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.
Rules that may be easy for Wall Street are a death sentence for startups. They are easy to break accidentally and the penalty for noncompliance is severe.
Access to talented and creative people is to modern business what access to coal and iron ore was to steel-making.
The hard part of running a business is that there are a hundred things that you could be doing, and only five of those actually matter, and only one of them matters more than all of the rest of them combined. So figuring out there is a critical path thing to focus on and ignoring everything else is really important.
My concern is that we live in an economy in which stabbing someone and waiting for them to complain before we remove the knife has become the normal way of doing business. When did we lose sight of the fact that it's not nice to stab people in the first place?
Corporations hope that the right concept will turn things around overnight. This is what you might call the crash-diet approach: starve yourself for a few days and you'll be thin for life.
The sooner you cut off negotiations with someone you shouldn't be dealing with, it gives you the chance to move on to a more profitable deal.
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