezos highlights the significant advantages that come with being a market leader in a business context. When a company successfully positions itself as a leader in its industry, it tends to experience an increase in revenue and profitability, and this can enhance the efficiency of its capital use, ultimately resulting in greater returns for its investors.
In practice
In a business seminar discussing strategies for success.
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.
If you deprive yourself of outsourcing and your competitors do not, you're putting yourself out of business.
Our model is to develop each business separately with its own shareholder and management - this way we can concentrate on the job in hand, rather than be part of some enormous and faceless conglomerate.
Entrepreneurs say in an economic boom it's actually hard to build a company because everybody's too excited and there is too much money funding too many marginal companies.
In business, you're trying to make a buck. God was good to me and blessed me. I made some money and started this foundation years ago, and it has grown in size. With the foundation it's a lot different, because the bottom line isn't how you can make more money or get a better return, it's helping the projects that you feel strongly about move forward.
Smart companies fail because they do everything right. They cater to high-profit-margin customers and ignore the low end of the market, where disruptive innovations emerge from.
Positive and engaged brains are a company's greatest assets. More than time and even more than productivity, people must be happy.
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