“I don't think that you can invent on behalf of customers unless you're willing to think long-term, because a lot of invention doesn't work. If you're going to invent, it means you're going to experiment, and if you're going to experiment, you're going to fail, and if you're going to fail, you have to think long term.”
Why the Long Horizon
From Jeff Bezos’s 2013 interview with Hanson Hosein for the Four Peaks TV series, conducted in conjunction with the opening of the Bezos Center for Innovation at Seattle’s Museum of History & Industry, and excerpted by Todd Bishop in GeekWire on September 17, 2013 ahead of the broadcast debut on UWTV that evening. Bishop frames the quote as Bezos describing the “Amazon cocktail” of customer-centricity, long-term thinking, and invention.
Of those three ingredients, the middle one does the structural work. Customer-centricity names who the invention is for; invention names what the work is; long-term thinking is the binding ingredient, because experimentation permitted to fail is what invention actually requires. The earlier part of the same interview captures the customer side (Bezos’s “divine discontent” of customers who are “never satisfied”), and the cited line captures the leader’s side: the horizon long enough to keep inventing past the failures.