the first thing to really talk about is to I want to take you back to to the
beginning and in 1995 you started yep you went public in 97 and I'll adjust
for stock splits but you raised stock you rate you issued shares at a dollar
fifty a share in 1988 your revenue was six hundred million dollars and you lost
125 million but your stock had gone to $55 a share so you doubled down sales
went up threefold you lost another 400 million but your stock went up to $76 27
billion dollars of market cap your personal net worth of nine billion take
us back to that time where the market is telling you you're doing great but you
have red ink in the company you took on two billion dollars of debt from 99201
while you tripled while you doubled sales yet again what were you thinking
back then well that's a great great question and it is kind of fun to go
back and think about those days you know in those days when we had I don't know
when I started the company and it was just one person and then there were ten
people and today there are almost 600,000 people so there's a lot of
change but back in that time we were still
pretty small company by most standards then the error you're talking about we
had we'd gone public and you're right on a split adjusted basis it's a dollar
fiftieth share in today's terms and the market became very quickly a kind of an
internet bubble kind of market and the stock prices went up very very high when
I raise the initial funding for Amazon I had to talk to 60 prospective investors
to raise a million dollars and I raised a million dollars from 22 different
investors $50,000 at a time and they got 20% of the company for a million dollars
and that was in 95 but just three years two or three years later
you know Stanford MBA with no business experience could raise 25 million
dollars with a single phone call if they had a internet business plan so the
whole thing in just two or three years the excitement really as we could would
shortly see when the bubble burst in the year 2000 the hyperbolic excitement
about the internet had infected everybody and I I was I knew that there
was that we had a funder I liked our business and I liked the fundamentals of
our business but I also knew that the stock price was disconnected from what
we were doing on a day to day basis and so I was always preaching we would have
All Hands meetings and there was a small number of employees at that time but you
know probably let's see in 97 I think we would have had a few hundred employees
we have All Hands meetings and I would said look you know we got to remember
the great quote from Benjamin Graham that in the short run the stock market
is a voting machine in the long run it's a weighing machine so don't think about
the daily stock price because it was going up every day the stock prices
going up and I didn't want because all the employees had stock options and I
didn't want them counting their success that way and so I was said look when the
stock is up 30% in a month don't feel 30% smarter because when it's down 30%
in a month then you're gonna have to feel 30% dumber and it's not gonna feel
as good and it was good that I kind of laid that groundwork because you know
sure enough in the year 2000 the whole thing came tumbling down I think Amazon
went back about $6 went down just six dollars and that I don't even know if
that's on a smoother justed basis I think that's probably that was below I
was on a split adjusted basis probably below it all about so and you know ever
doubt the business model at that point no so I you know it's very interesting
to me because I had all the internal metrics on you know how many customers
we had what was going on I could see people thought we were losing money
because we were selling dollar bills for 90 cents even though we were very clear
that we were we were we had high fixed costs and but
we had contribution margin positive contribution margin and I just knew that
it was a fixed cost business and as soon as we reached the sufficient scale we
would have a very good business and so that was that understanding of the fixed
nature of our expenses relative to physical world retail is what led us to
have the get big fast strategy we knew that it would be that our economics
would be very much improved if we could have a sufficient scale so we worked
hard and so so at that time you're you're preaching the benefits of
e-commerce and and really yeah disintermediating the business so
fast-forward to today now we have content we have physical Amazon stores
we have Amazon cashier 'less stores yeah we used to call shoplifting and and then
now you shoplifting without the jail time that's
right and then and then and then buying whole foods here for a Texas company so
how does that how does that fit together your vision and then how do you manage
these disparate businesses with different cost structures now yeah well
maybe just finishing up a little Oh in that prior point before I answer that
question I and and also with either the memory of Barbara Bush in all of our
minds I I think part of if you're a lot of people in this room or entrepreneurs
start their own businesses done various things taking risks of various kinds and
I think the one of the precursors one of the foundational things in being able to
take risk is to have had some kind of support from somebody you have to have
some mentors you have to have somebody who loves you these are the kind of
things that build up and allow you to kind of you know jump off into uncharted
terrain and do something new because you know you have a support system of one
kind or another how can you do so many different things why don't you stick to
the knitting the kind of traditional advice would be to stay focused and keep
the business simple and the way I think about this is we actually do stick to
one thing it's just not described it sunk the businesses so if
we do web services which is you know big Enterprise is buying compute services
from us and we have our retail business and we have Amazon Studios which is
making original content Amazon go the things you listed so but the cultural
thread that runs through all these things is the same we only have a few
principles of the Amazon kind of core values that we go back to over and over
again and if you looked at each of the things that we do you would see those
run straight through everything so the first one and by far the most important
one is customer obsession and we talk about it as customer obsession as
opposed to competitor obsession and I have seen over and over again companies
talk about that their customer focused but really when I pay close attention to
them I believe they are competitor focused and that's just a completely
different mentality by the way competitor focus can work but I don't
think it works in the long run as well as customer focus for one thing once
you're the leader if your whole culture is competitor obsessed it's kind of hard
to stay energized and motivated if you're out in front whereas customers
are always unsatisfied they're always discontent they always want more and so
no matter how far you get out there in front of your competitors you're still
behind your customers so they're always pulling you along so customer obsession
is a deep principle that underlies everything we do another one is
eagerness to invent so we love to pioneer and when we have done by the way
whenever we have tried to do something in a kind of me2 fashion we have failed
at it we need to have something that is differentiated unique something that
customers are going to like that we're kind of leading with so that's another
element that works for us and then another one is long-term thinking we are
willing to to take some time and be patient with our business initiative
and that runs through everything so a lot of our competitors might have two to
three year kind of timeframes and we might have more of a five to seven year
sort of timeframe and then the last one operational excellence so literally you
know how do you have high standards around you know identifying defects
fixing defects at the root all of those kinds of things that lead to what I
think also can be in a simpler way just stated as professionalism that you want
to do things right just for the records sake of doing them right so let's talk
about that with a with another I guess this is a corollary now that you have
about six hundred thousand employees I calculated you're adding about 250
people a day you've mentioned that you're trying to fend off day two
yeah and you've said that day two is stasis followed by irrelevance followed
by excruciating ly painful decline followed by death yeah that's why it is
always day one yeah yeah how's that work well so day one and this is a phrase
that we use at Amazon all the time I've been using it's in my first annual
shareholder letter from 20 years ago and we stay it's always day one and it needs
to be day one for the reason that you just mentioned and how do you so the
real question for me is how do you go about maintaining a day one culture you
know it's great to have the scale of Amazon we have financial resources we
have lots of brilliant people we can accomplish great things we have global
scope we have operations all over the world but the downside of that is that
you can lose your nimbleness you can lose your entrepreneurial spirit you can
lose your that kind of heart that the that small companies often have and so
if you could have the best of both worlds if you can have that
entrepreneurial spirit and heart while at the same time having all the
advantages that come with scale and scope I think think of the things that
you could do and and so how the question is how do you achieve that the scale is
good because it makes you robust you know
a big boxer can take a punch to the head the question is you also want to dodge
those punches so you'd like to be nimble you want to be big and nimble and I find
there are a lot of things that are protective of the day one mentality I
already spent some time on one of them which is customer obsession I think
that's the most important thing if you can and it gets harder as you get bigger
when you're a little tiny company so you're a 10 person startup company every
single person the company is focused on the customer when you get to be a bigger
company you've got all the milk you've got middle managers and you've got all
these layers and the those people aren't on the front lines they're not
interacting with customers every day they're insulated from customers and
they start to manage not the customer happiness directly but they start to
manage through proxies like metrics and processes and some of those things can
become bureaucratic so it's very challenging but one of the things that
happens is the decision-making velocity slows down and I think the reason one of
the reasons that that happens is that people oh it's a junior executive is
inside the big company start to model all decisions as if they are heavyweight
irreversible highly consequential decisions and so even two-way doors you
could make you make a decision it's the wrong decision you can just back up back
through the door and try again even those reversible decisions start to
be made with heavyweight processes and so you can teach people that these
pitfalls and and and traps and then teach them to avoid those traps and
that's what we're trying to do at Amazon so that we can maintain our
inventiveness and our hearts and our kind of small companies spirit even as
we have the scale and scope of a larger company so six hundred thousand people
small company which that's a that's a trick so I know the bush Center we focus
on leadership and I know that you're also a voracious reader and you're fond
of a book by now seem to leave called the Black Swan yes sure and it's it's
about humans tendencies to reduce thing to anecdote reduce things to anecdotal
stories and to shield us from sort of the
of the way things actually have building narratives and and how can we human
they'll create a narrative around anything to connect any sequence of
facts we can create a narrative so how do you infect that throughout the whole
organization when you have that many that many layers well I I think you know
what I would say about that it's really a little different from the way that
that Black Swan talks about anecdotes the way you're talking about but I'm
actually a big fan of anecdotes in business not building a narrative
structure around them necessarily but I still have an email address that
customers can write to I see most of those emails and I don't answer very
many of them anymore but but I see them and I and I forward them some of them
the ones that catch my curiosity I forward them to the executives in charge
that area but with a question mark and that question mark is just a shorthand
for can you look into this why is this happening what does what's going on and
what I find is free energy because we have tons of metrics we have you know
weekly business reviews with these metric decks and we look at our we know
so many things about customers and they're there you know whether we're
delivering on time what you know whether the packages have too much air in them
and you know wasteful of packaging and so we have so many metrics that we
monitor and the thing I have noticed is that when the anecdotes and the data
disagree the anecdotes are usually right there's something wrong with the way
you're measuring it and that's why it's so important to to keep your you need to
to run it something that you were you're doing you know shipping billions of
packages a year for sure you need good data and metrics and are you delivering
on time you deliver on time in every city are you delivering on time to
apartment complexes are you delivering on time in certain countries you do need
the data but then you need to check that data with your intuition and your
instincts and you need to teach that to the
all the senior executives and and junior executives just still have the to pizza
rule and no powerpoints oh yeah the two pizza team we try to we try to create
teams that are no larger than can be fed with two pizzas we call that the two
pizza team rule no power points are used inside of Amazon so every meeting we
have that when we hire a new executive from the outside this is the weirdest
meeting culture you will ever encounter and new executives have a little bit of
you know culture shock in their first Amazon meeting because what we do is
somebody for the meeting has prepared a six page memo a narrative lis structured
memo that is got you know real sentences and topic sentences and verbs and now
it's not just bullet points and it lays out and supposed to create the context
for what will then be a good discussion so and then we read those memos silently
in the meeting so it's like a study hall and we do that everybody sits around the
table and we read silently from usually about half an hour however long it takes
us to read the document and then we discuss it and it's so much better than
the typical PowerPoint presentation for so many reasons you were quoted as
saying I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you're going to
innovate so how are you misunderstood you're gonna do if you're gonna do
anything new or innovative you have to be willing
to be misunderstood and if you can't tolerate that then for God's sake don't
do anything new or innovative every important thing we've done has been
misunderstood often by well-meaning sincere critics sometimes of course by
self-interested insincere critics but but you know I'll
give you an example a thousand years ago we started this thing called customer
reviews and we let customers review books we only sold books at that time
and customers could come in and rate a book between one and five stars and they
could write a text-based review you guys are very familiar with this it's a now a
very normal thing but back then this was crazy and the the publishers the book
publishers did not like this because of course not all the reviews are positive
and the I got a letter from one publisher that said I have a good idea
for you why don't you just publish the positive customer reviews and I thought
about this and because and he is argument is making to me is that our
sales would go up if we just published the positive customer reviews I thought
about this I thought I don't know I don't actually believe that because I
don't think we make money when we sell something we make money when we help
someone make a purchase decision and it's just a slightly different way of
looking at it because people are the part of what they're paying us for is
helping them make a purchase decision and if you think about it that way then
you want the negative reviews too and of course it has been extremely helpful for
people to have negative customer views and by the way it's come full circle now
where the product manufacturers use the customer reviews to improve the next
generation of the product so it's actually helping the whole ecosystem but
and now nobody criticizes customer reviews in fact if you were in the you
know here in the year 2018 if some ecommerce company were to say we're only
going to publish the positive customer reviews that would be the crazy thing
that would get criticized so the
and innovative quickly becomes they do normal and then it's you know it's it's
it's the new incumbent idea and then it doesn't get criticized went by the way
more generally and what I preached at Amazon to all of our employees is when
we are criticized there is a simple process that you need to go through
which is first you look yourself in the mirror and decide is your critical right
do you agree are we doing something wrong if you are change and by the way
if you look yourself in the mirror and you decide that your critic as wrong as
we did with the customer reviews then do not change no matter how much pressure
is brought to bear do the right thing in that case as well have a deep Kehl you
have to have a deep teal the thing I worry about the most is that we would
lose our way in one of those things that we would lose our our obsessive focus on
customers or would somehow become short-term oriented or would you know
and start to become overly cautious you know kind of failure averse and
therefore unable to invent and pioneer you cannot invent and pioneer if you
cannot accept failure its you to invent you need to experiment and if it's if
you know in advance that it's going to work it is not an experiment and so
that's a very important thing you you know it's these they're inseparable
twins failure and invention it's so you have to be willing to do that
it's embarrassing to fail you know it's always embarrassing to fail but you have
to say no that's not how this works if I said to you you have a 10% chance of a
with a particular decision a 10% chance of a 100x return you should take that
bet every time but you're still going to be wrong nine out of ten times and it's
gonna feel bad 910 times and in in in with technology the outcomes the results
can be very long tailed they it's very at the payoff is can be very asymmetric
which is why you should do so much experimentation you know everybody knows
that if you swing for the fences you hit more home runs but you also strike out
more but with the baseball that analogy doesn't go far enough because with
baseball no matter how well you connect with the ball you can only get four runs
the success is capped at four runs but in business every once in a while you
step up to the plate you hit the ball so hard you get a thousand runs and so when
that when you have that kind of asymmetric payoff and you know one at
one at back and get you a thousand runs it encourages you to experiment more
it's the right business decision to experiment more it's also better for
your customers customers like the successful experiments by the way this
is a giant misconception in a lot of young entrepreneurs inexperienced
doctors that they mean one of the things that is very fashionable right now is to
talk about how disruptive their business plan is going to be and the but
invention is not disruptive only customer adoption is disruptive and
Amazon we've invented a lot of things the customers did not care about at all
and believe me they were not disruptive to anyone so it's only when customers
like the new way that anything becomes disruptive and so really it's just
saying that you wanted you know if somebody comes to you with a business
plan that they claim is disruptive you should ask them to explain it to you in
simpler language and the simpler language is why are customers going to
adopt this why are they going to like it why is it better than the traditional
way by the way one thing I should point out about failure and this is a fine
point internally we take it we know it and we don't need to talk about it much
but there's a different kind of failure which is not what you want that's where
you have operating history and you do know what you're doing and you just
screw it up so that's not a good fair that's not an experiment that's just bad
operations operational excellence and so like if we've opened 134
Elmen centers were on generation 8 of our fulfillment center technology if we
open a new fulfillment center and just woof it you know we have to do some
internal examination that's not an experiment
that's just bad execution so there's different kinds of failure and you need
to make sure you're making the right kind of failure the right kind of
failure should be an invention it should be something that you know it's an
experiment you don't know if it's gonna work and you know up front that you
don't know if it's gonna work you need to identify your big ideas and there
should only be two or three of them and then if a senior leader the the main job
of a senior leader is to identify two or three important ideas and then to
enforce great execution against those big ideas and the good news is that the
big ideas are usually incredibly easy to identify you shouldn't need to think
about them very much you already know what they are let me give you an example
for Amazon the consumer business the three big ideas are low prices fast
delivery and vast selection you don't need you know it's not the kind you know
in the way the way you know that they're the big ideas because they're so obvious
the big ideas should be obvious and by the way it's very hard to maintain a
firm grasp of the obvious at all times so little things can distract you from
the obvious but you have to back up and say these are the three big ideas how do
we always deliver things a little faster how do we always reduce our cost
structure so that we can have prices that are a little lower and the good
thing about these big ideas is they will be stable in time so I know for a fact
that ten years from now customers are still gonna like low prices no matter
what happens with technology and everything else no matter what happens
people are gonna like faster delivery it is impossible for me to imagine a
scenario where ten years from now a customer comes to me and says Jeff I
love Amazon I just wish you delivered a little more slowly
this is so inconceivable that you have you can have great conviction as a
leader to continue to put energy into driving speed of delivery and whatever
you're you know an AWS I know that customers they like low prices they like
availability they don't want the services to be down they like data
security it's not very hard to figure out what the big ideas are and then you
can keep putting energy into those things and you spin up those five wheels
and they'll still be paying you dividends ten years from now
For more infomation >> Nachverdichtung: Neue Häuser statt freie Flächen | Zur Sache Baden-Württemberg! - Duration: 4:38. 
For more infomation >> BOLT IoT Platform ⋆ cos'è, come usarla e cosa permette di fare ⊷ #gon_Esperimenti - Duration: 14:22. 
For more infomation >> Woman Who Trapped Flake In Elevator And Screamed At Him Is Exposed – Here's Who She Is - Duration: 6:15. 
For more infomation >> American Bar Association Issues a Stunning Change to Their Stance on Kavanaugh - Duration: 2:32. 
For more infomation >> Top GOP Official Comes Out Anonymously and Issues the BRUTAL Message to Jeff Flake - Duration: 2:23. 
For more infomation >> Bush Just Took FIRM Stand On Kavanaugh And People Are Furious About What He Had To Say - Duration: 5:24. 
For more infomation >> New Poll Shows Joe Manchin is in BIG TROUBLE - Duration: 3:25. 
Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét