Walter Isaacson

“You know the business plan won’t survive its first encounters with reality,” he says. “But the discipline of writing the plan forces you to think through some of the issues and to get sort of mentally comfortable in the space.

Then you start to understand, if you push on this knob, this will move

over here and so on. So, that’s the first step

and that is our goal, to be Earth’s most customer-centric company

I’m always trying to figure out one thing first and foremost: Is that person a missionary or a mercenary?” Bezos says. “The mercenaries are trying to flip their stock. The missionaries love their product or their service

and love their customers and are trying

build a great service. By the way, the great paradox here is that it’s usually the missionaries who make more money.” Mackey struck him as a missionary, and his passion infused the Whole Foods ethos. “It’s a missionary company, and he’s a missionary guy.”

Amazon only makes money when it sells things, so negative reviews hurt the business. “When I read that letter, I thought, we don’t make money when we sell things,” Bezos says. “We make money when we help customers make purchase decisions

An investor complained that Bezos was forgetting that

Amazon gets criticized—as does Walmart—for squeezing suppliers and forcing them to cut costs. But Bezos sees “relentlessly lowering prices” for consumers as core to Amazon’s mission. For most recent years Amazon has come in first in major surveys of customer satisfaction