Jeff Bezos shares everything he knows.

1. You Need to Obsess Over Customers – Put customers first. Given the choice of obsessing over competitors or obsessing over customers, always obsess over customers. Get your energy and motivation from obsessing on your customers. Pay attention to what competitors do, but obsess on your customers.

2. Invent – It’s important to invent. Any time there is a problem, never accept an either/or thinking. Figure out a solution that gets both things. You can invent your way out of any box if you think you can. You need invent on behalf of your customers.

3. Think Long Term – Any company that wants to focus on customers and put customers first, any company that wants to invent on behalf of on customers, must think long term. It’s harder than you might think. The ability to think in 5 and 7 year time frames requires and allows a willingness to be misunderstood. Don’t buckle to standard pressures that come on and force short term thinking. It’s a huge competitive advantage to be able to think long term and you get to serve customers much better.

4. It’s Always Day 1 – There’s always more invention in the future, always more customer innovation and new ways to obsess over customers.

You can watch Jeff Bezos here.

On the element that rings true for all the different jobs he’s had

“I believe in management, I really believe that give people the things that you want them to do, judge them on what you want them to accomplish, make sure you’re really bottom line on everything, they will recognize you have a heart and that you’re really trying to help them by giving them all that rigor,then they’re going to call you later.”

Hope

“If you don’t have hope you’re never going to do anything, and you’ll never accomplish anything.”

The Right Culture

“It’s all about the people. If you have the right people, then you’re going to end up with the right culture.”

“When you hire mediocre people and let them do mediocre things, it brings everybody down. You save to be absolutely fanatic about getting rid of people who can’t contribute or have bad attitudes. “”

“I’ve fired more people for attitude and behavior than I ever have for performance.”

“You’ve got to have people who really care about the outcome, the total outcome of the team.”

Working with misbehaving superstars

“The superstars have got to make sure that they are behaving.”

What he tells misbehaving superstars: “As great as you are, I can’t accommodate the dissonance. Either you’re going to work with everybody here, or you can’t work here. I don’t care how great you are.”

You can watch the video interview here.