And I don’t mean 124 word Tweets. Annual Reports, 10-K’s and Proxies are “basic” and one would think everyone reads them so where is the value-add? Obviously, we know that most people don’t read them or just AI for the summary.
Yes, one of my few innate abilities is reading very quickly. But I would argue that taking the time alone to read..and re-read thoroughly, leads naturally to the concept of thinking and re-thinking. Which seem to be good fundamentals for current or future decision making. Trotting out the old Pascal quote: “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” And that Thinking, Fast and Slow stuff.
I have read Amazon’s annual report since its inception, and it proved without a doubt the limits of my cognitive ability because I have never owned it. (And don’t ask me about being short personally in late 1999.) While Jassy is not Bezos, which is hardly a slight, he does his best to write from the well. While this has been said before, this remains a practical intellectual construct. And if you aren’t paying attention to where one of the largest companies in the world, which coined the phrase “your margin is my opportunity,” is going, then it can be argued your model might be wrong.
We’ve had this long-held philosophy at Amazon about two-way and one-way door decisions. A two-way door decision is one where if you get the decision wrong, you can walk back through that door, revert to where you were, and there are few (if any) ramifications. You can make these decisions quickly and locally. A oneway door decision is one where it’s quite difficult (if not impossible) to walk back through that door if you get the decision wrong, so these decisions are made more methodically. But, both of these constructs assume the door is unlocked. A lot of invention is about trying to open doors that have historically seemed bolted shut. And, over the past 30 years, we’ve found one of the most important keys to unlock these doors has been a simple question: “Why?”
So it’s worth reading the whole letter. And then the actual 10-k with all those number thingies and legal disclosures. (It’s ok to use the “compare doc with last year feature.)
