How Amazon Thinks About Competition

To do well in business, a company needs to be both robust and nimble. To be nimble as a big company, you need to make decisions quickly, take risks, and be ready to fail — and you need to know the difference between experimental failure, which is good, and operational failure, which is not. To create — and maintain — an edge you need innovative people, and you need to empower them.

Amazon Web Services exemplifies how this approach of taking risks and experimenting can pay off.

This piece was adapted from interviews Jeff Bezos gave at the Economic Club of Washington in 2018, and the Reagan National Defense Forum in 2019. Both...