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Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos delivers graduation speech at Princeton University

As a kid, I spent my summers with my grandparents on their ranch in Texas. I helped fix windmills, vaccinate cattle, and do other chores. We also watched soap operas every afternoon, especially "Days of our Lives." My grandparents belonged to a Caravan Club, a group of Airstream trailer owners who travel together around the U.S. and Canada. And every few summers, we'd join the caravan. We'd hitch up the Airstream trailer to my grandfather's car, and off we'd go, in a line with 300 other Airstream adventurers. I loved and worshipped my grandparents and I really looked forward to these trips. On one particular trip, I was about 10 years old. I was rolling around in the big bench seat in the back of the car. My grandfather was driving. And my grandmother had the passenger seat. She smoked throughout these trips, and I hated the smell.

At that age, I'd take any excuse to make estimates and do minor arithmetic. I'd calculate our gas mileage -- figure out useless statistics on things like grocery spending. I'd been hearing an ad campaign about smoking. I can't remember the details, but basically the ad said, every puff of a cigarette takes some number of minutes off of your life: I think it might have been two minutes per puff. At any rate, I decided to do the math for my grandmother. I estimated the number of cigarettes per days, estimated the number of puffs per cigarette and so on. When I was satisfied that I'd come up with a reasonable number, I poked my head into the front of the car, tapped my grandmother on the shoulder, and proudly proclaimed, "At two minutes per puff, you've taken nine years off your life!"

I have a vivid memory of what happened, and it was not what I expected. I expected to be applauded for my cleverness and arithmetic skills. "Jeff, you're so smart. You had to have made some tricky estimates, figure out the number of minutes in a year and do some division." That's not what happened. Instead, my grandmother burst into tears. I sat in the backseat and did not know what to do. While my grandmother sat crying, my grandfather, who had been driving in silence, pulled over onto the shoulder of the highway. He got out of the car and came around and opened my door and waited for me to follow. Was I in trouble? My grandfather was a highly intelligent, quiet man. He had never said a harsh word to me, and maybe this was to be the first time? Or maybe he would ask that I get back in the car and apologize to my grandmother. I had no experience in this realm with my grandparents and no way to gauge what the consequences might be. We stopped beside the trailer. My grandfather looked at me, and after a bit of silence, he gently and calmly said, "Jeff, one day you'll understand that it's harder to be kind than clever."

What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy -- they're given after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you're not careful, and if you do, it'll probably be to the detriment of your choices.

This is a group with many gifts. I'm sure one of your gifts is the gift of a smart and capable brain. I'm confident that's the case because admission is competitive and if there weren't some signs that you're clever, the dean of admission wouldn't have let you in.

Your smarts will come in handy because you will travel in a land of marvels. We humans -- plodding as we are -- will astonish ourselves. We'll invent ways to generate clean energy and a lot of it. Atom by atom, we'll assemble tiny machines that will enter cell walls and make repairs. This month comes the extraordinary but also inevitable news that we've synthesized life. In the coming years, we'll not only synthesize it, but we'll engineer it to specifications. I believe you'll even see us understand the human brain. Jules Verne, Mark Twain, Galileo, Newton -- all the curious from the ages would have wanted to be alive most of all right now. As a civilization, we will have so many gifts, just as you as individuals have so many individual gifts as you sit before me.

How will you use these gifts? And will you take pride in your gifts or pride in your choices?

I got the idea to start Amazon 16 years ago. I came across the fact that Web usage was growing at 2,300 percent per year. I'd never seen or heard of anything that grew that fast, and the idea of building an online bookstore with millions of titles -- something that simply couldn't exist in the physical world -- was very exciting to me. I had just turned 30 years old, and I'd been married for a year. I told my wife MacKenzie that I wanted to quit my job and go do this crazy thing that probably wouldn't work since most startups don't, and I wasn't sure what would happen after that. MacKenzie (also a Princeton grad and sitting here in the second row) told me I should go for it. As a young boy, I'd been a garage inventor. I'd invented an automatic gate closer out of cement-filled tires, a solar cooker that didn't work very well out of an umbrella and tinfoil, baking-pan alarms to entrap my siblings. I'd always wanted to be an inventor, and she wanted me to follow my passion.

I was working at a financial firm in New York City with a bunch of very smart people, and I had a brilliant boss that I much admired. I went to my boss and told him I wanted to start a company selling books on the Internet. He took me on a long walk in Central Park, listened carefully to me, and finally said, "That sounds like a really good idea, but it would be an even better idea for someone who didn't already have a good job." That logic made some sense to me, and he convinced me to think about it for 48 hours before making a final decision. Seen in that light, it really was a difficult choice, but ultimately, I decided I had to give it a shot. I didn't think I'd regret trying and failing. And I suspected I would always be haunted by a decision to not try at all. After much consideration, I took the less safe path to follow my passion, and I'm proud of that choice.

Tomorrow, in a very real sense, your life -- the life you author from scratch on your own -- begins.

How will you use your gifts? What choices will you make?

Will inertia be your guide, or will you follow your passions?

Will you follow dogma, or will you be original?

Will you choose a life of ease, or a life of service and adventure?

Will you wilt under criticism, or will you follow your convictions?

Will you bluff it out when you're wrong, or will you apologize?

Will you guard your heart against rejection, or will you act when you fall in love?

Will you play it safe, or will you be a little bit swashbuckling?

When it's tough, will you give up, or will you be relentless?

Will you be a cynic, or will you be a builder?

Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?

I will hazard a prediction. When you are 80 years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story. Thank you and good luck!


via: princeton.edu

People, Passion, Perseverance: You've Got Entrepreneurship

People, passion, perseverance. Former AOL CEO and Chairman Steve Case describes these words as the bedrock of successful entrepreneurship. Heading into what may be a "golden era of entrepreneurship," he says that he relies on the "three p's" as assessment tools to help guide his direction and goals. When all of the three parts are in balance, an entrepreneur can achieve success like that of AOL; when they aren't, you get the failure of the AOL-Time Warner merger.

Be Like the Internet

Be Like the Internet - 8 steps to success in a post 2.0 world

View more presentations from Thor.

1. Let Go: 8 Steps to Success Go! 2.0 World Let in a post 8 Steps to Success in a post 2.0 World
2. Letting Go: Letting Go 8 Steps to Success in a post 2.0 World 8 Steps to Success in a post 2.0 World
3. Losing Control: 8 Steps to SuccessControl Losing in a post 2.0 World 8 Steps to Success in a post 2.0 World
4. Why are some companies so overwhelmingly successful on the network? (While others seem to be killing themselves off)
5. Or, what makes Google Google?
6. We’ve seen a fundamental shift in how value is created 1. Collapse in the cost of creation 2. The network changes everything
7. We used to focus on building core competencies
8. Cheap coordination allows value to be created on the edges
9. We're moving from an industrial age...
10. ...to a networked one.
11. Industrial age assumptions still rule.
12. But the networked world doesn’t work that way
13. The way for a business to thrive in the networked world is to adapt to the network (not the other way around)
14. Be Like the Internet 8 Steps to Success in a post 2.0 World
15. That leads to two questions: 1. Um, what? 2. Ok, but how?
16. Basically, get used to it being out of your control
17. Most of what matters to your business is happening outside your business
18. And it’s happening faster and faster
19. YOU ARE A NODE
20. YOU ARE A NODE you
21. YOU ARE A NODE y
22. Your new home page
23. Ok, sure, but practically what does this mean?
24. 8 ways in which you* can change to... BE LIKE THE INTERNET
25. 1. From control to chaos
26. Adapting to chaos: we’re naturals “They walk fast and they walk adroitly. They give and they take, at once aggressive and accomodating. With the subtlest of motions they signal their intention to one another.” William Whyte, City (1969)
27. Unpredictability requires new ways to plan
28. Iteration Iteration Iteration Iteration Iteration Iteration Iteration Iteration
29. Yelp: customers lead the conversation
30. Disney’s image in the hands of passersby
31. 2. From convention to instinct
32. From red oceans to blue oceans
33. Southwest: ignoring sacred cows
34. Starbucks: coffee becomes a lifestyle
35. American Apparel: upstart with an attitude
36. 3. From process to flow
37. The industrial model: Hierarchies and procedures
38. The network model: Fluid dynamics
39. As seen in the brain’s synapses...
40. As see in a colony of ants...
41. What is Flow? Flow is the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing, characterized by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. Flow, is also another name for "flux" in physics, which is the rate at which something travels through a given cross section
42. Product development teams are adapting to manage the speed and uncertainty of the network
43. Abandoning the waterfall for the washing machine
44. Improvising directly with customers Example: 30 Boxes
45. 4. From documentation to collaboration
46. If the goal is to get into flow and avoid top-heavy process, how?
47. Whiteboard sessions
48. Cocktail napkin collaboration
49. Rapid prototyping
50. Bioteams that leverage short messaging
51. Pixar’s approach to movie development
52. “Make it OK for people to challenge an idea or two, the good ideas can withstand it and the weaker ideas fall away and make room for something [better].” -Brad Bird, Writer/Director of the Incredibles
53. 5. From fear to confidence
54. Fear of competition
55. There’s nowhere to hide anymore
56. Embrace critics and whistleblowers
57. vs. Kaiser Permanente
58. The truth about the Digg revolt
59. Jetblue apologizes via Youtube
60. 6. From ownership to stewardship
61. In service of a higher purpose
62. Ted Rheinold of Dogster “About week 3 I realized I wasn’t in charge anymore.”
63. It’s true for individual practitioners as well
64. Google aims to be a steward for the Internet’s decentralized nature, its core social good.
65. 7. From walls to openness
66. It’s not clear where you interests end and others begin
67. Secrecy is obsolete
68. Boundaries are optional
69. Create ecosystems around your business
70. Measure success by the meaningful connections in your own network
71. 8. From inside to outside
72. There’s a lot more going on outside your business
73. How do you need to change to BE LIKE THE INTERNET?
74. Develop a practice of valuing ideas on their merits and their connections
75. Beliketheinternet.pbwiki.com Come by our wiki to share stories about to put these principles into practice

The New Paradigm of Advantage - 20th vs 21st century

The past of advantage was extractive and protective.

The future of advantage, on the other hand, is allocative and creative.

20th century

Extractive. Over two decades, Microsoft has honed its extractive edge, coming up with cleverer and cleverer ways to extract profits from customers and suppliers. But Microsoft's just a flea on Wall St's elephant — who mastered extractive advantage by finding ways to, ultimately, extract trillions from you, me, and our grandkids. Extractive advantage asks: how can we transfer value from stakeholders to us, 10x or 100x better than our rivals?

Protective. Think Microsoft's the master of 20th century advantage? Think again. Monsanto's Round-up Ready strategy protects genetically modified crops with proprietary herbicide that crops need to flourish. The result? A protective advantage: Monsanto's made sure that farmers are locked in to Monsanto as tightly as possible. Protective advantage asks: are buyers and suppliers locked in to dealing with us, 10x or 100x more tightly than to rivals?

21st century

Allocative. Google's advantage was built on allocating attention to content and ads better than its rivals. Google's real secret? Relevance, media's measure of how efficiently attention is allocated. Match.com is building an allocative advantage in, well, matching people with partners. Allocative advantage asks: are we able to match people with what makes them durably, tangibly better off — and can we do it 10x or 100x better than our rivals?

Creative. Apple's advantage is, of course, radically creative: built on creating insanely great stuff that turns entire industries upside down. Next month, the iPad promises to do what the iPhone and iPod did before it. The power's in the creativity, not just the technology: Apple's thinking different yet again. Creative advantage asks: is our strategic imagination 10x or 100x richer, faster, and deeper than our rivals?

The New Paradigm of Advantage on Prezi

The future of advantage is radically different from the past for a simple reason: because it's economically better.

20th century advantage focuses firms on simply extracting resources from people, communities and society — and then protecting what they extract.

21st century advantage focuses firms on creating new resources, and allocating them better.

The former is useful only to shareholders and managers — but the latter is useful to people, communities, and society. The old Microsoft was useful to shareholders, but a lot less useful to society — and that's exactly how Google and Apple attacked it, and won.

An economy built on extractive and protective advantage is a giant, endless Ponziconomy. Value is transferred from one party to the next — but little is created anew. That's what we're finding out the hard way.

Only through creative and allocative advantage can we rebuild a more meaningful economy.

Via: blogs.hbr.org

Internet is Freedom (Speech at Italian Parliament)

Another incisive and insightful presentation by Lawrence Lessig (@lessig) :
Internet is Freedom (Speech at Italian Parliament - 11/03/10)

Here the full meeting (link)