Amazon and Jeff Bezos talk long term and mean it – NYTimes, Dec2011
“If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re competing against a lot of people,” Mr. Bezos told reporter Steve Levy last month in an interview in Wired. “But if you’re willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you’re now competing against a fraction of those people, because very few companies are willing to do that. Just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavors that you could never otherwise pursue. At Amazon we like things to work in five to seven years. We’re willing to plant seeds, let them grow—and we’re very stubborn.”
The Incredible Shrinking Boomer Economy – Dave Cohen, Aug 2009
When 79 million people—nearly a third of Americans—start spending less and saving more, you know it won’t be pretty. According to consulting firm McKinsey, boomers’ conversion to thrift could stifle the economy’s hoped-for rebound and knock U.S. growth down from the 3.2% it has averaged since 1965 to 2.4% over the next 30 years. “We would have gotten here in 5 or 10 years as boomers retire, but [the economic crisis] pushed it up,” says Michael Sinoway, managing director of consulting firm AlixPartners. “Now [companies] are scared things won’t come back”…
How one CEO Facebook’d his company – David Kirkpatrick, Jun 2008
“I told all the employees it’s OK on a Friday for everybody to goof off and spend an hour or two on Facebook… ‘Go nuts! I dare you to participate… The subversive message was ‘Guys – the world is a different place and if we’re going to stay relevant we’re going to have to wake up’” – Jeremy Burton, Serena Software
Gilberto Gil, Minister of Culture for Brazil – talking at Google Zeitgeist, May 2008
The 21st century technologies represent a huge challenge to regulations. The revolution generated by the convergence of digital technologies obliges us to reinvent the way we do almost everything. I believe that anybody with public responsibility should look into the digital distribution of Intellectual Property as the most direct and powerful way of democratizing knowledge in the history of mankind. But instead we see almost every formal institution insisting on bluntly calling the digital distribution “Piracy”.
Larry Page on how to change the world – Andy Serwer, Fortune, Apr 2008
If you ask an economist what’s driven economic growth, it’s been major advances in things that mattered – the mechanization of farming, mass manufacturing, things like that. The problem is, our society is not organized around doing that. Instead, it’s sort of like “We are captives of the world, and whatever happens, happens.” That’s not the case at all.
