Brad Gutting
Aug 28, 2017 · 1 min read

Somehow, you missed the most obvious aspect of Amazon’s approach: customer obsession. We’re not secretive about this. We examine what’s best for customers, and work backwards — relentlessly — to figure out what to create, how to build it, and how best to deliver it. We do this with buying and selling books, groceries, office supplies, toys, whatever. We do this with cloud computing. We do it with making movies.

It literally has nothing to do with what other companies do. Nothing. It’s written into most of the shareholder letters, and it’s all over the leadership principles. For reasons unknown though, few people seem able to grasp this extremely basic idea that maybe it’s a good idea to understand what is valuable to the people (aka, customers) who pay you money, and then work hard to deliver it.

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