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.
Virtually every company will be going out and empowering their workers with a certain set of tools, and the big difference in how much value is received from that will be how much the company steps back and really thinks through their business processes, thinking through how their business can change, how their project management, their customer feedback, their planning cycles can be quite different than they ever were before.
A visionary company doesn't simply balance between idealism and profitability: it seeks to be highly idealistic and highly profitable. A visionary company doesn't simply balance between preserving a tightly held core ideology and stimulating vigorous change and movement; it does both to an extreme.
It's not about me, it's about you, the customer. And if I am effective in making what I do about you, and I can enhance you and elevate you, you will support me forever.
Business isn't some disembodied bloodless enterprise. Profit is fine - a sign that the customer honors the value of what we do. But "enterprise" ( a lovely word ) is about heart. About beauty. It's about art. About people throwing themselves on the line. It's about passion and the selfless pursuit of an ideal.
When you start a company, it's a singular focus. You have the wind at your back.
Managing a business, small or large, today requires an extremely disciplined, thoughtful approach with regard to the pressure that people are under.
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