Bezos: why do we have to choose more difficult things to do?
- 2018-05-04 17:10
- High standards of Amazonian skills adhere to the theory of management
Since 1997, Bezos has issued a letter to the mainland every year. Bezos himself will add a lot of detailed management theory and long-term thinking into his letter, which is widely regarded as a required reading material for business people.
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The following is the full text of Bezos's stock in Dongxin
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To our shareholders:
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The United States customer satisfaction index recently announced the results of the annual survey, Amazon won the first in eighth years. The UK also has a similar index, the British customer satisfaction index, which is provided by the customer service center, Amazon's fifth consecutive ranking. Amazon has also been nominated by linkedIn for the list of the strongest companies in 2018, becoming the most sought after workplace in the United States. Just a few weeks ago, the Harris poll published the annual reputation quotient, a survey of more than 25 thousand consumers on a wide range of issues ranging from working environment to social responsibility, products and services, and Amazon ranked first in third years.
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Congratulations and thanks to the 560 thousand Amazon, for many years, with your sincere commitment to your customers, with creative work every day. At the same time, on behalf of the Amazon people all over the world, I sincerely thank you, our customers. We are very excited to see your response to these investigations.
One of the reasons why I love customers is that they are never satisfied. Their expectations are not static but rising, which is consistent with human nature. We did not stop in the primitive hunting period, and never ceased for better pursuits. Yesterday's "amazing" became the "normal" today. I see that the cycle of improvement is shorter than ever, probably because customers can get more information easily than ever - just a few seconds or a few keys on the phone, and customers can read, comment, compare the prices of multiple retailers, see if they have stock, and find out when to send them. Goods or alternative way of delivery and so on. These examples come from the retail industry, but I think the same customer licensing phenomenon is also widespread in our Amazon and most other industries. In this world, you can not be satisfied with the status quo, because customers do not allow this to happen.
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How to face the rising customer expectations and always remain at the forefront? A single way is impracticable and must be combined with various methods, but high standards must be an important part of them. Over the past few years, we have made some achievements in meeting the high expectations of our customers, and have also made billions of dollars in cost for failure. based on these experiences, I would like to share with you some of the key points we have learned about high standards within our organization.
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1. Internal? Or can be imparted
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First of all, there is a fundamental question: is high standard inherent? Or can you teach it? If you want me to join your basketball team, you can teach me a lot, but you can't teach me to grow taller. Do we need to choose "high standard" people first? If so, this letter will mainly describe recruitment.
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But I don't think so. I believe high standards can be learned. In fact, it is easy for people to learn to master high standards through exposure, and high standards are contagious. Bringing new people into a high standard team will soon get used to them, and vice versa. If low standards prevail, it will also spread rapidly.
Although personal contact is a good way to implement high standards, I believe you can speed up learning by clarifying some of the high standard core principles, which I want to share in this letter.
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2. General? Or is it specific?
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Another important problem is that the high standard is universal. Or is it specific? In other words, if you implement high standards in a field, will other areas automatically achieve high standards?
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I believe that high standards are specific, and you have to learn high standards individually in every interest area. At the beginning of the Amazon Co, I set up high standards in business development, customer care, and employee recruitment, but there were no high standards in the operation process, including how to solve fixed problems, how to eradicate defects, how to check the process, and so on. I have to learn to make high standards in all these aspects (my colleagues are my mentors).
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It is very important to understand this because it keeps you humble. ?Generally speaking, you can think of yourself as a high standard person, but there are also some frustrating blind spots. In some ways, you may not even know that your standards are very low, or that there are no standards at all. Of course, they are not even world-class. Therefore, it is essential to keep an open mind.
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3, identification and scope
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What kind of high standards do you need to achieve in a specific field? First, you must be able to identify what is good or bad in that field. Second, your expectations must be realistic, and you have a sense of how difficult it is to achieve your goals.
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Let me give you two examples. One is the phenomenon of life, and the other is the real case that Amazon often appears.
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4, the perfect inverted stand
One of my closest friends recently decided to learn to make perfect handstand handstand. Instead of relying on the wall for more than a few seconds, I want to take a picture on Instagram. She decided to start her handstand in her yoga gym. She practiced for a period of time, and the effect was not good. So she hired a handstand coach.
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In the first class, the coach gave her some good suggestions. "Many people think that if they work hard, they should be able to master handstand skills in two weeks. The fact is that even if practiced everyday, it will take about six months. If you think you can do it in two weeks, be prepared to give up. "
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Unrealistic expectations are always hidden in mind, which will stifle high standards. In order to achieve high standards, you or yourself as a part of the team need to form and proactively convey the true idea of how difficult it is.
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The statement of 5, six pages
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At Amazon, we don't do PPT. Instead, we write a memorandum in six pages of paper. We will read it silently at every meeting. These memorandums are very different. Some are as clear as angels sing. They are brilliant and thoughtful. They can make the meeting produce high quality discussions, some of which are the opposite.
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In the case of handstand handstands, the establishment of a high standard is clear. List action details, then you can do or not. The form of the memorandum is very different. The difference between first-class memorandum and ordinary memorandum is easy to distinguish, but it is very difficult to work out the detailed requirements of the excellent memorandum. ?Most of the time, readers' reactions to the first class memorandums are very similar. They can see them at a glance. The standard is there, it is real, even if it is not easy to describe.
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This is what we get. Usually, if the memo is problematic, the reason is not that the author can't identify the high standard, but the expectation is wrong: they mistakenly believe that a high standard, six page memo can be written in one or two or even hours in a few hours, and in fact, it may take a star or longer time! They tried to make perfect handstands in two weeks, and we did not train them in the right way. The first - class memo needs to be rewritten again and again, with colleagues who have been asked to improve their work, take a few days, change their brains to edit it, and can't be finished in one or two days. The main point is that you can improve your performance through simple teaching actions. A first-class memorandum may take a week or even longer.
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6. Skills
Is there any skill besides identifying standards and having feasible expectations? Do you have to be a skilled writer in writing a top-level memorandum? Do you need any other elements?
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In my view, this is not the case, at least for individuals in the team. Football coaches do not need to play football, nor do movie directors need to perform in person. But they all know what is high standard and tell others about practical expectations. Even in the six page memorandum case, team work is needed. Someone in the team has this ability, but not necessarily you. (by the way, according to Amazon's tradition, the author's name will never appear in the Memorandum - the memorandum is the wisdom of the whole team.
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7, the benefits of high standards
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Building a high standard culture is very rewarding. It can bring a lot of benefits. The most natural and obvious thing is that you will provide better products and services to customers -- that's enough reason. Perhaps less obvious is that people will be attracted by high standards, which is conducive to recruiting and maintaining employees. What is more subtle is that high standard culture can play a protective role in the "invisible" but crucial work of every company. I am talking about unsupervised work, even if no one is watching, the work will be completed. In high standard culture, doing well in the work itself is a reward -- a part of professionalism.
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Finally, the high standards are interesting! once you have tasted a high standard of sweetness, there is no turning back.
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Therefore, we believe that high standards have four elements: they can be taught, are specific, and you have to admit that they must set expectations clearly. For us, these jobs mean paying attention to detail at all levels. We hope that they can also benefit you.
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8. Adhere to the highest standard
Leaders insist on high standards. Many people may think these standards are too high.
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But the high standards that our leadership has done has benefited us a lot. Although I can't do it myself, I can share some of the important achievements that made us proud last year, each of which was the crystallization of a collective effort over the years. We never take it for granted.
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Recent milestones:
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Prime - 13 years after being online, we now have more than 100 million Prime paid members worldwide. In 2017, Amazon Prime sold more than 5 billion products worldwide. This year, both the number of Prime members worldwide and the number of Prime members in the United States increased. We extended Prime membership services to countries such as Mexico, Singapore, Holland and Luxemburg, and launched Business Prime Shipping services in the United States and Germany.
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At the same time, we are still striving to make Prime distribution faster. Nowadays, more than 8000 cities and towns can enjoy the day and day service. 50 cities in 9 countries around the world support Prime Now. The Prime membership day in 2017 became the largest global sales day we have ever had in history (until it was later surpassed by digital Monday), a new member of Prime on this day, more than any other day in history.
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The average sales volume of AWS - Amazon Web Services has reached US $20 billion, and now this business has been growing rapidly and healthfully. ?The pace of innovation has also grown in AWS, especially in machine learning, artificial intelligence, Internet of things, and no server computing technology.
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In 2017, AWS published more than 1400 excellent services and functions, including Amazon Sagemaker, which helped ordinary developers to create complex machine learning models more easily. We have tens of thousands of customers using AWS's comprehensive machine learning service. Last year, the number of active users increased by more than 250%, of which Amazon SageMaker contributed a lot, and many new users began to accept the service.
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Last November, we held the sixth re:Invent conference. More than 40 thousand people came to the scene, and 60 thousand people watched the live broadcast on the Internet.
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online retail - in 2017, more than half of the products sold on the Amazon platform worldwide came from third party sellers, the first time since the birth of Amazon. In 2017, more than 300 thousand SMBs from the United States began selling goods on the Amazon platform, and Amazon has sold hundreds of billions of products from SMBs around the world.
In 2017, on the Prime member day, consumers bought more than 40 million items on the Amazon platform, compared with the 2016 Prime membership day, and SMBs's Day sales increased by more than 60%. Our global sales project grew by more than 50% in 2017, and SMBs's cross-border electricity business accounted for 25% of the total sales of all third parties.
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Alexa - the enthusiasm of consumers to buy Alexa devices has not been reduced. The use of Alexa virtual assistant devices is one of the best selling products on Amazon platform. Currently, Alexa has more than 30 thousand skills from external developers, and now consumers can use Alxea to control more than 4000 smart home appliances, which come from 1200 independent brands.
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Every day Alxea becomes smarter. We have developed and deployed the fingerprint technology on the device. When Alexa ads are played on TV, the Alxea device in the user's home will not be mistaken (the function ensures that the Alexa ads that we play during the Super Bowl did not wake up tens of millions of Alexa at the same time).
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Last year, the accuracy of the far field speech recognition technology for Alexa devices increased by 15%; in the United States, Britain and Germany, we have improved the ability to understand the equipment by using machine learning and semi supervised learning in the past 12 months to improve the accuracy of 25%.
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Finally, by using Machine Translation and the transmission of learning skills, we significantly reduced the time needed by Alexa to learn new voice, which allows us to provide services for consumers from more countries, such as India and Japan.
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Amazon equipment - 2017 is the best year we have ever seen in hardware sales. Consumers have bought tens of millions of Echo devices, and Echo Dot and Fire TV TV rods are the best selling products of all products on the Amazon platform, including all commodity categories and manufacturers.
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During the holiday shopping season this year, the number of Fire TV TV bars and children's Fire Tablets purchased by consumers was two times that of the previous year. In 2017, we released a new Echo with new devices with new designs, better sound quality, and lower prices; Echo Plus built a smart home control center; and Echo Spot, a small portable, and a prototype display screen.
We also released the latest generation of Fire TV, which has a 4K Ultra HD display and a high dynamic range image (HDR), and the Fire HD 10 tablet, which carries a 1080p Full HD display. This year, Kindle equipment ushered in its 10 year old birthday. To celebrate this milestone, we launched a new Kindle Oasis, the most advanced electronic book reader that we have now launched, using a larger 7 inch display screen, the PPI of the high definition screen, and the built in. Voice generator allows users to listen to audio books.
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Prime video -- Prime video continues to make an important contribution to the growth and retention of Prime members. Last year, we made improvements to the Prime video to provide consumers with better experience. We added Prime Original homemade dramas, such as two commentator selecion awards, two golden ball awards, the great lady Massel, and the Oscar nominated movie "great illness".
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Amazon music, which continued to develop rapidly in 2017, now has tens of millions of paid users. Amazon Music Unlimited is our ad - free on-demand on-demand service, which entered more than 30 new countries in 2017, doubling the number of members in the past 6 months.
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Fashion - Amazon has become a platform for tens of millions of consumers to buy fashion items. In 2017, we launched the first fashion oriented Prime product in the history of the company: Prime Wardrobe. The new service can move the fitting room directly to the Prime member's home, and they can try the latest fashion dress directly before buying.
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We also work with Nike and UGG to provide consumers with Drew Barrymor (Drew Barrymore) and Dwyne Wade (Dwyane Wade), and we have worked with some other private brands, such as Goodthreads and Core10. We also provide a platform for thousands of designers and artists to sell their designs and works on Amazon's Merch. At the end of 2017, we jointly launched an interactive shopping experience with Calvin Klein.
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The whole food supermarket - after we completed the takeover of the whole food supermarket last year, we announced that we would be committed to providing high quality, natural organic food for everyone to buy. Then we reduced the price of some of the best food items, including avocado, organic eggs and high-quality salmon.
Last November, we made second rounds of price cuts. During Thanksgiving, our Prime members can buy turkey at a special discount price. In February this year, we launched a two hour distribution service in some cities, and Prime members can enjoy this service for more than US $35. In the following months of March and 4, we took the service to some other cities and planned to cover the whole country in this year.
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We are currently working on some technical problems to allow the whole food supermarket to identify the Prime membership of the consumer. After this technology is completed, the Amazon Prime members who are shopping in the whole food supermarket will get more benefits.
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Amazon GO - Amazon GO is a brand new entity store, and users do not have to queue up. We opened the first Amazon GO entity store in Seattle this year. ?Since opening, we are happy to see that many consumers describe this shopping experience as a "magical experience".
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This kind of shopping experience relies on our own research and development of computer vision technology, sensor fusion technology and deep learning technology. We combine these technologies together to create this new shopping experience. When shopping, consumers only need to go into the shops, take the breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks or other groceries they need, and then walk out of the store. This shopping method is more convenient than any other shopping method.
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Treasure truck - treasure truck, from the original truck owned only in Seattle, developed to 35 trucks covering 25 cities in the United States and 12 British cities. We are sending hundreds of thousands of orders to consumers with bubbles and music trucks, from steak to Nestle's latest products. In the middle of 2017, the treasure truck also worked with some local communities to help people who lost their homes in the communities affected by hurricanes.
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India - comScore and SimilarWeb data show that Amazon.in has become the fastest - growing online shopping market in India, with the largest number of sites on both the mobile and PC sides. App Annie said that in 2017, Amazon.in's mobile terminal application became the highest number of shopping applications on the India market.
After the first year in India, the number of Prime members has increased faster than all other countries in the history of Amazon. At present, India's Prime service covers more than 40 million local products from third party sellers, and Prime Video is currently investing in a massive homemade dramas in India.
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Sustainable development - we have been working to reduce carbon emissions by optimizing the transport network to improve product packaging and to enhance energy efficiency in operation. We also have a long-term goal, that is, let us use renewable energy in 100% of the global infrastructure.
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We have recently built the Amazon wind power station in Texas, the largest wind power station we have ever had, with more than 100 turbo generators that can generate 1 million megawatts of electricity per year. We plan to use solar energy systems in 50 performance centres in 2020. So far, we have built 24 solar and wind power projects in the United States, and another 29 will be built in the future.
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At present, all the renewable energy projects in Amazon generate enough electricity for more than 330 thousand families to use each year. In 2017, our Frustration-Free Packaging ushered in 10, and Frustration-Free Packaging is our environmental protection package. Over the past 10 years, the project has saved more than 244 thousand tons of packaging materials. In addition, in 2017 alone, our project significantly reduced the wastage of packaging materials and saved 305 million boxes.
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Worldwide, Amazon is signing a cooperation agreement with service providers to launch our first low pollution last mile distribution. As of now, we have been equipped with a large number of low pollution electric vehicles and natural gas vehicles in the European transport fleet, and we have more than 40 electric bicycles in the city.
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Small and medium-sized enterprises - tens of millions of small and medium enterprises from all over the world are now selling goods on the Amazon platform and they can reach new customers from the world on the Amazon platform. These small and medium-sized enterprises are not only from all parts of the United States, but also come from over 130 countries worldwide. In 2017, 14 of all small and medium enterprises sold over $100 thousand in Amazon. More than 1000 independent authors earned over $100 thousand in 2017 through Kindle Direct Publishing.
Investment and employment creation - since 2011, we have invested more than $150 billion in service networks, transport capabilities and technical infrastructure (such as the AWS data center) worldwide. Amazon has created more than 1 million 700 thousand direct and insights jobs around the world.
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In 2017, we created over 130 thousand Amazon direct jobs in the United States, excluding post acquisitions. Up till now, Amazon has 560 thousand employees worldwide. Our newly created posts cover a wide range of fields, from AI scientists to parcel professionals. In addition to these direct positions, we expect the Amazon online market to create 900 thousand positions worldwide, and Amazon's investment has created 260 thousand additional jobs in the fields of construction, logistics and other professional services.
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Career choice - we have always been very proud to provide a career planning project for our employees: Amazon Career Choice. For employees who have worked at Amazon for more than 1 years, we will pay them 95% of their tuition, fees, and textbook costs (up to $12 thousand) in advance to get them to learn to get high demand jobs, such as aircraft maintenance, computer aided design, machine tool technology, and medical practice. Laboratory technique and nursing.
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No matter whether the skills they study belong to the skills required by Amazon, as long as the skills they choose to learn are high demand skills, we will provide financial assistance. Since its launch in 2012, 16 thousand employees worldwide (12 thousand of whom are from the United States) have participated in the project. Commercial truck driving, medical care and information technology are the three most popular skills.
These milestones come from a lot of people's contributions. Amazon is inseparable from all 560 thousand employees from all over the world, with 2 million sellers, hundreds of thousands of authors, millions of AWS developers, and hundreds of millions of honorable consumers. These people are the driving force that we want to make progress every day.
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9. The road ahead
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This year, the first shareholder letter was born 20th anniversary. Our core values and methods have not changed. We continue to aspire to be the best customer focused company on the planet, and we realize that this is not a small or easy challenge. We know that we can do better, and we find tremendous energy in many of the challenges and opportunities that we will face in the future.
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Thank you very much for every customer who can serve you. We are grateful. ?Thank the shareholders for their support, thanks to the wisdom, passion and high standards of Amazon people all over the world.
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As usual, I will enclose the letter which was originally written in 1997. The time is still first days (Day 1).
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Genuine
jeff bezos
Founder and Chief Executive Officer
amazon
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Source / whetstone Business Review