Steve Ells Quotes

Disruption starts with committing to excellence and taking a stand for your customer.

We're running the company to serve more people.

It's not about market share. If you have a successful company, you will get your market share. But to get a successful company, what do you have to have? The same metrics of success that your customer does.

I talked about 12 to 18 months, and that's about reaffirming our foundation for sustained growth: getting the discipline back, getting the basics right, getting the customer focus back... so by the end of next year, I hope most of that's in place.

When businesses go through hard times, through down markets, what do they do is they challenge every basic assumption of how they operate. They innovate. They create disruption for a while that leads them to even greater heights when the economy turns around.

In setting goals and executing a strategy, Wanda is sophisticated. We have good systems and departments. If targets are not reached, a yellow light goes off.

We've had three big ideas at Amazon that we've stuck with for 18 years, and they're the reason we're successful: Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient.

I think the biggest challenge over time is that we stay creative and making sure that we continue to launch awesome products that people love.

We undertook a huge internal transformation to sharpen our customer focus, step up innovation, improve productivity to ensure competitiveness, change our culture, and simplify our ways of working so that our size and scale became a competitive advantage rather than a bureaucratic hangover after years of diversification.

A world-changing vision often necessitates a profound simplicity in the user experience.

As CEO of Cold Stone Creamery, we used a concept called 'search and reapply,' which meant that if we found better ways of doing something, then we would do it.

The challenge is moving fast and staying great. You have to keep the bar high. There's only one way you can evolve the brand and perception, which is to deliver. You just gotta lay it down.

From the early days, Booking.com has been disruptive. Our aim is to create the best product for our customers, and we do that through constant innovation and testing.

I learned from growing a business that it's important to listen to everyone how we can do better.

Our customers, system, and shareholders are best served when we direct our focus and energy towards executing against these critical customer expectations.

If you're not trying to do something better, then you're not focused on the customer and you'll miss the possibility of making your business great.

It doesn't matter what product or service you're offering; there is unlimited ability to improve the quality of anything.

Deliver total quality to every customer every day.

I've never had any big ideas about being the solo.

Simplify the task. Continually look for faster, better, easier ways to get the job done.

I don't really like to work with literary allusions very much. I never want to be in a position where I'm saying, "You've got to read a lot of other stuff" or "You've got to have had a good education in literature to fully appreciate what I'm doing."

Big ideas are usually simple ideas.

Disneyland is like a piece of clay: If there is something I don't like, I'm not stuck with it. I can reshape and revamp.

Quality management is needed because nothing is simple anymore, if indeed it ever was.

In a certain way, you get some new tools to work with, but I don't know if it ultimately makes the creative process any easier.