Companies get skills-focused, instead of customer-needs focused

Q: Do you feel vindicated, given how well the company is doing now?
A: No. I've taken plenty of criticism, but it's always been about our stock price and never about our customer experience. After the bubble burst, I would sit down with our harshest critics, and at the end of the meeting they would say, "I'm a huge customer." You know that when your harshest critics are among your best customers, you can't be doing that badly.

...

Q: Every company claims to be customer-focused. Why do you think so few are able to pull it off?
A: Companies get skills-focused, instead of customer-needs focused. When [companies] think about extending their business into some new area, the first question is "why should we do that—we don't have any skills in that area." That approach puts a finite lifetime on a company, because the world changes, and what used to be cutting-edge skills have turned into something your customers may not need anymore. A much more stable strategy is to start with "what do my customers need?" Then do an inventory of the gaps in your skills. Kindle is a great example. If we set our strategy by what our skills happen to be rather than by what our customers need, we never would have done it. We had to go out and hire people who know how to build hardware devices and create a whole new competency for the company.

- Bezos on Innovation

I tried to imagine what he was doing there. You're Jeff f'n Bezos. More than 10,000 people work for you. You're building a space ship!

After the talk, Jeff came up (patiently waiting his turn) and said he was really going to think hard about the implications of the some of the things we talked about, especially the part on levels and rewards. Then he asked, "How can I do more for our reviewers? These people do so much, and work so hard--especially the ones who do a lot of reviews -- and the 'Top [some number] Reviewer' badges are not enough." I was speechless. Not because I couldn't think of an answer, but because I couldn't believe someone this far up the food chain would even think--let alone care about this. My talk is geared toward--and usually attended by--founders of tiny start-ups, not Big Company CEOs. [Visualize me doing one of those cartoon double-take head shake eye-pop things]

But then I remembered my trip to Amazon, where Paul Graham gave a fabulous talk on what a company loses when it gets big, and how important it was to hang on to a start-up sensibility as you grow. Paul said to the Amazon folks, "You're a big company now, but how can you still act like a start-up in the ways that really matter."

And there's Jeff Bezos, doing exactly that. Acting just like the enthusiastic start-up folks I usually see--the ones whose chance for success hangs on their ability to make and keep users happy. The ones who don't have 10,000 other people to do it for them.

- Difference between Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates?