When I wrote my Working Backwards summary a friend told me that perhaps I should read Bezos’s shareholder letters, because they would paint a more complete picture of Amazon. But I disagreed. I said that the letter were a good example of investor relations, but perhaps not more.
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Another way of saying this is: perhaps, yes, Bezos does believe some of these things, or at least he thinks it’s good messaging for both internal and external stakeholders, but his actions are sometimes contrary to those statements. It’s more revealing to look at his actions.
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I think this fantastic interview between and Brad Stone kind of gets at it a bit. Yes, customer is number one, except when they’re not, and we don’t look at competitors, except Bezos does, and it’s always Day One, except for the business units that are > 7 years old.
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Meanwhile, his ‘Leadership Principles’ exists for an instrumental purpose (to spread a specific culture across this sprawling company), and the things he says in his letters serve a different instrumental purpose (to use narrative to buy himself an aligned shareholder base).
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When you're reading about smart operators, it's always games within games.
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I've always taken "We think about our customers not our competitors" as a very specific point that Bezos emphasizes as a general point because it sounds good.
I believe it means to create your roadmap based upon customer needs, not in reaction to competitor's moves which...
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Is a recipe for both intense competition and possibly missing wide open opportunities.
Bezos definitely cares about competitive dynamics in an industry though, and how that will affect business viability.
Bezos has to care about competitors when they're also offering the...
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