第二十封信中英文对照：

“Jeff, what does Day 2 look like?”

「杰夫，Day 2长什么样子？」

That’s a question I just got at our most recent all-hands meeting. I’ve been reminding people that it’s Day 1 for a couple of decades. I work in an Amazon building named Day 1, and when I moved buildings, I took the name with me. I spend time thinking about this topic

这是我在最近的全体会议上遇到的一个问题。我一直提醒人们，现在依旧是Day 1。我原本在一栋名为Day 1的建筑中工作，当我换办公室时，我把这个名字也带走了。关于Day 1，我花了很多时间思考。

“Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.”

「Day 2是停滞的、无关紧要的、极其乏味的，痛苦地衰退，最终死亡。这就是为什么我总说现在是Day 1。」

To be sure, this kind of decline would happen in extreme slow motion. An established company might harvest Day 2 for decades, but the final result would still come.

可以肯定的是，这种衰退的过程极度缓慢。一间成熟的公司可能在Day 2欢喜收获数十年，但最终结果一定会到来。

I’m interested in the question, how do you fend off Day 2? What are the techniques and tactics? How do you keep the vitality of Day 1, even inside a large organization?

我对这个问题感兴趣：你如何抵御Day 2？有哪些技巧和方法？即使在大型组织内部，你如何保持Day 1的活力？

Such a question can’t have a simple answer. There will be many elements, multiple paths, and many traps. I don’t know the whole answer, but I may know bits of it. Here’s a starter pack of essentials for Day 1 defense: customer obsession, a skeptical view of proxies, the eager adoption of external trends, and high-velocity decision making.

这样的问题不能简单回答。这个问题包含很多元素、多条路径和许多陷阱。我并不知道全部答案，但我可能知道其中一部分。这是Day 1的入门装备：专注于客户、对代理的怀疑态度、渴望接纳外部趋势及快速决策。

True Customer Obsession

真正专注于客户

There are many ways to center a business. You can be competitor focused, you can be product focused, you can be technology focused, you can be business model focused, and there are more. But in my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of Day 1 vitality.

一项业务可以有很多种专注方式。你可以专注于竞争对手，可以专注于产品，可以专注于技术，可以专注于商业模式等等。但是在我看来，专注于客户是保持Day 1活力的最好方式。

Why? There are many advantages to a customer-centric approach, but here’s the big one: customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great. Even when they don’t yet know it, customers want something better, and your desire to delight customers will drive you to invent on their behalf. No customer ever asked Amazon to create the Prime membership program, but it sure turns out they wanted it, and I could give you many such examples.

为什么？以客户为中心有很多优点，其中最大的优点是：即使客户表示满意而且生意很好，他们仍旧总是还有些不满意。即使他们还不了解他们要什么，但客户就是想要更好的东西。若你聚焦于客户，客户的希望会驱动你为他们发明更好的东西。从未有客户直接要求Amazon创建Prime会员计划，但可以肯定的是，他们确实希望这样做。我还可以举出许多这样的例子。

Staying in Day 1 requires you to experiment patiently, accept failures, plant seeds, protect saplings, and double down when you see customer delight. A customer-obsessed culture best creates the conditions where all of that can happen.

保持在Day 1需要耐心试验、接受失败、种下种子、保护树苗，并在客户满意时加倍努力。专注于客户的文化最能创造Day 1的条件，使一切发生。

Resist Proxies

拒绝代理

As companies get larger and more complex, there’s a tendency to manage to proxies. This comes in many shapes and sizes, and it’s dangerous, subtle, and very Day 2.

随着公司的规模变大且日益复杂，会出现代理管理的趋势。代理管理十分多样、非常危险，而且正是Day 2的征兆。

A common example is process as proxy. Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing. This can happen very easily in large organizations. The process becomes the proxy for the result you want. You stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you’re doing the process right. Gulp. It’s not that rare to hear a junior leader defend a bad outcome with something like, “Well, we followed the process.” A more experienced leader will use it as an opportunity to investigate and improve the process. The process is not the thing. It’s always worth asking, do we own the process or does the process own us? In a Day 2 company, you might find it’s the second.

一个常见的例子就是代理流程。好的流程让你可以更好地为客户服务。但是如果你不注意的话，「遵循流程」就会变成「为客户服务」的同义词，这会变成问题。在大型组织中，这个问题很容易发生。于是，你不再关注结果，只是确保自己正确地执行流程。年轻领导者以「是这样的，我们确实遵循流序」之类的话来为自己辩护，这样的事并不罕见。经验丰富的领导者，将以此为契机调查和改进流程。过程本身不是问题。我们要不断问自己：流程听命于我们，还是我们听命于流程？在Day 2的公司中，你会发现他们是后者。

Another example: market research and customer surveys can become proxies for customers – something that’s especially dangerous when you’re inventing and designing products. “Fifty-five percent of beta testers report being satisfied with this feature. That is up from 47% in the first survey.” That’s hard to interpret and could unintentionally mislead.

另一个例子是：市场研究和客户调查可能会成为客户的代理－当你在发明和设计产品时，这尤其危险。「在Beta测试中，55%的测试人员对此功能感到满意，比第一次调查的47％还高。」这样的现象很难解释，而且可能在无意间误导我们。

Good inventors and designers deeply understand their customer. They spend tremendous energy developing that intuition. They study and understand many anecdotes rather than only the averages you’ll find on surveys. They live with the design.

优秀的发明者和设计师对客户有深刻的了解。他们花费巨大的精力培养这种直觉。他们研究并了解许多奇闻轶事，而不仅仅是你在调查中能找到的平均值。他们与设计共生。

I’m not against beta testing or surveys. But you, the product or service owner, must understand the customer, have a vision, and love the offering. Then, beta testing and research can help you find your blind spots. A remarkable customer experience starts with heart, intuition, curiosity, play, guts, taste. You won’t find any of it in a survey.

我不反对Beta测试或调查研究。但是你，产品或服务的所有者，必须了解客户、有远见并热爱产品。Beta测试和调查可以帮助你找到盲点。出色的客户体验始于内心、直觉、好奇心、乐趣、胆量和品味。你不会在调查研究中找到以上任何一项。

Embrace External Trends

拥抱外部趋势

The outside world can push you into Day 2 if you won’t or can’t embrace powerful trends quickly. If you fight them, you’re probably fighting the future. Embrace them and you have a tailwind.

如果你不愿或无法迅速接受大趋势，那外界将会把你带入Day 2。如果你与之对抗，那么你可能正在和未来对立。拥抱趋势，你会顺风顺水。

These big trends are not that hard to spot (they get talked and written about a lot), but they can be strangely hard for large organizations to embrace. We’re in the middle of an obvious one right now: machine learning and artificial intelligence.

这些大趋势并不难发现（很多人都在谈论大趋势），但是对于大型组织而言很难适应。我们正处于一个明显的趋势之中：机器学习和人工智能。

Over the past decades computers have broadly automated tasks that programmers could describe with clear rules and algorithms. Modern machine learning techniques now allow us to do the same for tasks where describing the precise rules is much harder.

在过去的几十年间，由程序员以清晰的规则和算法定义任务，计算器可以自动化处理广泛的任务。现在，机器学习技术使我们能够对难以描述清晰规则的任务，执行相同的操作。

At Amazon, we’ve been engaged in the practical application of machine learning for many years now. Some of this work is highly visible: our autonomous Prime Air delivery drones; the Amazon Go convenience store that uses machine vision to eliminate checkout lines; and Alexa, our cloud-based AI assistant. (We still struggle to keep Echo in stock, despite our best efforts. A high-quality problem, but a problem. We’re working on it.)

在Amazon，我们从事机器学习的应用已经很多年了。其中一些工作的成果是明显可见的：我们的自动化运送无人机Prime Air、使用机器视觉技术达到无柜台结账的便利店Amazon Go、基于云技术的AI助手Alexa，1我们基于云的AI助手。（尽管我们已尽了最大的努力，但我们仍在努力增加智能音箱Echo的库存量。这是一个维护质量的问题，我们正在努力。）

But much of what we do with machine learning happens beneath the surface. Machine learning drives our algorithms for demand forecasting, product search ranking, product and deals recommendations, merchandising placements, fraud detection, translations, and much more. Though less visible, much of the impact of machine learning will be of this type – quietly but meaningfully improving core operations.

但是，更多的事情没那么显而易见。机器学习驱动我们的算法，用于需求预测、产品搜索排名、产品和交易建议、商品陈列、诈骗检测、翻译等等。大部分机器学习的投入属于这种类型－尽管没那么明显，但悄然改善了核心操作。

Inside AWS, we’re excited to lower the costs and barriers to machine learning and AI so organizations of all sizes can take advantage of these advanced techniques.

在AWS内部，我们很高兴可以降低机器学习和AI的成本和障碍，因此各种规模的组织都可以利用这些先进技术。

Using our pre-packaged versions of popular deep learning frameworks running on P2 compute instances (optimized for this workload), customers are already developing powerful systems ranging everywhere from early disease detection to increasing crop yields. And we’ve also made Amazon’s higher level services available in a convenient form. Amazon Lex (what’s inside Alexa), Amazon Polly, and Amazon Rekognition remove the heavy lifting from natural language understanding, speech generation, and image analysis. They can be accessed with simple API calls – no machine learning expertise required. Watch this space. Much more to come.

使用我们在P2计算实例上运行深度学习框架的预包装版本，客户已经在开发功能强大的系统，其范围从早期疾病检测到农作物产量提升。而且，我们以方便的形式提供了Amazon的更高级别服务。Amazon Lex（Alexa的内部功能）、Amazon Polly和Amazon Rekognition去除了自然语言理解、语音生成和图像分析方面的繁重工作。开发者可以透过简单的API来使用它们－无须复杂的机器学习专业知识。注意了，还有更多东西将推出。

High-Velocity Decision Making

快速决策

Day 2 companies make high-quality decisions, but they make high-quality decisions slowly. To keep the energy and dynamism of Day 1, you have to somehow make high-quality, high-velocity decisions. Easy for start-ups and very challenging for large organizations. The senior team at Amazon is determined to keep our decision-making velocity high. Speed matters in business – plus a high-velocity decision making environment is more fun too. We don’t know all the answers, but here are some thoughts.

Day 2的公司可以做出高质量的决策，但他们是慢慢地做出高质量的决策。为了保持Day 1的精力与活力，你必须以某种方式做出质量高、速度快的决策。对于初创来说很容易，但这对于大型组织来说很有挑战性。Amazon的高级团队决心保持快速的决策速度。速度对企业至关重要，快速决策让商业环境更加有趣。我们并不知道所有问题的答案，这只是我们的一些想法。

First, never use a one-size-fits-all decision-making process. Many decisions are reversible, two-way doors. Those decisions can use a light-weight process. For those, so what if you’re wrong? I wrote about this in more detail in last year’s letter.

首先，切勿使用千篇一律的决策流程。许多决策都是可逆的、双向的。这些决策可以使用轻量的决策流程。对于这些决策，错了又何妨？我在去年的致股东信中详细地介绍了这一点。

Second, most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow. Plus, either way, you need to be good at quickly recognizing and correcting bad decisions. If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure.

其次，大多数决策可能需要在你只拥有70％信息时进行。在大多数情况下，如果你等待90％信息，那你的决策速度会很慢。你需要擅长快速识别和纠正错误的决策。如果你擅长调整路线，那么犯错的代价可能会比你想象的要低，而速度慢将使你付出高昂的代价。

Third, use the phrase “disagree and commit.” This phrase will save a lot of time. If you have conviction on a particular direction even though there’s no consensus, it’s helpful to say, “Look, I know we disagree on this but will you gamble with me on it? Disagree and commit?” By the time you’re at this point, no one can know the answer for sure, and you’ll probably get a quick yes.

第三，使用惯用语「不同意但支持」将节省大量时间。即使在没有达成共识的情况下，你仍对某个特定方向充满信心，那么你可以说：「看，我知道我们对此没有共识，但你是否可以和我赌一把？不同意但支持？」 虽然还没有任何一方知道这个方向的前景如何，但你很可能会得到尝试的机会。

This isn’t one way. If you’re the boss, you should do this too. I disagree and commit all the time. We recently greenlit a particular Amazon Studios original. I told the team my view: debatable whether it would be interesting enough, complicated to produce, the business terms aren’t that good, and we have lots of other opportunities. They had a completely different opinion and wanted to go ahead. I wrote back right away with “I disagree and commit and hope it becomes the most watched thing we’ve ever made.” Consider how much slower this decision cycle would have been if the team had actually had to convince me rather than simply get my commitment.

不只是员工应该如此，如果你是老板，你也应该这么做。我总是不同意但支持。我们最近放行了几部Amazon Studios的原创内容。我告诉团队：无论想法是否足够有趣、会不会太复杂、有没有考虑商业层面，在我们面前还有很多机会，欢迎把想法提出来讨论。他们有完全不同的意见，并希望可以往前推进。我立刻回信：「我不同意但支持，希望它成为我们有史以来最受关注的事情。」想想看，如果团队必须说服我才能得到我的支持，那么这个决策周期变得多慢。

Note what this example is not: it’s not me thinking to myself “well, these guys are wrong and missing the point, but this isn’t worth me chasing.” It’s a genuine disagreement of opinion, a candid expression of my view, a chance for the team to weigh my view, and a quick, sincere commitment to go their way. And given that this team has already brought home 11 Emmys, 6 Golden Globes, and 3 Oscars, I’m just glad they let me in the room at all!

值得注意的是，这个例子不是我对自己说「好吧，这些人错了，没把握住重点，不过这件事不值得我花费心力。」这个例子是真正的意见分歧，我坦率表达我的想法，团队因此有机会权衡我的想法，迅速得到我的支持。有鉴于该团队已经带回了11个艾美奖、6个金球奖和3个奥斯卡奖，我非常高兴他们让我参与！

Fourth, recognize true misalignment issues early and escalate them immediately. Sometimes teams have different objectives and fundamentally different views. They are not aligned. No amount of discussion, no number of meetings will resolve that deep misalignment. Without escalation, the default dispute resolution mechanism for this scenario is exhaustion. Whoever has more stamina carries the decision.

第四，及早发现错位问题，并立即调整。有时不同团队会有不同的目标和观点。它们无法对齐。没有讨论或会议可以解决严重的错位问题。如果不由上级管理者干预，错位问题引发的争端将耗尽所有人的精力。最终，只能由耐力更好的人来做决定。

I’ve seen many examples of sincere misalignment at Amazon over the years. When we decided to invite third party sellers to compete directly against us on our own product detail pages – that was a big one. Many smart, well-intentioned Amazonians were simply not at all aligned with the direction. The big decision set up hundreds of smaller decisions, many of which needed to be escalated to the senior team.

多年来，我在Amazon已经看到许多错位的例子。当我们决定邀请第三方卖家使用我们的产品详细信息页，直接与我们自家商品竞争时，发生了很大的错位问题。出于善意，许多聪明的Amazon员工并没有照着这个目标执行。这个重大决策影响底下数百个小决策，其中许多小决策因此需要上报给上级团队。

“You’ve worn me down” is an awful decision-making process. It’s slow and de-energizing. Go for quick escalation instead – it’s better.

「你使我精疲力竭」是一种糟糕的决策过程，缓慢而耗尽心力。更好的做法是－上报后迅速决策。

So, have you settled only for decision quality, or are you mindful of decision velocity too? Are the world’s trends tailwinds for you? Are you falling prey to proxies, or do they serve you? And most important of all, are you delighting customers? We can have the scope and capabilities of a large company and the spirit and heart of a small one. But we have to choose it.

那么，你是否只关心决策质量，还是也注意到决策速度？世界趋势对你来说有利吗？你是代理的受害者，还是代理的主人？最重要的是，你使客户满意吗？能不能同时拥有大公司的规模和能力和小公司的精神和内心？可以，但是我们必须做出选择。

A huge thank you to each and every customer for allowing us to serve you, to our shareowners for your support, and to Amazonians everywhere for your hard work, your ingenuity, and your passion.

非常感谢每个客户让我们为你提供服务，感谢我们的股东的支持，也感谢所有Amazon员工的勤奋、独创性和热情。

As always, I attach a copy of our original 1997 letter. It remains Day 1.

如同往常，我把我们在1997年写的致股东信附在文末。我们的价值观依然不变，今天依旧是Day 1。

Sincerely,

Jeff

真诚的

杰夫

Jeffrey P. Bezos

Founder and Chief Executive Officer

Amazon.com, Inc.

杰夫·贝索斯

Amazon创始人暨CEO

我的看法

贝索斯说亚马逊现在还是Day1，那Day1是指的啥。

Day1其实在亚马逊网站上有：链接 https://aws.amazon.com/tw/executive-insights/content/how-amazon-defines-and-operationalizes-a-day-1-culture/

Day1指： 持續的好奇心、敏捷性和實驗

Day2在这封信上有，Day 2是停滞的、无关紧要的、极其乏味的，痛苦地衰退，最终死亡。

贝索斯说要保持在Day1上，而不是要跌入Day2

具体的措施是指

1. 真正专注于客户
2. 拒绝代理
3. 拥抱外部趋势
4. 快速决策

第一，专注于客户。主要就是指要专业于让客户满意。即是客户不知道要什么，但是也要聚焦于不满意的部分。

第二，拒绝代理。 代理是指代理管理，公司大了，很多事情只是遵循流程，而不是服务客户，这就导致公司偏离了最终的目的。

第三，拥抱外部趋势。就是要接受大趋势，还要去拥抱趋势，不要抵触改变。

第四，快速决策。快速决策是指在还没有得到更多的信息的时候，就速度决策，慢决策会拖累公司的发展。你需要在只拥有70%信息的时候，就做出决策。

确实，公司大了，很多东西就变得臃肿了，船大了就很难掉头，也很难创新。贝索斯十说的这几点还是不错的。拥抱变化这个在国内也蛮流行的。