What's Not Changing

“It helps to base your strategy on things that won't change… I very rarely get asked ‘What's not going to change in the next five to ten years?’ … We're always trying to figure that out, because… all the energy you invest in them today will still be paying you dividends ten years from now. Whereas if you base your strategy first and foremost on more transitory things -- who your competitors are, what kind of technologies are available, and so on -- those things are going to change so rapidly that you're going to have to change your strategy very rapidly, too…

“For our business, most of them turn out to be customer insights. Look at what's important to the customers... They want selection, low prices, and fast delivery… that will be paying us dividends ten years from now…

“Another thing that we believe is pretty fundamental is that the world is getting increasingly transparent -- that information perfection is on the rise. If you believe that, it becomes strategically smart to align yourself with the customer. You think about marketing differently. If in the old world you devoted 30% of your attention to building a great service and 70% of your attention to shouting about it, in the new world that inverts… Of course there could also come a day when one of those things turns out to be wrong. So it's important to have some kind of mechanism to figure out if you're wrong about a deeply held precept.”

(Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com, in “The HBR Interview: Jeff Bezos, The Institutional YES.” Julia Kirby, Thomas A Stewart. Harvard Business Review: October 2007. Vol. 85, Iss. 10; p. 74)