We are our choices. Build yourself a great story.
Jeff BezosRead
Your margin is my opportunity.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that one person's challenges or inefficiencies can be leveraged by another as an opportunity for gain.
Jeff Bezos's quote, 'Your margin is my opportunity,' highlights the competitive nature of business, where the weaknesses or profit margins of one company can serve as an opportunity for others to innovate, improve, and seize market share. In a marketplace where margins are often tight, identifying the areas where competitors fall short allows businesses to capitalize on those gaps and grow their own revenues, ultimately leading to a more dynamic and competitive environment.
In practice
In a presentation about strategic business planning.
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.
The most efficient way to produce anything is to bring together under one management as many as possible of the activities needed to turn out the product.
Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department.
CEOs are paid for doing a terrible job. If the system wasn't so messed up, guys like me wouldn't make this kind of money.
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.
It's so important for startups to get their culture right at the start. They need to feel unique and that they are on their own important mission in the world.
**New business concepts are always, always the product of lucky foresight.** That's right - the essential insight doesn't come out of any dirigiste planning process; it comes form some cocktail of happenstance, desire, curiosity, ambition and need. But at the end of the day, there has to be a degree of foresight -- a sense of where new riches lie. So radical innovation is always one part fortuity and one part clearheaded vision. [first-line bold by author] [2002] p.23
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