Book: The Everything Store
Author: Brad Stone
Key takeaways:
Amazon doesn’t use PPTs in its internal presentations. Instead, employees are required to write 6-page narratives laying out their point in prose, because Bezos thinks that this fosters critical thinking. (on a similar note, Warren Buffett famously eschews charts etc. from his writing, saying that charts hide more than they show). For each new product, employees present their documents in form of a press release.
Bezos often quoted the computer scientist, Alan Kay, who said “A point of view is worth 80 IQ points.” It was said that Bezos “went to school” on everyone.
“When you are in the thick of things, you can get confused by small stuff,” Bezos said a few years later. “I knew when I was eighty that I would never, for example, think about why I walked away from my 1994 Wall Street bonus right in the middle of the year at the worst possible time. That kind of thing just isn’t something you worry about when you’re eighty years old. At the same time, I knew that I might sincerely regret not having participated in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a revolutionizing event. When I thought about it that way… it was incredibly easy to make the decision.”
Walmart said “Our marketing strategy is our pricing strategy, which is everyday low pricing.”
Prasad Capital 