We are our choices. Build yourself a great story.
Jeff BezosRead
Part of company culture is path-dependent - it's the lessons you learn along the way.
Interpretation
Company culture is shaped by the experiences and lessons learned over time.
This quote by Jeff Bezos highlights the importance of experiences in shaping a company's culture. It suggests that the journey and the lessons learned during that journey significantly influence the way a company operates and its core values, emphasizing that culture is not static but evolves based on the challenges and successes encountered along the way.
In practice
In a business seminar discussing how to foster a positive work environment, this quote can illustrate the importance of experiential learning.
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.
Not adding value is the same as taking it away.
All businesses and jobs depend on a vast number of people, often unnoticed and unthanked, without which nothing really gets done. They are all human and deserve respect and gratitude.
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.
I don't know why the word 'solopreneur' is in our lexicon. Nobody can physically do it all by themselves, and more importantly, why would they want to? Being the sales team, the HR department, management, and production all by yourself is terrible. Period.
In business, staying focused requires that you turn most opportunities down.
I don't think a true company - one that builds sustainable value - can ever only exist online or remotely.
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