I have started reading “Invent & Wander - The Collected Writings of JEFF BEZOS” by the HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW PRESS:

“All were very smart. But that’s not what made them special. Smart people are a dime a dozen and often don’t amount to much. What counts is being creative and imaginative.”

“The first [ingredient of creativity] is to be curious, passionately curious... “Curiosity is more important than knowledge.””

“A second key trait is to love and to connect the arts and sciences... In fact, it helps to be excited by all disciplines. Leonardo da Vinci and Benjamin Franklin wanted to know everything you could possibly know about everything that was knowable.”

“Another characteristic of truly innovative and creative people is that they have a reality-distortion field, a phrase that was used about Steve Jobs and comes from a Star Trek episode in which aliens create an entire new world through sheer mental force.”

“One final trait shared by all my subjects is that they retained a childlike sense of wander...We should be careful to never outgrow our wonder years-or to let our children do so.”

“Jeff was a voracious reader with an adventurous mind... “You grow up with a mother like that and you have unbelievable grit,” he says.”

“”That was the very moment when I realized I was never going to be a great theoretical physicist,” Bezos says... It was a difficult realization. His heart had been set on becoming a physicist, but finally he had confronted his own limits.”

“”Every single person in the company, because we had to work our hands so close to the customer, making sure those orders went out, really set up a culture that served us well, and that is our goal, to be Earth most customer-centric company.””

“When he meets with the founder of a company that Amazon is thinking of buying, Bezos tries to assess whether he is in it because of a true passion for serving customers. “I’m always trying to figure out one thing first and foremost: Is that person a missionary or a mercenary?””

“Bezos approaches his space endeavors as a missionary rather than a mercenary... “I would like to see us not have a population cap. I wish there were a trillion humans in the solar system; then there would be a thousand Einstein and a thousand Mozarts.””

“”A free market economy, which by necessity involves a lot of liberty, just happens to work well in terms of allocating resources” he says. But the merit of the free market arises not merely from its efficiency but also from the moral value it accords to individuals, he believes”

“1. Focus on the long term. “It’s All About the Long Term,”... long-term thinking permits innovation. “We like to invent and do new things, and I know for sure that long-term orientation is essential for invention because you’re going to have a lot of failures along the way.””

“2. Focus relentlessly and passionately on the customer... “The advantage of being customer focused is that customers are always dissatisfied. They always want more, and so they pull you along... if you’re competitor obsessed, if you’re a leader,... maybe you slow down a little””

“3. Avoid PowerPoint and slide presentations... The memos, which are limited to six pages, are supposed to be written with clarity, which Bezos believes (correctly) forces a clarity of thinking.”

“4. Focus on the big decisions... “You get paid to make a small number of high-quality decisions. Your job is not to make thousands of decisions every day.””

“5. Hire the right people... “You can work long, hard, or smart, but at http://Amazon.com  you can’t choose two out of three.””

“Still, with all of our faults and problems, the rest of the world would love even the tiniest sip of the elixir we have here in the US... It’s still Day One for this country.”

“From the beginning, our focus has been on offering our customers compelling value... Word of mouth remains the most powerful customer acquisition tool we have, and we are grateful for the trust our customers have placed in us.”

“During our hiring meetings, we ask people to consider three questions before making a decision: Will you admire this person?... Will this person raise the average level of effectiveness of the group they’re entering?... Along what dimension might this person be a superstar?”

“We continued to benefit from a business model that is inherently capital efficient.”

“What Do You Own?”

“We are doubly blessed. We have a market-size unconstrained opportunity in an area where the underlying foundational technology we employ improves every day. That is not normal.”

“We’re a company that wants to be weighed, and over time, we will be-over the long term, all companies are. In the meantime we have our heads down working to build a heavier and heavier company.”

“In the physical world, retailers will continue to use technology to reduce costs, but not to transform the customer experience. We too will use technology to reduce costs, but the bigger effect will be using technology to drive adoption and revenue.”

“Focus on cost improvement makes it possible for us to afford to lower prices, which drives growth. Growth spreads fixed costs across more sales, reducing cost per unit, which makes possible more price reductions... Please except us to repeat this loop.”

“Since we expect to keep our fixed costs largely fixed, even at significantly higher unit volumes, we believe http://Amazon.com  is poised over the coming years to generate meaningful, sustainable, free cash flow.”

“We are committed to extending our leadership in e-commerce in a way that benefits customers and therefore, inherently, investors-you can’t do one without the other.”

“We believe our ability to lower prices and simultaneously drive customer experience is a big deal, and this past year offers evidence that the strategy is working.”

“We have a strong team of hard-working, innovative folks building http://Amazon.com . They are focused on the customer and on the long term. On that time scale, the interests of shareowners and customers are aligned.”

“Our ultimate financial measure, and the one we most want to drive over the long-term, is fcf per share..Future earnings are a component-but not the only important component-of future cf per share. Working capital and capital expenditures are also important, as is share dilution”