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Re:Jeff Bezos’ letter to shareholders by peteretep on Thursday April 07, 2016 @11:57PM (#11452490)
Help me understand how:

"We learned from our failures and stayed stubborn on the vision"

isn't mutually exclusive

Re:Jeff Bezos’ letter to shareholders by davidrusu on Friday April 08, 2016 @12:07AM (#11452531)
They are convinced of the vision and have an unwavering belief that they will achieve this vision, but there are many paths one can take. So to act rationally when encountering a failed attempt, given their belief, is to learn and try something else. :)
Re:Jeff Bezos’ letter to shareholders by skj on Friday April 08, 2016 @12:04AM (#11452519)
You can have tactical failures that don't invalidate the vision.
Re:Jeff Bezos’ letter to shareholders by wheat7420 on Friday April 08, 2016 @12:10AM (#11452543)
Your quote is from the section where they are explaining their first attempt at an auction house and how it failed but how their current system of third party retailers is implementing a similar idea in a successful way.

They kept the same vision/goal but they learned from how their first attempt failed and iterated on it until it succeeded.

Re:Jeff Bezos’ letter to shareholders by hspak on Friday April 08, 2016 @12:03AM (#11452515)
How so? You try again when you fail like that Thomas Edison quote: "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."
Re:Jeff Bezos’ letter to shareholders by sib on Friday April 08, 2016 @12:06AM (#11452529)
There's another part of the quote that was not included that relates to being flexible on tactics (...while being stubborn on vision). So the "why" and "for whom" stay constant, but the "what" and "how" may change as you learn.
Re:Jeff Bezos’ letter to shareholders by adventured on Friday April 08, 2016 @12:10AM (#11452539)
He's talking about failures related to individual steps on the way to the greater vision of what Amazon is supposed to represent as a value proposition to customers.

A single failure on a step, such as the Fire Phone for example, doesn't imply a failure of the overall vision ("Our vision is to be earth's most customer centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online.").

Re:Jeff Bezos’ letter to shareholders by resu_nimda on Friday April 08, 2016 @12:05AM (#11452524)
Usually vision is paired with the concept of execution. The vision was to build a business out of being a marketplace where third parties can sell goods, they failed twice on the execution.
Re:Jeff Bezos’ letter to shareholders by megablast on Friday April 08, 2016 @01:25AM (#11452729)
Now they know exactly what they are doing wrong?
Re:Jeff Bezos’ letter to shareholders by glibgil on Friday April 08, 2016 @12:02AM (#11452510)
$99 Prime, for example