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Author: [[Walter Isaacson and Jeff Bezos]] Full Title: Invent and Wander Category: #books One final trait shared by all my subjects is that they retained a childlike sense of wonder. At a certain point in life most of us quit puzzling over everyday phenomena. Leonardo did. So did Einstein, who wrote to another friend, “You and I never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born.” At one point during the dot.com meltdown, he and a few other internet entrepreneurs were on an NBC Nightly News special with Tom Brokaw. “Mr. Bezos, can you even spell ‘profit’?” Brokaw asked, highlighting the fact that Amazon was hemorrhaging money as it grew. “Sure,” Bezos replied, “P-R-O-P-H-E-T.” And by 2019 Amazon stock would be at $2,000 a share, and the company would have $233 billion in revenues and 647,000 employees worldwide. Bezos seized on its potential and, sometimes with great passion erupting into bouts of fury, pushed his team to develop it faster and bigger. The result would supercharge internet entrepreneurship like no other platform since the iPhone App Store. THROUGH THIS BOOK you can learn many of the lessons and secrets revealed in Bezos’s interviews, writings, and the annual shareholder letters he has personally composed since 1997. Here are the five that I think are most important: 1. Focus on the long term. “It’s All About the Long Term,” he said in the italicized initial headline in his first shareholder letter in 1997. “We will continue to make investment decisions in light of long-term market leadership considerations rather than short-term profitability considerations or short-term Wall Street reactions.” Focusing on the long term allows the interests of your customers, who want better and faster services cheaper, and the interests of your shareholders, who want a return on investment, to come into alignment. That’s not always true in the short term. 2. Focus relentlessly and passionately on the customer. As he put it in his 1997 letter, “Obsess over Customers.” Each annual letter reinforces that mantra. “We intend to build the world’s most customer-centric company,” he wrote the following year. “We hold as axiomatic that customers are perceptive and smart.… But there is no rest for the weary. I constantly remind our employees to be afraid, to wake up every morning terrified. Not of our competition, but of our customers.” 3. Avoid PowerPoint and slide presentations. This is a maxim that Steve Jobs also followed. Bezos’s belief in the power of storytelling means that he thinks that his colleagues should be able to create a readable narrative when they pitch an idea. “We don’t do PowerPoint (or any other slide-oriented) presentations at Amazon,” he wrote in a recent shareholder letter. “Instead, we write narratively structured six-page memos. We silently read one at the beginning of each meeting in a kind of study hall.”

AI Summary

Invent and Wander by Walter Isaacson and Jeff Bezos presents wisdom from the contemplative traditions.

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