Large companies stagnate with innovation and startups steal their thunder. One root cause is that the decision making is not agile any more. No one wants to do anything to upset the brand. Projects are green lit with caution. The decision making is punted up the chain.

So how does Amazon’s CEO manage to keep his company agile? By making high-velocity decisions since “Speed matters in business”. Seems self evident, but lot of companies seem to forget this. For light-weight things, don’t sweat too much as the decisions are reversible. Also, you don’t have to wait for 100% of the information. Get going with 70% of the information.

One of the most valuable comments is this: Disagree and commit

This phrase will save a lot of time. If you have conviction on a particular direction even though there’s no consensus, it’s helpful to say, “Look, I know we disagree on this but will you gamble with me on it? Disagree and commit?” By the time you’re at this point, no one can know the answer for sure, and you’ll probably get a quick yes. This isn’t one way. If you’re the boss, you should do this too. I disagree and commit all the time. We recently greenlit a particular Amazon Studios original. I told the team my view: debatable whether it would be interesting enough, complicated to produce, the business terms aren’t that good, and we have lots of other opportunities. They had a completely different opinion and wanted to go ahead.

I wrote back right away with “I disagree and commit and hope it becomes the most watched thing we’ve ever made.” Consider how much slower this decision cycle would have been if the team had actually had to convince me rather than simply get my commitment.

Second, companies are faced with a question as to what their focus should be. Should they focus on competition, product, business model or technology. The answer is simple

..in my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of Day 1 vitality.

Why? There are many advantages to a customer-centric approach, but here’s the big one: customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great. Even when they don’t yet know it, customers want something better, and your desire to delight customers will drive you to invent on their behalf. No customer ever asked Amazon to create the Prime membership program, but it sure turns out they wanted it, and I could give you many such examples.

Staying in Day 1 requires you to experiment patiently, accept failures, plant seeds, protect saplings, and double down when you see customer delight. A customer-obsessed culture best creates the conditions where all of that can happen.

In my previous startup,we had an obsessive customer focus. We had a practice called Follow Me Home, where would actually visit landlords at their home and watch them use the product. It provided many insights to engineers who were not landlords. For example, the site was easy to use for folks who owned couple of homes, but was a pain for people who owned more than 10 homes. Their rental payments would all be grouped into a single transaction by the backend system and sent to the bank, making it hard for them to reconcile. Due to these interactions, many of our customers were willing to try out our beta features, because they knew we would listen.

Read 2017 Amazon shareholder letter from Jeff Bezos for more insights. It is not very long.