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141 " All new hires had to directly improve the outcome of the company. He wanted doers—engineers, developers, perhaps merchandise buyers, but not managers. “We didn’t want to be a monolithic army of program managers, à la Microsoft. We wanted independent teams to be entrepreneurial,” says Neil Roseman. Or, as Roseman also put it: “Autonomous working units are good. Things to manage working units are bad. "
― Brad Stone , The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
142 " We don't make money when we sell things. We make money when we help customers make purchase decisions. "
143 " The notion that he can accomplish a huge amount with a larger time frame, if he is steady about it, is fundamentally his philosophy. "
144 " copy of Sam Walton’s autobiography, Sam Walton: Made in America. "
145 " It's one thing to have a good idea, but it'a another to have confidence in a person to execute it. "
146 " It is far better to cannibalize yourself than have "
147 " Despite his famously hearty laugh and cheerful public persona, he is capable of the same kind of acerbic outbursts as Apple’s late founder, Steve Jobs, who could terrify any employee who stepped into an elevator with him. "
148 " Para mim, a Amazon é a história de um fundador brilhante que promoveu pessoalmente a concretização de sua visão”, diz Eric Schmidt, presidente executivo do Google, "
149 " There was little science to Amazon’s earliest distribution methods. The company held no inventory itself at first. When a customer bought a book, Amazon ordered it, the book would arrive within a few days, and Amazon would store it in the basement and then ship it off to the customer. It took Amazon a week to deliver most items to customers, and it could take several weeks or more than a month for scarcer titles. "
150 " series of choices "
151 " from his company. After the stock market crash in 2000, Amazon went through two rounds of layoffs. But Bezos didn’t want to stop recruiting altogether; he just wanted to be more efficient. So he framed the kind "
152 " Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe, "
153 " Later Bezos recalled speaking at an all-hands meeting called to address the assault by Barnes & Noble. “Look, you should wake up worried, terrified every morning,” he told his employees. “But don’t be worried about our competitors because they`re never going to send us any money anyway. Let’s be worried about our customers and stay heads-down focused.”15 "
154 " Thus did Jeff Bezos become one of the original investors in Google, his company’s future rival, "
155 " He was looking for versatile managers—he called them “athletes”—who could move fast and get big things done. "
156 " In the seminal high-tech book The Mythical Man-Month, IBM veteran and computer science professor Frederick Brooks argued that adding manpower to complex software projects actually delayed progress. One reason was that the time and money spent on communication increased in proportion to the number of people on a project. "
157 " Amazon executives were going to have to substitute artifice and improvisation for truly comprehensive selection. "
158 " Bezos had ruthlessly engineered another acquisition by driving his target off a cliff. Says one observer who had a seat close to the battle, “They have an absolute willingness to torch the landscape around them to emerge the winner. "
159 " Just like Creation author Steve Grand had predicted, the creatures were evolving in ways that Bezos could not have imagined. It was the combination of EC2 and S3—storage and compute, two primitives linked together—that transformed both AWS and the technology world. "
160 " precipitously, "