第二十四封信中英文对照：

To our shareowners:

致亚马逊的股东:

In Amazon’s 1997 letter to shareholders, our first, I talked about our hope to create an “enduring franchise,” one that would reinvent what it means to serve customers by unlocking the internet’s power. I noted that Amazon had grown from having 158 employees to 614, and that we had surpassed 1.5 million customer accounts. We had just gone public at a split-adjusted stock price of $1.50 per share. I wrote that it was Day 1.

在亚马逊1997年写给股东的第一封信中，我谈到了我们希望创造一种“持久的特许经营权”，一种通过释放互联网的力量来重新定义为顾客服务的特许经营权。我注意到亚马逊已经从158名员工发展到614名员工，我们已经超过了150万客户账户。我们刚刚上市，经拆股调整后的股价为每股1.50美元。我写的是第一天。

We’ve come a long way since then, and we are working harder than ever to serve and delight customers. Last year, we hired 500,000 employees and now directly employ 1.3 million people around the world. We have more than 200 million Prime members worldwide. More than 1.9 million small and medium-sized businesses sell in our store, and they make up close to 60% of our retail sales. Customers have connected more than 100 million smart home devices to Alexa. Amazon Web Services serves millions of customers and ended 2020 with a $50 billion annualized run rate. In 1997, we hadn’t invented Prime, Marketplace, Alexa, or AWS. They weren’t even ideas then, and none was preordained. We took great risk with each one and put sweat and ingenuity into each one.

从那时起，我们已经取得了长足的进步，我们比以往任何时候都更加努力地服务和取悦客户。去年，我们雇佣了500,000名员工，现在全世界直接雇佣了130万名员工。我们在全球拥有超过2亿的会员。超过190万家中小企业在我们店里销售，占我们零售额的近60% 。用户已经将超过1亿台智能家居设备连接到 Alexa 上。亚马逊网络服务为数以百万计的用户提供服务，到2020年年化运营率达到500亿美元。在1997年，我们还没有发明 Prime、 Marketplace、 Alexa 或 AWS。那时他们甚至还不是思想，也没有什么是注定的。我们冒着巨大的风险，为每一个人付出了汗水和智慧。

Along the way, we’ve created $1.6 trillion of wealth for shareowners. Who are they? Your Chair is one, and my Amazon shares have made me wealthy. But more than 7/8ths of the shares, representing $1.4 trillion of wealth creation, are owned by others. Who are they? They’re pension funds, universities, and 401(k)s, and they’re Mary and Larry, who sent me this note out of the blue just as I was sitting down to write this shareholder letter:

一路走来，我们为股民创造了1.6万亿美元的财富。他们是谁？你的椅子就是其中之一，我的亚马逊股份让我变得富有。但是超过八分之七的股份，代表着1.4万亿美元的财富创造，是由其他人持有的。他们是谁？他们是养老基金、大学和401(k)养老金，他们是玛丽和拉里，就在我坐下来给股东写这封信的时候，他们突然给我发来了这封信:

I am approached with similar stories all the time. I know people who’ve used their Amazon money for college, for emergencies, for houses, for vacations, to start their own business, for charity – and the list goes on. I’m proud of the wealth we’ve created for shareowners. It’s significant, and it improves their lives. But I also know something else: it’s not the largest part of the value we’ve created.

我一直接触到类似的故事。我认识一些人，他们用亚马逊的钱上大学，应付紧急情况，买房子，度假，开创自己的事业，做慈善——这样的例子还有很多。我为我们为股民创造的财富感到骄傲。这意义重大，并且改善了他们的生活。但我还知道一些其他的东西: 它不是我们创造的价值中最大的部分。

Create More Than You Consume

创造比你消耗更多

If you want to be successful in business (in life, actually), you have to create more than you consume. Your goal should be to create value for everyone you interact with. Any business that doesn’t create value for those it touches, even if it appears successful on the surface, isn’t long for this world. It’s on the way out.

如果你想在事业上取得成功(实际上是在生活中) ，你必须创造比你消耗的更多。你的目标应该是为每一个与你互动的人创造价值。任何不能为所接触的人创造价值的企业，即使表面上看起来很成功，在这个世界上也不会长久。在出去的路上。

Remember that stock prices are not about the past. They are a prediction of future cash flows discounted back to the present. The stock market anticipates. I’m going to switch gears for a moment and talk about the past. How much value did we create for shareowners in 2020? This is a relatively easy question to answer because accounting systems are set up to answer it. Our net income in 2020 was $21.3 billion. If, instead of being a publicly traded company with thousands of owners, Amazon were a sole proprietorship with a single owner, that’s how much the owner would have earned in 2020.

记住，股票价格不是关于过去的。它们是对未来现金流折现回到现在的预测。股票市场预期。我要换一下话题，谈谈过去。2020年我们为股民创造了多少价值？这是一个相对容易回答的问题，因为会计系统就是用来回答这个问题的。我们2020年的净利润是213亿美元。如果亚马逊不是一个拥有成千上万所有者的上市公司，而是一个拥有单一所有者的独资企业，那么这就是所有者在2020年的收入。

How about employees? This is also a reasonably easy value creation question to answer because we can look at compensation expense. What is an expense for a company is income for employees. In 2020, employees earned $80 billion, plus another $11 billion to include benefits and various payroll taxes, for a total of $91 billion.

那雇员呢？这也是一个相当容易回答的价值创造问题，因为我们可以看看补偿费用。对于公司来说，开支就是员工的收入。2020年，员工的收入为800亿美元，加上110亿美元的福利和各种工资税，共计910亿美元。

How about third-party sellers? We have an internal team (the Selling Partner Services team) that works to answer that question. They estimate that, in 2020, third-party seller profits from selling on Amazon were between $25 billion and $39 billion, and to be conservative here I’ll go with $25 billion.

第三方卖家怎么样？我们有一个内部团队(销售伙伴服务团队)来回答这个问题。他们估计，到2020年，第三方销售商在亚马逊上销售产品的利润在250亿美元到390亿美元之间。

For customers, we have to break it down into consumer customers and AWS customers.

对于客户，我们必须将其分解为消费者客户和 AWS 客户。

We’ll do consumers first. We offer low prices, vast selection, and fast delivery, but imagine we ignore all of that for the purpose of this estimate and value only one thing: we save customers time.

我们将首先针对消费者。我们提供低廉的价格，大量的选择，快速的交货，但是想象一下，我们忽略了所有这些，为了这个估计和价值只有一件事: 我们节省客户的时间。

Customers complete 28% of purchases on Amazon in three minutes or less, and half of all purchases are finished in less than 15 minutes. Compare that to the typical shopping trip to a physical store – driving, parking, searching store aisles, waiting in the checkout line, finding your car, and driving home. Research suggests the typical physical store trip takes about an hour. If you assume that a typical Amazon purchase takes 15 minutes and that it saves you a couple of trips to a physical store a week, that’s more than 75 hours a year saved. That’s important. We’re all busy in the early 21^st century.

在亚马逊上，28% 的消费者在三分钟或更短的时间内完成了购买，一半的购买在15分钟内完成。比较一下典型的购物之旅——开车，停车，搜索商店过道，排队结账，找到你的车，然后开车回家。研究表明，典型的实体商店之旅大约需要一个小时。如果你假设一次典型的亚马逊购物需要15分钟，并且每周可以节省几次去实体店的时间，那么每年节省的时间就超过75个小时。这很重要。在21世纪初，我们都很忙碌。

So that we can get a dollar figure, let’s value the time savings at $10 per hour, which is conservative. Seventy-five hours multiplied by $10 an hour and subtracting the cost of Prime gives you value creation for each Prime member of about $630. We have 200 million Prime members, for a total in 2020 of $126 billion of value creation.

所以我们可以得到一个美元的数字，让我们以每小时10美元的价值来衡量节省的时间，这是保守的。75小时乘以每小时10美元，再减去 Prime 的成本，你每个 Prime 会员的价值创造约630美元。我们拥有2亿首要会员，2020年总共创造了1260亿美元的价值。

AWS is challenging to estimate because each customer’s workload is so different, but we’ll do it anyway, acknowledging up front that the error bars are high. Direct cost improvements from operating in the cloud versus on premises vary, but a reasonable estimate is 30%. Across AWS’s entire 2020 revenue of $45 billion, that 30% would imply customer value creation of $19 billion (what would have cost them $64 billion on their own cost $45 billion from AWS). The difficult part of this estimation exercise is that the direct cost reduction is the smallest portion of the customer benefit of moving to the cloud. The bigger benefit is the increased speed of software development – something that can significantly improve the customer’s competitiveness and top line. We have no reasonable way of estimating that portion of customer value except to say that it’s almost certainly larger than the direct cost savings. To be conservative here (and remembering we’re really only trying to get ballpark estimates), I’ll say it’s the same and call AWS customer value creation $38 billion in 2020.

因为每个客户的工作负载是如此的不同，AWS 的估算是很有挑战性的，但是我们还是要做，事先承认错误条件很高。在云端运营的直接成本提高与在线运营的直接成本提高有所不同，但合理的估计是30% 。纵观 AWS 2020年全年450亿美元的收入，这30% 意味着客户价值创造了190亿美元(这意味着他们自己花费了640亿美元，而 AWS 花费了450亿美元)。这个评估工作的难点在于，直接成本降低是转移到云计算的客户利益中最小的一部分。更大的好处是提高了软件开发的速度——这可以显著提高客户的竞争力和销售额。我们没有合理的方法来估计客户价值的这一部分，只能说它几乎肯定大于直接成本节约。在这里保守一点(记住我们只是试图得到大概的估计) ，我会说这是一样的，并称 AWS 的客户价值创造在2020年为380亿美元。

Adding AWS and consumer together gives us total customer value creation in 2020 of $164 billion.

加上 AWS 和消费者，2020年我们总共创造了1640亿美元的客户价值。

Summarizing:
Shareholders      $21B
Employees          $91B
3P Sellers            $25B
Customers           $164B
Total                    $301B

总结: 股东 $21B 雇员 $91B 3P 卖家 $25B 顾客 $164B 总计 $301B

If each group had an income statement representing their interactions with Amazon, the numbers above would be the “bottom lines” from those income statements. These numbers are part of the reason why people work for us, why sellers sell through us, and why customers buy from us. We create value for them. And this value creation is not a zero-sum game. It is not just moving money from one pocket to another. Draw the box big around all of society, and you’ll find that invention is the root of all real value creation. And value created is best thought of as a metric for innovation.

如果每个群体都有一个代表他们与亚马逊互动的收益表，上面的数字就是这些收益表的“底线”。这些数字是为什么人们为我们工作，为什么卖家通过我们销售，为什么客户从我们这里购买的部分原因。我们为他们创造价值。这种价值创造不是零和游戏。这不仅仅是把钱从一个口袋转移到另一个口袋。在整个社会周围画一个大盒子，你会发现发明是所有真正创造价值的根源。创造价值是衡量创新的最佳标准。

Of course, our relationship with these constituencies and the value we create isn’t exclusively dollars and cents. Money doesn’t tell the whole story. Our relationship with shareholders, for example, is relatively simple. They invest and hold shares for a duration of their choosing. We provide direction to shareowners infrequently on matters such as annual meetings and the right process to vote their shares. And even then they can ignore those directions and just skip voting.

当然，我们与这些选民的关系以及我们创造的价值不仅仅是美元和美分。钱不能说明一切。例如，我们与股东的关系相对简单。他们在自己选择的期限内投资和持有股票。我们很少在年度会议和正确的投票程序等事项上为股民提供指导。即使这样，他们也可以忽略这些指示，直接跳过投票。

Our relationship with employees is a very different example. We have processes they follow and standards they meet. We require training and various certifications. Employees have to show up at appointed times. Our interactions with employees are many, and they’re fine-grained. It’s not just about the pay and the benefits. It’s about all the other detailed aspects of the relationship too.

我们与员工的关系就是一个非常不同的例子。我们有他们遵循的流程和符合的标准。我们需要培训和各种证书。员工必须在约定的时间出现。我们与员工之间的互动很多，而且是细致入微的。这不仅仅是薪水和福利的问题。这也是关于这段关系的所有其他细节方面。

Does your Chair take comfort in the outcome of the recent union vote in Bessemer? No, he doesn’t. I think we need to do a better job for our employees. While the voting results were lopsided and our direct relationship with employees is strong, it’s clear to me that we need a better vision for how we create value for employees – a vision for their success.

你的主席是否对最近贝塞默的工会投票结果感到安慰？不，他没有。我认为我们需要为我们的员工做得更好。虽然投票结果不平衡，我们与员工的直接关系也很牢固，但我清楚地知道，我们需要一个更好的愿景来为员工创造价值——一个他们成功的愿景。

If you read some of the news reports, you might think we have no care for employees. In those reports, our employees are sometimes accused of being desperate souls and treated as robots. That’s not accurate. They’re sophisticated and thoughtful people who have options for where to work. When we survey fulfillment center employees, 94% say they would recommend Amazon to a friend as a place to work.

如果你读了一些新闻报道，你可能会认为我们不关心员工。在这些报告中，我们的员工有时被指责为绝望的灵魂，被当作机器人对待。这不准确。他们都是成熟而有思想的人，在哪里工作都有自己的选择。当我们调查履行中心的员工时，94% 的人说他们会把亚马逊推荐给朋友作为工作场所。

Employees are able to take informal breaks throughout their shifts to stretch, get water, use the rest room, or talk to a manager, all without impacting their performance. These informal work breaks are in addition to the 30-minute lunch and 30-minute break built into their normal schedule.

员工可以在整个轮班期间进行非正式休息，伸展身体，取水，使用洗手间，或者与经理交谈，所有这些都不会影响他们的工作表现。这些非正式的工作休息时间是在他们正常日程安排的30分钟午餐和30分钟休息时间之外的。

We don’t set unreasonable performance goals. We set achievable performance goals that take into account tenure and actual employee performance data. Performance is evaluated over a long period of time as we know that a variety of things can impact performance in any given week, day, or hour. If employees are on track to miss a performance target over a period of time, their manager talks with them and provides coaching.

我们不会设定不合理的绩效目标。我们设定可实现的绩效目标，考虑到任期和实际的员工绩效数据。绩效评估要经过很长一段时间，因为我们知道在任何给定的一周、一天或一小时中，各种各样的事情都会影响绩效。如果员工在一段时间内没有达到绩效目标，他们的经理会与他们交谈并提供指导。

Coaching is also extended to employees who are excelling and in line for increased responsibilities. In fact, 82% of coaching is positive, provided to employees who are meeting or exceeding expectations. We terminate the employment of less than 2.6% of employees due to their inability to perform their jobs (and that number was even lower in 2020 because of operational impacts of COVID-19).

培训也扩展到那些优秀的员工和那些需要承担更多责任的员工。事实上，82% 的指导是积极的，提供给那些达到或超过预期的员工。我们解雇了不到2.6% 的员工，因为他们无法完成自己的工作(2020年，这个数字甚至更低，因为2019冠状病毒疾病的操作影响)。

Earth’s Best Employer and Earth’s Safest Place to Work

地球上最好的雇主和最安全的工作场所

The fact is, the large team of thousands of people who lead operations at Amazon have always cared deeply for our hourly employees, and we’re proud of the work environment we’ve created. We’re also proud of the fact that Amazon is a company that does more than just create jobs for computer scientists and people with advanced degrees. We create jobs for people who never got that advantage.

事实上，在亚马逊，由成千上万的人组成的庞大团队一直都非常关心我们的小时工，我们为自己创造的工作环境感到自豪。亚马逊不仅为计算机科学家和拥有高等学位的人创造就业机会，我们还为这家公司感到骄傲。我们为那些从未获得这种优势的人创造就业机会。

Despite what we’ve accomplished, it’s clear to me that we need a better vision for our employees’ success. We have always wanted to be Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company. We won’t change that. It’s what got us here. But I am committing us to an addition. We are going to be Earth’s Best Employer and Earth’s Safest Place to Work.

不管我们取得了什么样的成就，我很清楚，我们需要为员工的成功制定一个更好的愿景。我们一直想成为地球上最以客户为中心的公司。我们不会改变这一点。这就是我们来到这里的原因。但是我承诺我们要增加一个。我们将成为地球上最好的雇主和地球上最安全的工作场所。

In my upcoming role as Executive Chair, I’m going to focus on new initiatives. I’m an inventor. It’s what I enjoy the most and what I do best. It’s where I create the most value. I’m excited to work alongside the large team of passionate people we have in Ops and help invent in this arena of Earth’s Best Employer and Earth’s Safest Place to Work. On the details, we at Amazon are always flexible, but on matters of vision we are stubborn and relentless. We have never failed when we set our minds to something, and we’re not going to fail at this either.

在我即将担任执行主席的职务中，我将专注于新的倡议。我是个发明家。这是我最喜欢的，也是我最擅长的。这是我创造最大价值的地方。我很高兴能和我们在行动中心的一大群充满激情的人们一起工作，并且帮助创建这个地球上最好的雇主和地球上最安全的工作场所的舞台。在细节方面，我们在亚马逊总是很灵活，但在视觉方面，我们却很顽固，冷酷无情。当我们下定决心做某件事的时候，我们从来没有失败过，我们也不会在这件事上失败。

We dive deep into safety issues. For example, about 40% of work-related injuries at Amazon are related to musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs), things like sprains or strains that can be caused by repetitive motions. MSDs are common in the type of work that we do and are more likely to occur during an employee’s first six months. We need to invent solutions to reduce MSDs for new employees, many of whom might be working in a physical role for the first time.

我们深入研究安全问题。例如，亚马逊公司约40% 的工伤与肌肉骨骼疾病有关，比如扭伤或者由重复运动引起的劳损。在我们所从事的工作类型中，msd 很常见，而且更有可能发生在员工的头六个月。我们需要为新员工找到减少 msd 的解决方案，他们中的许多人可能是第一次担任物理角色。

One such program is WorkingWell – which we launched to 859,000 employees at 350 sites across North America and Europe in 2020 – where we coach small groups of employees on body mechanics, proactive wellness, and safety. In addition to reducing workplace injuries, these concepts have a positive impact on regular day-to-day activities outside work.

我们在2020年在北美和欧洲的350个地点向859,000名员工推出了一个这样的项目，我们在这个项目中对小组员工进行身体机械、积极健康和安全方面的培训。除了减少工伤外，这些概念还对工作之外的日常活动产生了积极的影响。

We’re developing new automated staffing schedules that use sophisticated algorithms to rotate employees among jobs that use different muscle-tendon groups to decrease repetitive motion and help protect employees from MSD risks. This new technology is central to a job rotation program that we’re rolling out throughout 2021.

我们正在开发新的自动化人员配置时间表，使用复杂的算法在使用不同肌腱群的工作岗位之间轮换员工，以减少重复运动，并帮助保护员工免受 MSD 风险。这项新技术是我们在2021年推出的工作轮换计划的核心。

Our increased attention to early MSD prevention is already achieving results. From 2019 to 2020, overall MSDs decreased by 32%, and MSDs resulting in time away from work decreased by more than half.

我们对早期预防 MSD 的重视已经取得了成效。从2019年到2020年，总体味精浓度下降了32% ，导致离开工作的时间减少了一半以上。

We employ 6,200 safety professionals at Amazon. They use the science of safety to solve complex problems and establish new industry best practices. In 2021, we’ll invest more than $300 million into safety projects, including an initial $66 million to create technology that will help prevent collisions of forklifts and other types of industrial vehicles.

我们在亚马逊雇佣了6200名安全专家。他们利用安全科学来解决复杂的问题，建立新的行业最佳实践。到2021年，我们将在安全项目上投资3亿多美元，其中包括最初的6600万美元，用于开发有助于防止叉车和其他类型工业车辆碰撞的技术。

When we lead, others follow. Two and a half years ago, when we set a $15 minimum wage for our hourly employees, we did so because we wanted to lead on wages – not just run with the pack – and because we believed it was the right thing to do. A recent paper by economists at the University of California-Berkeley and Brandeis University analyzed the impact of our decision to raise our minimum starting pay to $15 per hour. Their assessment reflects what we’ve heard from employees, their families, and the communities they live in.

当我们领导时，其他人会跟随。两年半以前，当我们为小时工设定15美元的最低工资时，我们这样做是因为我们希望在工资方面发挥领导作用——而不仅仅是随大流——也因为我们相信这样做是正确的。加州大学伯克利分校和布兰戴斯大学的经济学家最近发表了一篇论文，分析了我们决定将最低起薪提高到每小时15美元的影响。他们的评估反映了我们从员工、他们的家人以及他们所生活的社区那里听到的。

Our increase in starting wage boosted local economies across the country by benefiting not only our own employees but also other workers in the same community. The study showed that our pay raise resulted in a 4.7% increase in the average hourly wage among other employers in the same labor market.

我们提高起步工资，不仅使我们自己的雇员受益，而且使同一社区的其他工人受益，从而推动了全国各地的地方经济。研究表明，在同一劳动力市场上，我们的加薪导致其他雇主的平均小时工资上涨了4.7% 。

And we’re not done leading. If we want to be Earth’s Best Employer, we shouldn’t settle for 94% of employees saying they would recommend Amazon to a friend as a place to work. We have to aim for 100%. And we’ll do that by continuing to lead on wages, on benefits, on upskilling opportunities, and in other ways that we will figure out over time.

我们的领导还没有结束。如果我们想成为地球上最好的雇主，我们不应该满足于94% 的员工说他们会推荐亚马逊给朋友作为工作的地方。我们的目标必须是100% 。我们将继续在工资、福利、技能提升机会等方面发挥领导作用，以及其他一些我们会逐渐发现的方面。

If any shareowners are concerned that Earth’s Best Employer and Earth’s Safest Place to Work might dilute our focus on Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company, let me set your mind at ease. Think of it this way. If we can operate two businesses as different as consumer ecommerce and AWS, and do both at the highest level, we can certainly do the same with these two vision statements. In fact, I’m confident they will reinforce each other.

如果任何股民担心地球上最好的雇主和地球上最安全的工作场所可能会削弱我们对地球上最以客户为中心的公司的关注，让我放心。这么想吧。如果我们能够像消费者电子商务和 AWS 一样经营两个不同的业务，并且在最高层面上做到这两点，我们当然可以对这两个愿景声明做同样的事情。事实上，我相信他们会互相加强。

The Climate Pledge

气候承诺

In an earlier draft of this letter, I started this section with arguments and examples designed to demonstrate that human-induced climate change is real. But, bluntly, I think we can stop saying that now. You don’t have to say that photosynthesis is real, or make the case that gravity is real, or that water boils at 100 degrees Celsius at sea level. These things are simply true, as is the reality of climate change.

在这封信的早期草稿中，我用论据和例子开始了本节，旨在证明人类引起的气候变化是真实存在的。但坦率地说，我认为我们现在可以停止这样说。你不必说光合作用是真实存在的，或者证明重力是真实存在的，或者证明水在海平面100摄氏度时就会沸腾。这些都是事实，气候变化的现实也是如此。

Not long ago, most people believed that it would be good to address climate change, but they also thought it would cost a lot and would threaten jobs, competitiveness, and economic growth. We now know better. Smart action on climate change will not only stop bad things from happening, it will also make our economy more efficient, help drive technological change, and reduce risks. Combined, these can lead to more and better jobs, healthier and happier children, more productive workers, and a more prosperous future. This doesn’t mean it will be easy. It won’t be. The coming decade will be decisive. The economy in 2030 will need to be vastly different from what it is today, and Amazon plans to be at the heart of the change. We launched The Climate Pledge together with Global Optimism in September 2019 because we wanted to help drive this positive revolution. We need to be part of a growing team of corporations that understand the imperatives and the opportunities of the 21^st century.

不久前，大多数人认为应对气候变化是有益的，但他们也认为这将花费很多，并将威胁就业、竞争力和经济增长。我们现在更清楚了。在气候变化问题上采取明智的行动，不仅可以阻止不好的事情发生，还可以提高我们的经济效率，推动技术变革，降低风险。综合起来，这些可以带来更多更好的工作，更健康更快乐的孩子，更有生产力的工人，以及更繁荣的未来。这并不意味着它会很容易。不会的。未来十年将是决定性的。2030年的经济需要与现在有很大的不同，亚马逊计划成为变革的核心。我们在2019年9月与全球乐观主义一起发起了气候承诺，因为我们想帮助推动这场积极的革命。我们需要成为一个日益壮大的企业团队的一员，这个团队理解21世纪的当务之急和机遇。

Now, less than two years later, 53 companies representing almost every sector of the economy have signed The Climate Pledge. Signatories such as Best Buy, IBM, Infosys, Mercedes-Benz, Microsoft, Siemens, and Verizon have committed to achieve net-zero carbon in their worldwide businesses by 2040, 10 years ahead of the Paris Agreement. The Pledge also requires them to measure and report greenhouse gas emissions on a regular basis; implement decarbonization strategies through real business changes and innovations; and neutralize any remaining emissions with additional, quantifiable, real, permanent, and socially beneficial offsets. Credible, quality offsets are precious, and we should reserve them to compensate for economic activities where low-carbon alternatives don’t exist.

现在，不到两年之后，代表几乎所有经济部门的53家公司签署了《气候承诺》。百思买(Best Buy)、 IBM、印孚瑟斯(Infosys)、梅赛德斯-奔驰(Mercedes-Benz)、微软(Microsoft)、西门子(Siemens)和威瑞森(Verizon)等签约公司已承诺，到2040年，在《巴黎协定》(Paris Agreement)签署前10年，在全球范围内实现零碳排放。该承诺还要求他们定期测量和报告温室气体排放量; 通过真正的商业变革和创新实施脱碳战略; 用额外的、可量化的、真实的、永久的和对社会有益的补偿来中和剩余的排放量。可靠、高质量的补偿是宝贵的，我们应该保留这些补偿，以补偿那些不存在低碳替代品的经济活动。

The Climate Pledge signatories are making meaningful, tangible, and ambitious commitments. Uber has a goal of operating as a zero-emission platform in Canada, Europe, and the U.S. by 2030, and Henkel plans to source 100% of the electricity it uses for production from renewable sources. Amazon is making progress toward our own goal of 100% renewable energy by 2025, five years ahead of our initial 2030 target. Amazon is the largest corporate buyer of renewable energy in the world. We have 62 utility-scale wind and solar projects and 125 solar rooftops on fulfillment and sort centers around the globe. These projects have the capacity to generate over 6.9 gigawatts and deliver more than 20 million megawatt-hours of energy annually.

气候承诺的签署者正在做出有意义的、切实的和雄心勃勃的承诺。优步的目标是到2030年在加拿大、欧洲和美国成为一个零排放的平台，汉高公司计划100% 使用可再生能源生产的电力。亚马逊正朝着到2025年实现100% 可再生能源的目标前进，比我们最初的2030年目标提前了5年。亚马逊是世界上最大的可再生能源企业买家。我们有62个公用事业规模的风能和太阳能项目，以及125个太阳能屋顶在全球各地的实施和分类中心。这些项目的产能超过6.9千兆瓦，年产能超过2000万兆瓦时。

Transportation is a major component of Amazon’s business operations and the toughest part of our plan to meet net-zero carbon by 2040. To help rapidly accelerate the market for electric vehicle technology, and to help all companies transition to greener technologies, we invested more than $1 billion in Rivian – and ordered 100,000 electric delivery vans from the company. We’ve also partnered with Mahindra in India and Mercedes-Benz in Europe. These custom electric delivery vehicles from Rivian are already operational, and they first hit the road in Los Angeles this past February. Ten thousand new vehicles will be on the road as early as next year, and all 100,000 vehicles will be on the road by 2030 – saving millions of metric tons of carbon. A big reason we want companies to join The Climate Pledge is to signal to the marketplace that businesses should start inventing and developing new technologies that signatories need to make good on the Pledge. Our purchase of 100,000 Rivian electric vans is a perfect example.

交通运输是亚马逊商业运营的重要组成部分，也是我们到2040年实现零碳排放计划中最艰难的部分。为了帮助快速加速电动汽车技术市场的发展，并帮助所有公司向更环保的技术过渡，我们在 Rivian 投资了超过10亿美元，并向该公司订购了10万辆电动运货车。我们还与印度的 Mahindra 和欧洲的梅赛德斯-奔驰合作。这些来自 Rivian 的定制电动运输车已经投入使用，今年二月份首次在洛杉矶上路。最早明年将有1万辆新车上路，到2030年，所有10万辆车都将上路，这将节省数百万吨的碳排放。我们希望企业加入气候承诺的一个重要原因是向市场发出信号，企业应该开始发明和开发新技术，签署者需要这些技术来实现承诺。我们购买的10万辆 Rivian 电动面包车就是一个很好的例子。

To further accelerate investment in new technologies needed to build a zero-carbon economy, we introduced the Climate Pledge Fund last June. The investment program started with $2 billion to invest in visionary companies that aim to facilitate the transition to a low-carbon economy. Amazon has already announced investments in CarbonCure Technologies, Pachama, Redwood Materials, Rivian, Turntide Technologies, ZeroAvia, and Infinium – and these are just some of the innovative companies we hope will build the zero-carbon economy of the future.

为了进一步加快对建立零碳经济所需的新技术的投资，我们在去年6月推出了气候承诺基金。这个投资项目最初投资了20亿美元，用于投资有远见的公司，目的是促进向低碳经济的过渡。亚马逊已经宣布投资 CarbonCure Technologies、 Pachama、红木材料、 Rivian、 Turntide Technologies、 ZeroAvia 和 Infinium ——这些只是我们希望建立未来零碳经济的创新公司中的一部分。

I have also personally allocated $10 billion to provide grants to help catalyze the systemic change we will need in the coming decade. We’ll be supporting leading scientists, activists, NGOs, environmental justice organizations, and others working to fight climate change and protect the natural world. Late last year, I made my first round of grants to 16 organizations working on innovative and needle-moving solutions. It’s going to take collective action from big companies, small companies, nation states, global organizations, and individuals, and I’m excited to be part of this journey and optimistic that humanity can come together to solve this challenge.

我还亲自拨款100亿美元，提供赠款，帮助促进我们在未来十年将需要的系统性变革。我们将支持领先的科学家、活动家、非政府组织、环境正义组织和其他致力于对抗气候变化和保护自然世界的人。去年年底，我向16个致力于创新和推进解决方案的组织提供了第一轮资助。大公司、小公司、民族国家、全球性组织和个人将采取集体行动，我很高兴能参与这次旅程，并乐观地相信人类能够团结起来解决这一挑战。

Differentiation is Survival and the Universe Wants You to be Typical

差异化就是生存，宇宙要你成为典型

This is my last annual shareholder letter as the CEO of Amazon, and I have one last thing of utmost importance I feel compelled to teach. I hope all Amazonians take it to heart.

这是我作为亚马逊首席执行官的最后一封年度股东信，我觉得有必要教授最重要的最后一件事。我希望所有的亚马逊人都能牢记这一点。

Here is a passage from Richard Dawkins’ (extraordinary) book The Blind Watchmaker. It’s about a basic fact of biology.

这里有一段来自 Richard Dawkins 的著作《盲眼钟表匠，是关于生物学的一个基本事实。

“Staving off death is a thing that you have to work at. Left to itself – and that is what it is when it dies – the body tends to revert to a state of equilibrium with its environment. If you measure some quantity such as the temperature, the acidity, the water content or the electrical potential in a living body, you will typically find that it is markedly different from the corresponding measure in the surroundings. Our bodies, for instance, are usually hotter than our surroundings, and in cold climates they have to work hard to maintain the differential. When we die the work stops, the temperature differential starts to disappear, and we end up the same temperature as our surroundings. Not all animals work so hard to avoid coming into equilibrium with their surrounding temperature, but all animals do some comparable work. For instance, in a dry country, animals and plants work to maintain the fluid content of their cells, work against a natural tendency for water to flow from them into the dry outside world. If they fail they die. More generally, if living things didn’t work actively to prevent it, they would eventually merge into their surroundings, and cease to exist as autonomous beings. That is what happens when they die.”

“避免死亡是你必须努力的事情。任其自生自灭——这就是它死后的样子——身体倾向于恢复到与环境平衡的状态。如果你测量一些数据，比如温度、酸度、水含量或者生物体内的电势，你通常会发现它与周围环境中的相应数据有明显的不同。例如，我们的身体通常比我们周围的环境更热，在寒冷的气候下，他们必须努力工作来维持这种差异。当我们死去的时候，功停止了，温差开始消失，我们最终的温度和我们周围的环境一样。并不是所有的动物都如此努力地避免与周围温度达到平衡，但是所有的动物都做一些类似的工作。例如，在一个干燥的国家，动物和植物努力保持细胞内的液体含量，抵制水从它们身上流入干燥的外部世界的自然趋势。如果他们失败了，他们就会死。更广泛地说，如果生物没有积极地阻止它，它们最终会融入周围环境，不再作为独立的生物存在。这就是他们死后的下场。”

While the passage is not intended as a metaphor, it’s nevertheless a fantastic one, and very relevant to Amazon. I would argue that it’s relevant to all companies and all institutions and to each of our individual lives too. In what ways does the world pull at you in an attempt to make you normal? How much work does it take to maintain your distinctiveness? To keep alive the thing or things that make you special?

虽然这篇文章并不是一个比喻，但它仍然是一个很棒的比喻，与亚马逊非常相关。我认为，它与所有公司、所有机构以及我们每个人的生活都有关系。这个世界以什么样的方式吸引着你，试图让你变得正常？要保持你的独特性需要多少工作？让那些让你与众不同的东西活下去？

I know a happily married couple who have a running joke in their relationship. Not infrequently, the husband looks at the wife with faux distress and says to her, “Can’t you just be normal?” They both smile and laugh, and of course the deep truth is that her distinctiveness is something he loves about her. But, at the same time, it’s also true that things would often be easier – take less energy – if we were a little more normal.

我认识一对幸福的已婚夫妇，他们的关系中有一个流行的笑话。丈夫经常假装痛苦地看着妻子，对她说: “你就不能正常一点吗?”他们都笑了，当然，最深刻的事实是，他喜欢她与众不同的特点。但与此同时，如果我们能稍微正常一点，事情往往会变得更简单——少消耗能量。

This phenomenon happens at all scale levels. Democracies are not normal. Tyranny is the historical norm. If we stopped doing all of the continuous hard work that is needed to maintain our distinctiveness in that regard, we would quickly come into equilibrium with tyranny.

这种现象发生在所有规模的水平。民主是不正常的。暴政是历史规范。如果我们停止为保持我们在这方面的独特性所需要的所有持续的艰苦工作，我们将很快与暴政达成平衡。

We all know that distinctiveness – originality – is valuable. We are all taught to “be yourself.” What I’m really asking you to do is to embrace and be realistic about how much energy it takes to maintain that distinctiveness. The world wants you to be typical – in a thousand ways, it pulls at you. Don’t let it happen.

我们都知道独特性——原创性——是有价值的。我们都被教导要“做自己”我真正要求你做的是拥抱和现实的多少精力，它需要保持这种独特性。这个世界希望你成为一个典型——无论从哪个方面来说，它都在吸引着你。不要让它发生。

You have to pay a price for your distinctiveness, and it’s worth it. The fairy tale version of “be yourself” is that all the pain stops as soon as you allow your distinctiveness to shine. That version is misleading. Being yourself is worth it, but don’t expect it to be easy or free. You’ll have to put energy into it continuously.

你必须为你的独特性付出代价，这是值得的。童话版本的“做你自己”是所有的痛苦停止，只要你让你的独特性闪耀。这种说法具有误导性。做你自己是值得的，但不要期望它是容易的或免费的。你必须不断地投入精力。

The world will always try to make Amazon more typical – to bring us into equilibrium with our environment. It will take continuous effort, but we can and must be better than that.

世界总是试图使亚马逊更加典型——使我们与我们的环境达到平衡。这需要不断的努力，但是我们可以而且必须做得更好。

* * *

As always, I attach our 1997 shareholder letter. It concluded with this: “We at Amazon.com are grateful to our customers for their business and trust, to each other for our hard work, and to our shareholders for their support and encouragement.” That hasn’t changed a bit. I want to especially thank Andy Jassy for agreeing to take on the CEO role. It’s a hard job with a lot of responsibility. Andy is brilliant and has the highest of high standards. I guarantee you that Andy won’t let the universe make us typical. He will muster the energy needed to keep alive in us what makes us special. That won’t be easy, but it is critical. I also predict it will be satisfying and oftentimes fun. Thank you, Andy.

一如既往，我随函附上我们1997年的股东函。文章的结尾是这样的: “我们亚马逊感谢我们的客户给予我们的业务和信任，感谢我们的辛勤工作，感谢我们的股东给予我们的支持和鼓励。”这一点没有改变。我要特别感谢安迪 · 贾西同意担任首席执行官。这是一项艰巨的工作，责任重大。安迪才华横溢，有最高的标准。我向你保证安迪不会让宇宙把我们变成典型。他会聚集所需的能量，让我们保持活力，让我们与众不同。这并不容易，但至关重要。我还预测它将是令人满意的，而且常常是有趣的。谢谢，安迪。

To all of you: be kind, be original, create more than you consume, and never, never, never let the universe smooth you into your surroundings. It remains Day 1.

对你们所有人: 要善良，要有独创性，创造比你消耗更多的东西，永远，永远，永远，永远不要让宇宙使你融入你的环境。现在还是第一天。

Sincerely,

真诚的,

Jeffrey P. Bezos
Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Amazon.com, Inc.

杰夫·贝索斯创始人兼首席执行官。

我的观点

这是解读的最后一封信了，也是第24封信。 2021年的信可能还有一段时间才会发出来，也有可能不会有了，这是贝索斯的最后一封信。

贝索斯先回顾了亚马逊上市这24年取得的成就。

1. 我们雇佣了500,000名员工，现在全世界直接雇佣了130万名员工。
2. 我们在全球拥有超过2亿的会员。超过190万家中小企业在我们店里销售，占我们零售额的近60% 。
3. 用户已经将超过1亿台智能家居设备连接到 Alexa 上。
4. 亚马逊网络服务为数以百万计的用户提供服务，到2020年年化运营率达到500亿美元。
5. 有了 Prime、 Marketplace、 Alexa 和 AWS。

贝索斯因为所持有的股份成为了世界首富，但是股民也成功了。 亚马逊创造了1.6万亿美元的财富，1.4万亿美元是除贝索斯的人持有的，股票的增值让很多人改善了他们的生活。

他还说，你需要创造比你消耗更多，才能在事业和生活上成功。你的目标应该是为每一个与你互动的人创造价值。不创造价值的企业活不长。

独特性

贝索斯引用了一段话，来自 Richard Dawkins 的著作《盲眼钟表匠》如下：

“避免死亡是你必须努力的事情。任其自生自灭——这就是它死后的样子——身体倾向于恢复到与环境平衡的状态。如果你测量一些数据，比如温度、酸度、水含量或者生物体内的电势，你通常会发现它与周围环境中的相应数据有明显的不同。例如，我们的身体通常比我们周围的环境更热，在寒冷的气候下，他们必须努力工作来维持这种差异。当我们死去的时候，功停止了，温差开始消失，我们最终的温度和我们周围的环境一样。并不是所有的动物都如此努力地避免与周围温度达到平衡，但是所有的动物都做一些类似的工作。例如，在一个干燥的国家，动物和植物努力保持细胞内的液体含量，抵制水从它们身上流入干燥的外部世界的自然趋势。如果他们失败了，他们就会死。更广泛地说，如果生物没有积极地阻止它，它们最终会融入周围环境，不再作为独立的生物存在。这就是他们死后的下场。”

意思就是作为生物要维持差异，就必须努力。 人想做自己，都需要更多的努力，来保持这种独特性。

为了你的独特性付出努力，是很值得的，但是你必须不断的投入精力。

愿你做自己。

第二十三封信中英文对照：

To our shareowners:

致我们的股东：

One thing we’ve learned from the COVID-19 crisis is how important Amazon has become to our customers. We want you to know we take this responsibility seriously, and we’re proud of the work our teams are doing to help customers through this difficult time.

我们在COVID-19疫情中学到的一件事是：Amazon对于顾客来说，已经变成非常重要的存在。我们希望让你知道，我们认真对于这份责任十分认真看待。Amazon团队正帮助顾客度过这段艰难时期，我们对这份工作感到自豪。

Amazonians are working around the clock to get necessary supplies delivered directly to the doorsteps of people who need them. The demand we are seeing for essential products has been and remains high. But unlike a predictable holiday surge, this spike occurred with little warning, creating major challenges for our suppliers and delivery network. We quickly prioritized the stocking and delivery of essential household staples, medical supplies, and other critical products.

Amazon员工正夜以继日地工作，将必要物资送达需要的人的家。在目前情况下，顾客对生活必需品的需求一直居高不下。过去，Amazon对于假期需求暴增有预期，但当下的暴增几乎没有任何预警，这给了供货商和配送网络带来重大挑战。为此，我们迅速将生活必需品、医疗用品和其他重点产品的储备和配送排在目前的第一顺位。

Our Whole Foods Market stores have remained open, providing fresh food and other vital goods for customers. We are taking steps to help those most vulnerable to the virus, setting aside the first hour of shopping at Whole Foods each day for seniors. We have temporarily closed Amazon Books, Amazon 4-star, and Amazon Pop Up stores because they don’t sell essential products, and we offered associates from those closed stores the opportunity to continue working in other parts of Amazon.

我们的全食超市（Whole Foods）仍持续营业，为顾客提供新鲜食品和其他重要商品。我们正在采取手段帮助那些最容易感染病毒的人。全食超市每天营业后的前一个小时定为「年长者专用时段」。我们暂时关闭了Amazon Books、Amazon 4-Star和Amazon Pop Up商店，因为这些商店不贩卖生活必需品。对于这些关闭的商店的员工，我们提供他们在Amazon其他区域工作的机会。

Crucially, while providing these essential services, we are focused on the safety of our employees and contractors around the world—we are deeply grateful for their heroic work and are committed to their health and well-being. Consulting closely with medical experts and health authorities, we’ve made over 150 significant process changes in our operations network and Whole Foods Market stores to help teams stay healthy, and we conduct daily audits of the measures we’ve put into place. We’ve distributed face masks and implemented temperature checks at sites around the world to help protect employees and support staff. We regularly sanitize door handles, stairway handrails, lockers, elevator buttons, and touch screens, and disinfectant wipes and hand sanitizer are standard across our network.

重要的是，在提供这些基本服务的同时，我们也专注于保障Amazon各地员工和承包商的安全－我们对他们的英勇工作深表感谢，并致力于保证他们的健康和福祉。我们与医疗专家和卫生当局密切协商，在我们的运营网络和实体门店进行150多项重大流程改革，帮助团队成员保持健康。我们对这些措施每日进行审查，在世界各地的站点分发口罩，实施体温检测，帮助保护员工身体健康。我们定期对门把手、楼梯扶手、储物柜、电梯按钮和触摸屏进行消毒，消毒湿巾和洗手液是站点的标准配置。

We’ve also introduced extensive social distancing measures to help protect our associates. We have eliminated stand-up meetings during shifts, moved information sharing to bulletin boards, staggered break times, and spread out chairs in breakrooms. While training new hires is challenging with new distancing requirements, we continue to ensure that every new employee gets six hours of safety training. We’ve shifted training protocols so we don’t have employees gathering in one spot, and we’ve adjusted our hiring processes to allow for social distancing.

我们也引入了广泛的社交距离手段来帮助保护我们的同事。我们取消了轮班时的站立会议，利用告示牌来共享信息，错开彼此的休息时间，在休息室里将位置分散开来。因为有了新的社交距离要求，所以新员工培训变得很有挑战性，但我们仍确保每位新员工都接受6小时的安全培训。我们已经改变培训方式，这样一来我们就不会让员工聚集在同一个处。考虑到社交距离，我们也调整了招聘流程。

A next step in protecting our employees might be regular testing of all Amazonians, including those showing no symptoms. Regular testing on a global scale, across all industries, would both help keep people safe and help get the economy back up and running. For this to work, we as a society would need vastly more testing capacity than is currently available. If every person could be tested regularly, it would make a huge difference in how we fight this virus. Those who test positive could be quarantined and cared for, and everyone who tests negative could re-enter the economy with confidence.

保护员工的下一步可能是对所有Amazon员工进行定期检测，包括无症状者。在全球范围内对所有行业进行定期检测，不仅可以保障人们的安全，还可以恢复经济。为了这个目标，整个社会将需要比目前更强大的测试能力。如果每个人都可以定期接受测试，那么我们对抗病毒的局面将发生巨大变化。测试结果为阳性的人可以被隔离和照顾，每个测试结果为阴性的人都可以信心满满地重新回到职场，为经济做出贡献。

We’ve begun the work of building incremental testing capacity. A team of Amazonians—from research scientists and program managers to procurement specialists and software engineers—moved from their normal day jobs onto a dedicated team to work on this initiative. We have begun assembling the equipment we need to build our first lab and hope to start testing small numbers of our frontline employees soon. We are not sure how far we will get in the relevant timeframe, but we think it’s worth trying, and we stand ready to share anything we learn.

我们已经开始了建构更强大的检测能力。Amazon的其中一支团队－从科学家、项目经理、采购专家和软件工程师－从他们平时的日常工作转换到一支专门的团队，致力于建构强大的检测能力。我们已经开始组装建造第一个实验室所需的设备，希望可以很快开始检测我们的部分一线员工。我们不确定短时间内我们能走多远，但我们认为这值得一试。我们随时准备分享我们从中学到的任何东西。

While we explore longer-term solutions, we are also committed to helping support employees now. We increased our minimum wage through the end of April by $2 per hour in the U.S., $2 per hour in Canada, £2 per hour in the UK, and €2 per hour in many European countries. And we are paying associates double our regular rate for any overtime worked—a minimum of $34 an hour—an increase from time and a half. These wage increases will cost more than $500 million, just through the end of April, and likely more than that over time. While we recognize this is expensive, we believe it’s the right thing to do under the circumstances. We also established the Amazon Relief Fund—with an initial $25 million in funding—to support our independent delivery service partners and their drivers, Amazon Flex participants, and temporary employees under financial distress.

在我们寻找长期解决方案的同时，我们也致力于支持员工。截至4月底，我们将美国的每小时最低工资提高了2美元，在加拿大提高了2美元，在英国提高了2英镑，在许多欧洲国家提高了2欧元。我们支付给员工的加班费是正常工资的两倍，每小时最低34美元。到4月底时这些增加的工资总金额将超过5亿美元，而且还会随着时间变长而增加更多。虽然我们意识到这将所费不赀，但我们相信在这种情况下，这么做是对的。我们还设立了Amazon救济基金（Amazon Relief Fund）－最初提供2500万美元的资金支持我们的配送服务合作伙伴及司机、Amazon Flex参与者和陷入财务困境的临时员工。

In March, we opened 100,000 new positions across our fulfillment and delivery network. Earlier this week, after successfully filling those roles, we announced we were creating another 75,000 jobs to respond to customer demand. These new hires are helping customers who depend on us to meet their critical needs. We know that many people around the world have suffered financially as jobs are lost or furloughed. We are happy to have them on our teams until things return to normal and either their former employer can bring them back or new jobs become available. We’ve welcomed Joe Duffy, who joined after losing his job as a mechanic at Newark airport and learned about an opening from a friend who is an Amazon operations analyst. Dallas preschool teacher Darby Griffin joined after her school closed on March 9th and now helps manage new inventory. We’re happy to have Darby with us until she can return to the classroom.

3月份，我们的配送物流网络新招了10万名员工。这一周的早些时候，我们宣布再招聘7.5万名员工，以满足顾客的需求。这些新员工正在帮助那些依赖我们满足重要需求的顾客。我们知道，由于失业或被暂时解雇，世界各地有许多人都遭受到经济上的损失。我们很高兴让他们加入我们的团队，直到一切恢复正常，或他们的前雇主召回他们回到工作岗位，或他们有了新的工作机会。我们欢迎Joe Duffy，他失去了纽瓦克机场的机械师的工作后，加入到Amazon的行列，他是从一名Amazon运营分析师的朋友那里得知了这个职缺。达拉斯幼儿园教师Darby Griffin在3月9日学校停课后加入Amazon，现在帮助管理新库存。我们很高兴有Darby的陪伴，直到她能回到幼儿园工作。

Amazon is acting aggressively to protect our customers from bad actors looking to exploit the crisis. We’ve removed over half a million offers from our stores due to COVID-based price gouging, and we’ve suspended more than 6,000 selling accounts globally for violating our fair-pricing policies. Amazon turned over information about sellers we suspect engaged in price gouging of products related to COVID-19 to 42 state attorneys general offices. To accelerate our response to price-gouging incidents, we created a special communication channel for state attorneys general to quickly and easily escalate consumer complaints to us.

有人试图利用这场危机敲诈顾客，对此Amazon正在积极行动，保护我们的客户免于伤害。COVID-19相关的价格敲诈使我们删除50多万笔相关交易，暂停了全球6000多个违反公平定价政策的销售账户。Amazon向42个州总检察长办公室提供了我们怀疑参与COVID-19相关商品的价格哄抬的卖家信息。为了加快对价格哄抬事件的反应速度，我们为州总检察长创建了一个特殊的沟通渠道，以便快速、轻松地处理消费者投诉。

Amazon Web Services is also playing an important role in this crisis. The ability for organizations to access scalable, dependable, and highly secure computing power—whether for vital healthcare work, to help students continue learning, or to keep unprecedented numbers of employees online and productive from home—is critical in this situation. Hospital networks, pharmaceutical companies, and research labs are using AWS to care for patients, explore treatments, and mitigate the impacts of COVID-19 in many other ways. Academic institutions around the world are transitioning from in-person to virtual classrooms and are running on AWS to help ensure continuity of learning. And governments are leveraging AWS as a secure platform to build out new capabilities in their efforts to end this pandemic.

AWS在这场危机中也扮演着重要角色。在这种情况下，使各种机构能够取用可扩展、可靠且高度安全的计算能力至关重要，无论是用于重要的医疗保健工作、帮助学生继续学习，还是让大量的员工在家远程工作并保持工作效率。各大医院、制药公司和研究实验室正使用AWS来照护患者、探索治疗方法，并以许多其他方式减轻COVID-19的影响。世界各地的学术机构正在从「面对面」教室过渡到在线虚拟教室，这些教室运行在AWS上，能够帮助学生保障学习不中断。各国政府正利用AWS作为一个安全的平台，在对抗病毒的过程中建设新的能力。

We are collaborating with the World Health Organization, supplying advanced cloud technologies and technical expertise to track the virus, understand the outbreak, and better contain its spread. WHO is leveraging our cloud to build large-scale data lakes, aggregate epidemiological country data, rapidly translate medical training videos into different languages, and help global healthcare workers better treat patients. We are separately making a public AWS COVID-19 data lake available as a centralized repository for up-to-date and curated information related to the spread and characteristics of the virus and its associated illness so experts can access and analyze the latest data in their battle against the disease.

我们正与世界卫生组织合作，提供先进的云技术和技术专长，以跟踪病毒、了解疫情和遏制传播。世卫组织正在利用我们的云技术构建大规模数据湖，聚合流行病学数据，快速将医疗培训视频翻译成不同的语言，并帮助全球医护人员更好地治疗患者。我们提供一个公开的AWS COVID-19数据湖，以便专家可以取用和分析对抗疾病的最新数据。

We also launched the AWS Diagnostic Development Initiative, a program to support customers working to bring more accurate diagnostic solutions to market for COVID-19. Better diagnostics help accelerate treatment and containment of this pandemic. We committed $20 million to accelerate this work and help our customers harness the cloud to tackle this challenge. While the program was established in response to COVID-19, we also are looking toward the future, and we will fund diagnostic research projects that have the potential to blunt future infectious disease outbreaks.

我们启动了AWS Diagnostic Development Initiative（AWS诊断开发计划），此计划致力于将更准确的COVID-19诊断方案推向市场。更好的诊断有助于治疗并遏制病毒流行。我们已承诺投入2000万美元来加速这项工作，并帮助我们的客户利用云技术应对疾病挑战。虽然此计划是为应对COVID-19COVID-19疫情而建立的，但我们也在展望未来，资助有可能遏制未来传染病爆发的诊断性研究项目。

Customers around the world have leveraged the cloud to scale up services and stand up responses to COVID-19. We joined the New York City COVID-19 Rapid Response Coalition to develop a conversational agent to enable at-risk and elderly New Yorkers to receive accurate, timely information about medical and other important needs. In response to a request from the Los Angeles Unified School District to transition 700,000 students to remote learning, AWS helped establish a call center to field IT questions, provide remote support, and enable staff to answer calls. We are providing cloud services to the CDC to help thousands of public health practitioners and clinicians gather data related to COVID-19 and inform response efforts. In the UK, AWS provides the cloud computing infrastructure for a project that analyzes hospital occupancy levels, emergency room capacity, and patient wait times to help the country’s National Health Service decide where best to allocate resources. In Canada, OTN—one of the world’s largest virtual care networks—is scaling its AWS-powered video service to accommodate a 4,000% spike in demand to support citizens as the pandemic continues. In Brazil, AWS will provide the São Paulo State Government with cloud computing infrastructure to guarantee online classes to 1 million students in public schools across the state.

世界各地的客户利用云技术来扩展服务来因应COVID-19疫情。我们加入了纽约市COVID-19疫情快速反应联盟，开发了一种对话服务，使处于危险中的纽约人，尤其是年长者，能够收到医疗和其他重要需求的准确信息。为了响应洛杉矶联合学区提出的需求，要将70万名学生过渡到远程学习，AWS帮忙建立了一个呼叫中心来回答IT问题、提供远程支持。我们正在向疾控中心提供云服务，帮助数千名公共卫生从业者和临床医生收集COVID-19相关数据，回报因应措施。在英国，AWS为一个项目提供云计算基础设施，该项目分析医院入住率、急诊室容量和患者等待时间，目的是帮助英国国民保健署决定如何分配资源。在加拿大，因为疫情所导致的观看需求暴增4000%，因此OTN（世界上最大的虚拟医疗网络之一）正在扩展他们在AWS站上的视频服务。在巴西，AWS将为圣保罗州政府提供云计算基础设施，以确保该州公立学校的100万名学生能够参加在线课程。

Following CDC guidance, our Alexa health team built an experience that lets U.S. customers check their risk level for COVID-19 at home. Customers can ask, “Alexa, what do I do if I think I have COVID-19?” or “Alexa, what do I do if I think I have coronavirus?” Alexa then asks a series of questions about the person’s symptoms and possible exposure. Based on those responses, Alexa then provides CDC-sourced guidance. We created a similar service in Japan, based on guidance from the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare.

美国疾控中心的指导下，我们的Alexa医疗团队新增了一种机制，让美国顾客可以在家里检测他们的COVID-19风险水平。当顾客问：「Alexa，如果我认为我感染了COVID-19，我该怎么办？」然后，Alexa会问一系列关于这个人的症状，以及他可能接触到的问题。根据这些响应，Alexa会提供来自美国疾控中心的指导。我们也在日本提供类似的服务，指导来源则改为日本厚生劳动省。

We’re making it easy for customers to use http://Amazon.com or Alexa to donate directly to charities on the front lines of the COVID-19 crisis, including Feeding America, the American Red Cross, and Save the Children. Echo users have the option to say, “Alexa, make a donation to Feeding America COVID-19 Response Fund.” In Seattle, we’ve partnered with a catering business to distribute 73,000 meals to 2,700 elderly and medically vulnerable residents in Seattle and King County during the outbreak, and we donated 8,200 laptops to help Seattle Public Schools students gain access to a device while classes are conducted virtually.

我们让顾客户可以轻松地使用http://Amazon.com或Alexa向COVID-19疫情前线的慈善机构捐款，包括Feeding America，American Red Cross和Save the Children。Echo用户可以直接说：「Alexa，向Feeding America COVID-19 Response Fund捐款。」在西雅图，我们与餐饮业合作，在疫情爆发期间向西雅图和金县的2700名老年人和居民分发了7.3万顿餐，捐赠了8200台笔记本计算机，帮助西雅图公立学校的学生进行在线课程。

Beyond COVID

COVID疫情之外

Although these are incredibly difficult times, they are an important reminder that what we do as a company can make a big difference in people’s lives. Customers count on us to be there, and we are fortunate to be able to help. With our scale and ability to innovate quickly, Amazon can make a positive impact and be an organizing force for progress.

虽然当前是极其艰难的时期，但疫情也是一个重要的提醒：Amazon作为一家公司，所做的事情可以大大改变人们的生活。客户依赖我们，幸运的是我们能够提供帮助。凭借我们的规模和快速创新的能力，Amazon能够创造积极的影响，成为推动进步的力量。

Last year, we co-founded The Climate Pledge with Christiana Figueres, the UN’s former climate change chief and founder of Global Optimism, and became the first signatory to the pledge. The pledge commits Amazon to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement 10 years early—and be net zero carbon by 2040. Amazon faces significant challenges in achieving this goal because we don’t just move information around—we have extensive physical infrastructure and deliver more than 10 billion items worldwide a year. And we believe if Amazon can get to net zero carbon ten years early, any company can—and we want to work together with all companies to make it a reality.

去年，我们与联合国前气候变化负责人，同时也是Global Optimism创办人的Christian Figueres共同发起《气候宣言》（The Climate Pledge），并成为该宣言的首位签字人。根据这一承诺，Amazon将提前10年实现《巴黎协议》的目标，到2040年实现零净碳排放量。Amazon在实现这一目标上面临重大挑战，因为我们不仅仅是传递信息－我们拥有庞大的实体设施，每年在全球范围运送超过100亿件商品。我们相信，如果Amazon能够提前10年实现零碳排放，那么任何公司都能做到－我们希望与所有公司合作，使其成为现实。

To that end, we are recruiting other companies to sign The Climate Pledge. Signatories agree to measure and report greenhouse gas emissions regularly, implement decarbonization strategies in line with the Paris Agreement, and achieve net zero annual carbon emissions by 2040. (We’ll be announcing new signatories soon.)

为了这个目标，我们正在寻找其他公司一起签署《气候宣言》。签署者同意定期测量和报告温室气体排放量，实施符合《巴黎协议》的脱碳战略，在2040年前实现年度净碳排放量为零。（我们很快就会宣布新的签署者。）

We plan to meet the pledge, in part, by purchasing 100,000 electric delivery vans from Rivian—a Michigan-based producer of electric vehicles. Amazon aims to have 10,000 of Rivian’s new electric vans on the road as early as 2022, and all 100,000 vehicles on the road by 2030. That’s good for the environment, but the promise is even greater. This type of investment sends a signal to the marketplace to start inventing and developing new technologies that large, global companies need to transition to a low-carbon economy.

为了兑现承诺，我们将从Rivian（总部位于密歇根州的电动汽车生产商）购买10万辆电动送货面包车。Amazon的目标是在2022年前让1万辆Rivian的新型电动面包车上路，在2030年前增加至10万辆电动车。这对环境大有帮助，而且前景可期。这类投资会向市场发出一个信号－新发明与新技术将要开始发展。大型全球化公司要开始运用这些技术过渡到低碳经济。

We’ve also committed to reaching 80% renewable energy by 2024 and 100% renewable energy by 2030. (The team is actually pushing to get to 100% by 2025 and has a challenging but credible plan to pull that off.) Globally, Amazon has 86 solar and wind projects that have the capacity to generate over 2,300 MW and deliver more than 6.3 million MWh of energy annually—enough to power more than 580,000 U.S. homes.

我们也承诺，2024年前达到80%可再生能源使用率，2030年前达到100%。（事实上，我们的团队正在推动2025年前达到100%，透过一个具有挑战性但可行的计划来实现目标。）在全球范围内，Amazon推动86个太阳能和风能项目，这些项目的发电能力超过2300兆瓦，每年提供超过630万兆瓦时的能源－足够为超过58万个美国家庭供电。

We’ve made tremendous progress cutting packaging waste. More than a decade ago, we created the FrustrationFree Packaging program to encourage manufacturers to package their products in easy-to-open, 100% recyclable packaging that is ready to ship to customers without the need for an additional shipping box. Since 2008, this program has saved more than 810,000 tons of packaging material and eliminated the use of 1.4 billion shipping boxes.

我们在减少包装垃圾方面也取得了巨大进步。十多年前，我们推出了「Frustration-Free包装计划」，以鼓励制造商将产品装在易开启、100%可回收的包装中，无需额外的装运箱即可运送到客户手中。自2008年以来，此计划已节省包装材料81万多吨，减少了14亿个装运箱的使用。

We are making these significant investments to drive our carbon footprint to zero despite the fact that shopping online is already inherently more carbon efficient than going to the store. Amazon’s sustainability scientists have spent more than three years developing the models, tools, and metrics to measure our carbon footprint. Their detailed analysis has found that shopping online consistently generates less carbon than driving to a store, since a single delivery van trip can take approximately 100 roundtrip car journeys off the road on average. Our scientists developed a model to compare the carbon intensity of ordering Whole Foods Market groceries online versus driving to your nearest Whole Foods Market store. The study found that, averaged across all basket sizes, online grocery deliveries generate 43% lower carbon emissions per item compared to shopping in stores. Smaller basket sizes generate even greater carbon savings.

在线购物已经比在实体商店购物更具碳效率。虽然如此，但Amazon仍持续进行重大投资，以将我们的碳足迹降至零。Amazon的永续发展科学家花了三年多的时间开发模型、工具和指针衡量我们的碳足迹。经过他们的详细分析发现，在线购物始终比开车去商店产生的碳排放更少，因为一次面包车送货平均可以节省大约100次汽车往返。我们的科学家开发了一个模型，比较在线订购全食超市杂货和开车去周遭最近的全食超市的碳排放。研究发现，与前往商店购物相比，在线购买食品杂货并配送到家所产生的每件商品碳排放平均降低了43%。

AWS is also inherently more efficient than the traditional in-house data center. That’s primarily due to two things—higher utilization, and the fact that our servers and facilities are more efficient than what most companies can achieve running their own data centers. Typical single-company data centers operate at roughly 18% server utilization. They need that excess capacity to handle large usage spikes. AWS benefits from multitenant usage patterns and operates at far higher server utilization rates. In addition, AWS has been successful in increasing the energy efficiency of its facilities and equipment, for instance by using more efficient evaporative cooling in certain data centers instead of traditional air conditioning. A study by 451 Research found that AWS’s infrastructure is 3.6 times more energy efficient than the median U.S. enterprise data center surveyed. Along with our use of renewable energy, these factors enable AWS to do the same tasks as traditional data centers with an 88% lower carbon footprint. And don’t think we’re not going to get those last 12 points—we’ll make AWS 100% carbon free through more investments in renewable energy projects.

AWS也比传统在自家运营的数据中心效率更高。这点主要来自两个原因－更高的利用率，以及我们的服务器和基础设施比大多数公司自己的数据中心更高效。典型的自家运营的数据中心的服务器利用率约为18%，因为他们需要过剩的容量来应付使用量高峰。而AWS受益于多租户使用模式，得以用高得多的服务器利用率运转。此外，AWS也成功地提高了设备的能效，例如在某些数据中心，AWS使用更高效的蒸发冷却，而非传统空调。451 Research的一项研究发现，AWS的基础设施能效是接受调查的美国企业数据中心的能效中值的3.6倍。再加上我们使用可再生能源，这些因素使AWS能以更低的碳足迹（低88%），完成与传统数据中心相同的任务。别因此认为我们不在意剩下的12%－我们透过对可再生能源项目的更多投资，让AWS 100%实现零碳排放。

Leveraging scale for good

运用规模创造福祉

Over the last decade, no company has created more jobs than Amazon. Amazon directly employs 840,000 workers worldwide, including over 590,000 in the U.S., 115,000 in Europe, and 95,000 in Asia. In total, Amazon directly and indirectly supports 2 million jobs in the U.S., including 680,000-plus jobs created by Amazon’s investments in areas like construction, logistics, and professional services, plus another 830,000 jobs created by small and medium-sized businesses selling on Amazon. Globally, we support nearly 4 million jobs. We are especially proud of the fact that many of these are entry-level jobs that give people their first opportunity to participate in the workforce.

在过去的十年里，没有一家公司创造了比Amazon更多的就业岗位。Amazon在全球直接雇佣了84万名员工，其中59万人在美国、11.5万人在欧洲，9.5万人在亚洲。整体而言，Amazon直接和间接与美国200万个就业岗位有关联，包括Amazon在建筑、物流和专业服务等领域的投资所创造的68万个就业岗位，以及Amazon上的中小企业所创造的83万个就业岗位。在全球范围内，我们支持近400万个工作岗位。我们特别自豪的是，这些工作中有许多是入门级工作，给了人们第一次进入劳动力市场的机会。

And Amazon’s jobs come with an industry-leading $15 minimum wage and comprehensive benefits. More than 40 million Americans—many making the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour—earn less than the lowestpaid Amazon associate. When we raised our starting minimum wage to $15 an hour in 2018, it had an immediate and meaningful impact on the hundreds of thousands of people working in our fulfillment centers. We want other big employers to join us by raising their own minimum pay rates, and we continue to lobby for a $15 federal minimum wage.

Amazon的工作工资是业界领先的最低工资每小时15美元和综合福利。超过4000万美国人－其中许多人的联邦最低工资为每小时7.25美元－收入低于Amazon员工的最低工资。2018年，当我们将最低工资提高到每小时15美元后，对配送中心的数十万员工产生立竿见影的正面影响。我们希望其他大公司也加入我们的行列，提高他们的最低工资，我们仍持续为联邦最低工资15美元进行游说。

We want to improve workers’ lives beyond pay. Amazon provides every full-time employee with health insurance, a 401(k) plan, 20 weeks paid maternity leave, and other benefits. These are the same benefits that Amazon’s most senior executives receive. And with our rapidly changing economy, we see more clearly than ever the need for workers to evolve their skills continually to keep up with technology. That’s why we’re spending $700 million to provide more than 100,000 Amazonians access to training programs, at their places of work, in high-demand fields such as healthcare, cloud computing, and machine learning. Since 2012, we have offered Career Choice, a pre-paid tuition program for fulfillment center associates looking to move into highdemand occupations. Amazon pays up to 95% of tuition and fees toward a certificate or diploma in qualified fields of study, leading to enhanced employment opportunities in high-demand jobs. Since its launch, more than 25,000 Amazonians have received training for in-demand occupations.

除了工资之外，我们还计划改善工人的生活。Amazon为每位全职员工提供医疗保险、401(k)退休福利计划、20周带薪产假和其他福利，这些福利与Amazon最高级管理人员相同。经济瞬息万变，我们比以往任何时候都更清楚地看到，工人们需要不断发展他们的技能，才能跟上技术的发展。这就是为什么我们将花费7亿美元为超过10万多Amazon员工提供培训计划的原因，培训项目包含医疗保健、云计算和机器学习等高需求领域。自2012年以来，我们提供了Career Choice计划，为希望进入高需求职业的配送中心员工提供预付费的教学。Amazon为特定领域的证书或文凭支付高达95%的学杂费，让员工更有机会获得想要的工作。自推出以来，已有超过2.5万名Amazon员工接受职业培训。

To ensure that future generations have the skills they need to thrive in a technology-driven economy, we started a program last year called Amazon Future Engineer, which is designed to educate and train low-income and disadvantaged young people to pursue careers in computer science. We have an ambitious goal: to help hundreds of thousands of students each year learn computer science and coding. Amazon Future Engineer currently funds Introduction to Computer Science and AP Computer Science classes for more than 2,000 schools in underserved communities across the country. Each year, Amazon Future Engineer also gives 100 four-year, $40,000 college scholarships to computer science students from low-income backgrounds. Those scholarship recipients also receive guaranteed, paid internships at Amazon after their first year of college. Our program in the UK funds 120 engineering apprenticeships and helps students from disadvantaged backgrounds pursue technology careers.

为了确保下一代掌握在科技驱动的经济中成长所需的技能，我们去年启动了一个名为「Amazon未来工程师计划（Amazon Future Engineer）」，该项目旨在教育和培训低收入和弱势群体的年轻人，让他们有机会追求计算器科学的职业生涯。我们有一个雄心勃勃的目标：每年帮助数十万学生学习计算器科学和编程。Amazon未来工程师计划目前资助全美超过2000所学校计算器科学入门和AP计算器科学课程。每年，Amazon未来工程师计划还会提供100个为期4年、价值4万美元的大学生奖学金名额给低收入背景的计算器科学专业学生。奖学金获得者在大学第一年后，还会得到在Amazon带薪实习机会。在英国，我们资助120个工程背景的学徒，帮助来自弱势背景的学生从事技术职业。

For now, my own time and thinking continues to be focused on COVID-19 and how Amazon can help while we’re in the middle of it. I am extremely grateful to my fellow Amazonians for all the grit and ingenuity they are showing as we move through this. You can count on all of us to look beyond the immediate crisis for insights and lessons and how to apply them going forward.

目前，我个人的时间和想法集中在COVID-19疫情上，以及Amazon如何「正在提供帮助的情况下」继续提供更多帮助。我非常感谢我的同事们，感谢他们在我们所经历的这一切中所表现出的所有勇气和聪明才智。我相信，我们所有人都会超越眼前的危机，洞悉未来、总结教训，并将其应用于未来。

Reflect on this from Theodor Seuss Geisel:

美国作家Theodor Seuss Geisel对此反思：

“When something bad happens you have three choices. You can either let it define you, let it destroy you, or you can let it strengthen you.”

「当不好的事情发生时，你有三个选择。你可以让它定义你，让它摧毁你，也可以让它强化你。」

I am very optimistic about which of these civilization is going to choose.

对于人们会选择哪一种做法，我很乐观。

Even in these circumstances, it remains Day 1. As always, I attach a copy of our original 1997 letter.

即使在当前这种情况下，我们依旧保持Day 1的价值观。如同往常，我把我们在1997年写的致股东信附在文末。

Sincerely,

Jeffrey P. Bezos

真诚的

杰夫·贝索斯

Jeffrey P. Bezos

Founder and Chief Executive Officer

Amazon.com, Inc.

杰夫·贝索斯

Amazon创始人暨CEO

我的观点

贝索斯说，疫情让亚马逊觉得，亚马逊对于顾客来说，已经变得非常的重要。

疫情期间，顾客对生活必需品的需求大增，亚马逊必须保持配送能力，超市需要持续营业，还关掉了一些非必须的业务，只提供基本的服务。还需要保护亚马逊的员工安全，构建强大的检测能力。

亚马逊还利用AWS提供了一些计算能力，来保证医疗机构，远程上学，远程上班等工作。还帮助医院，制药公司和研究实验室探索新的治疗方法等等。和世卫组织合作，提供云计算来跟踪病毒，了解疫情传播情况。

疫情期间，确实亚马逊还是做了不少事情，担起了很多的社会责任。

第二十二封信中英文对照：

To our shareowners:

致我们的股东：

Something strange and remarkable has happened over the last 20 years. Take a look at these numbers:

过去的20年里，发生了一些奇怪而令人惊讶的事情。请看这些数字：

1999 3%

2000 3%

2001 6%

2002 17%

2003 22%

2004 25%

2005 28%

2006 28%

2007 29%

2008 30%

2009 31%

2010 34%

2011 38%

2012 42%

2013 46%

2014 49%

2015 51%

2016 54%

2017 56%

2018 58%

The percentages represent the share of physical gross merchandise sales sold on Amazon by independent thirdparty sellers – mostly small- and medium-sized businesses – as opposed to Amazon retail’s own first party sales. Third-party sales have grown from 3% of the total to 58%. To put it bluntly:

百分比数字代表第三方卖家（主要是中小型企业）在Amazon上销售的总销售额百分比。第三方销售额从总销售额的3％增长到58％。说清楚一点就是：

Third-party sellers are kicking our first party butt. Badly.

第三方卖家正全方位地击败作为官方的Amazon，他们大大胜出。

And it’s a high bar too because our first-party business has grown dramatically over that period, from $1.6 billion in 1999 to $117 billion this past year. The compound annual growth rate for our first-party business in that time period is 25%. But in that same time, third-party sales have grown from $0.1 billion to $160 billion – a compound annual growth rate of 52%. To provide an external benchmark, eBay’s gross merchandise sales in that period have grown at a compound rate of 20%, from $2.8 billion to $95 billion.

这建立起很高的门坎，因为在此期间，我们的官方业务也急剧增长，从1999年的16亿美元增长到去年的1170亿美元，复合年增长率为25％。与此同时，第三方销售额从1亿美元增长到1600亿美元，复合年增长率为52％。提供一个对目标外部基准，eBay在同时期的商品销售总额以20％的复合增长率增长，从28亿美元增长到950亿美元。

Why did independent sellers do so much better selling on Amazon than they did on eBay? And why were independent sellers able to grow so much faster than Amazon’s own highly organized first-party sales organization? There isn’t one answer, but we do know one extremely important part of the answer:

为什么第三方卖家在Amazon上的销售成绩比在eBay上好得多？为什么第三方卖家能够比Amazon官方增长得更快？没有一个确切答案，但是我们对答案略知一二。

We helped independent sellers compete against our first-party business by investing in and offering them the very best selling tools we could imagine and build. There are many such tools, including tools that help sellers manage inventory, process payments, track shipments, create reports, and sell across borders – and we’re inventing more every year. But of great importance are Fulfillment by Amazon and the Prime membership program. In combination, these two programs meaningfully improved the customer experience of buying from independent sellers. With the success of these two programs now so well established, it’s difficult for most people to fully appreciate today just how radical those two offerings were at the time we launched them. We invested in both of these programs at significant financial risk and after much internal debate. We had to continue investing significantly over time as we experimented with different ideas and iterations. We could not foresee with certainty what those programs would eventually look like, let alone whether they would succeed, but they were pushed forward with intuition and heart, and nourished with optimism.

我们提供最好的销售工具给第三方卖家，帮助第三方卖家可以跟官方竞争。这样的工具提供的服务包括库存管理、付款流程、物流追踪、报告生成和跨境销售，而且还在持续发明新工具。然而，更重要的是Amazon配送服务和Prime会员服务。结合这两项服务，可以大大改善和第三方卖家购买商品的客户体验。如今这两项服务已经很成功，因此大家很难想象当初推出它们时，这两种产品的发展有多么艰难。经过内部成员大量讨论之后，我们投资于这两项具有重大财务风险的服务。在我们尝试不同的想法并多次迭代后，我们继续加码大笔投资。我们无法预见这些服务最终会长成什么样子，更不用说它们会不会成功。这两项服务被直觉推动，被乐观滋润。

Intuition, curiosity, and the power of wandering

直觉、好奇心和漫步的力量

From very early on in Amazon’s life, we knew we wanted to create a culture of builders – people who are curious, explorers. They like to invent. Even when they’re experts, they are “fresh” with a beginner’s mind. They see the way we do things as just the way we do things now. A builder’s mentality helps us approach big, hard-to-solve opportunities with a humble conviction that success can come through iteration: invent, launch, reinvent, relaunch, start over, rinse, repeat, again and again. They know the path to success is anything but straight.

从一开始，我们就知道我们想营造一种创造者文化，也就是一种属于好奇者、探险者的文化。他们喜欢发明。即使已经是专家，他们还是具备初学者的好奇心。他们看待做事的价值观，正是我们现做事的原则。创造者心态能帮助我们以谦虚来把握重大的机会和难以解决的问题。我们相信成功可以透过迭代来实现：发明、推出、再发明、再推出、从头来过、一次又一次重复。他们知道成功的道路绝不可能一帆风顺。

Sometimes (often actually) in business, you do know where you’re going, and when you do, you can be efficient. Put in place a plan and execute. In contrast, wandering in business is not efficient … but it’s also not random. It’s guided – by hunch, gut, intuition, curiosity, and powered by a deep conviction that the prize for customers is big enough that it’s worth being a little messy and tangential to find our way there. Wandering is an essential counter-balance to efficiency. You need to employ both. The outsized discoveries – the “non-linear” ones – are highly likely to require wandering.

有时（通常是实际上）在业务中，你确实清楚自己要的是什么，于是你可以很有效率地往前迈进。制定计划，然后执行。相比之下，在企业中漫步不前（Wandering）并不高效。漫步不是随机的，而是受预感、直觉和好奇心引导，坚信一点混乱和偏离正轨能带给客户更大的好处。漫步是必要的平衡，你需要同时兼顾效率和漫步。大的发明－尤其是「非线性」的发明，极需要漫步才有机会出现。

AWS’s millions of customers range from startups to large enterprises, government entities to nonprofits, each looking to build better solutions for their end users. We spend a lot of time thinking about what those organizations want and what the people inside them – developers, dev managers, ops managers, CIOs, chief digital officers, chief information security officers, etc. – want.

数百万名AWS客户遍及初创公司到大企业，从政府到非营利组织，每名客户都希望提供终端消费者更好的解决方案。我们花费大量时间思考这些组织的需求以及组织内部人员的需求－开发人员、开发经理、运营经理、CIO、首席数字长和首席信息安全长想要的东西。

Much of what we build at AWS is based on listening to customers. It’s critical to ask customers what they want, listen carefully to their answers, and figure out a plan to provide it thoughtfully and quickly (speed matters in business!). No business could thrive without that kind of customer obsession. But it’s also not enough. The biggest needle movers will be things that customers don’t know to ask for. We must invent on their behalf. We have to tap into our own inner imagination about what’s possible.

AWS的大部分功能都奠基于客户的意见。询问客户他们想要什么是至关重要的事，认真听他们的回答，并制定出计划，周到且迅速提供服务（速度是关键！）。没有这种对客户的专注，任何企业都无法蓬勃发展。但这样还不够，最大的推动力是那些客户不知道怎么提出需求的事情。我们必须为他们发明。我们必须从想象出发，化可能为真实。

AWS itself – as a whole – is an example. No one asked for AWS. No one. Turns out the world was in fact ready and hungry for an offering like AWS but didn’t know it. We had a hunch, followed our curiosity, took the necessary financial risks, and began building – reworking, experimenting, and iterating countless times as we proceeded.

AWS本身就是一个例子。没有客户要求AWS这样的东西。没有任何一名客户。事实证明，世界已经做好了准备并渴望AWS的出现，只是世界并不知道这件事。我们有预感并跟随好奇心，承担必要的财务风险，然后开始建构、重来、试验和迭代，就这样进行了无数次。

Within AWS, that same pattern has recurred many times. For example, we invented DynamoDB, a highly scalable, low latency key-value database now used by thousands of AWS customers. And on the listeningcarefully-to-customers side, we heard loudly that companies felt constrained by their commercial database options and had been unhappy with their database providers for decades – these offerings are expensive, proprietary, have high-lock-in and punitive licensing terms. We spent several years building our own database engine, Amazon Aurora, a fully-managed MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible service with the same or better durability and availability as the commercial engines, but at one-tenth of the cost. We were not surprised when this worked.

这样的模式已经在AWS重复多次。例如，我们发明了DynamoDB，这是一种可扩展、低延迟的键值（Key-Value）数据库，已经有成千上万名AWS客户在使用。认真聆听客户需求，我们听到许多公司对自己使用的商业数据库感到束缚，数十年来一直对数据库提供商感到不满意－这些产品昂贵、专用、高度限制，又经常带有惩罚授权使用条款。我们花费了数年时间，构建自己的数据库引擎Amazon Aurora，这是一种全托管的服务，兼容MySQL和PostgreSQL，拥有和其他商用引擎相同，甚至更好的耐用性和可用性，但成本仅为商用引擎的十分之一。当AWS表现得很好时，我们并不感到讶异。

But we’re also optimistic about specialized databases for specialized workloads. Over the past 20 to 30 years, companies ran most of their workloads using relational databases. The broad familiarity with relational databases among developers made this technology the go-to even when it wasn’t ideal. Though sub-optimal, the data set sizes were often small enough and the acceptable query latencies long enough that you could make it work. But today, many applications are storing very large amounts of data – terabytes and petabytes. And the requirements for apps have changed. Modern applications are driving the need for low latencies, real-time processing, and the ability to process millions of requests per second. It’s not just key-value stores like DynamoDB, but also in-memory databases like Amazon ElastiCache, time series databases like Amazon Timestream, and ledger solutions like Amazon Quantum Ledger Database – the right tool for the right job saves money and gets your product to market faster.

我们也对用于特殊工作的专用数据库的前景感到乐观。在过去的20到30年间，企业使用关系数据库来处理大部分业务需求。开发人员对关系数据库的选择，主要取决于他们是否了解该技术，而不是技术本身是否优异。尽管没那么好，但因为数据集的大小通常很小，所以查询等待时间还是在可接受的范畴。但是今天，许多应用程序的数据量级在TB和PB，而且需要满足低延迟、实时处理以及并发处理的需求。每秒处理数百万个请求是常见的需求。它需要是DynamoDB这样的键值数据库，而且也要是Amazon ElastiCache这样的内存数据库、Amazon Timestream这样的时间序列数据库、Amazon Quantum Ledger Database这样的分类账解决方案－用上正确的工具可以节省金钱，提升产品推向市场的速度。

We’re also plunging into helping companies harness Machine Learning. We’ve been working on this for a long time, and, as with other important advances, our initial attempts to externalize some of our early internal Machine Learning tools were failures. It took years of wandering – experimentation, iteration, and refinement, as well as valuable insights from our customers – to enable us to find SageMaker, which launched just 18 months ago. SageMaker removes the heavy lifting, complexity, and guesswork from each step of the machine learning process – democratizing AI. Today, thousands of customers are building machine learning models on top of AWS with SageMaker. We continue to enhance the service, including by adding new reinforcement learning capabilities. Reinforcement learning has a steep learning curve and many moving parts, which has largely put it out of reach of all but the most well-funded and technical organizations, until now. None of this would be possible without a culture of curiosity and a willingness to try totally new things on behalf of customers. And customers are responding to our customer-centric wandering and listening – AWS is now a $30 billion annual run rate business and growing fast.

我们也致力于帮助其他公司利用机器学习。我们已经为机器学习进行了长时间的研究，与其他重要进展一样，我们最初尝试将内部学习工具向外推广的尝试是失败的。经过数年的漫步－实验、迭代、优化，以及来自客户的宝贵建议，我们找到SageMaker，并在18个月前正式推出。SageMaker减少了机器学习过程中的繁重复杂的工作，从而使AI能够普及。如今，成千上万名客户使用SageMaker在AWS上建构机器学习模型，我们将继续加强服务，添加新的强化学习功能（Reinforcement learning）。强化学习的学习曲线陡峭，并不容易掌握。目前为止，除资金最雄厚的技术组织外，其他人都无法接触它。出于好奇心文化，以及乐意为客户尝试新事物，我们开始以客户为中心进行漫步和聆听－AWS现在是年营业额300亿美元的业务，而且还在快速增长。

Imagining the impossible

想象那些不可能的事

Amazon today remains a small player in global retail. We represent a low single-digit percentage of the retail market, and there are much larger retailers in every country where we operate. And that’s largely because nearly 90% of retail remains offline, in brick and mortar stores. For many years, we considered how we might serve customers in physical stores, but felt we needed first to invent something that would really delight customers in that environment. With Amazon Go, we had a clear vision. Get rid of the worst thing about physical retail: checkout lines. No one likes to wait in line. Instead, we imagined a store where you could walk in, pick up what you wanted, and leave.

如今，Amazon在全球零售业中仍然只是小人物。我们在零售市场中所占的比例较低，而且我们开站的每个国家里都有规模更大的零售商，近90％的零售仍然发生在线下。多年以来，我们一直在思考如何在实体店中提供服务，但我们认为首先需要一款让客户真正满意的产品。有了Amazon Go，我们有了明确的愿景－摆脱实体零售最糟糕的事情：结账台。没有人喜欢排队等候结账。我们设想了一家商店，你可以走进去，拿起想要的东西，然后直接离开。

Getting there was hard. Technically hard. It required the efforts of hundreds of smart, dedicated computer scientists and engineers around the world. We had to design and build our own proprietary cameras and shelves and invent new computer vision algorithms, including the ability to stitch together imagery from hundreds of cooperating cameras. And we had to do it in a way where the technology worked so well that it simply receded into the background, invisible. The reward has been the response from customers, who’ve described the experience of shopping at Amazon Go as “magical.” We now have 10 stores in Chicago, San Francisco, and Seattle, and are excited about the future.

要实现真的很难，技术上很难。需要全球数百名聪明敬业的计算器科学家和工程师的努力。必须设计和制造专用相机和架子，发明新的计算器视觉算法，合并数百个协作相机中的图像。而且必须以一种运行良好的方式实现，让技术退入背景，客户看不见也无须看见。成就感来自于客户的响应，他们称Amazon Go的购物经历为「神奇」。我们在芝加哥、旧金山和西雅图有10家Amazon Go，我们对未来感到兴奋。

Failure needs to scale too

就算练习失败，也需要放大规模

As a company grows, everything needs to scale, including the size of your failed experiments. If the size of your failures isn’t growing, you’re not going to be inventing at a size that can actually move the needle. Amazon will be experimenting at the right scale for a company of our size if we occasionally have multibillion-dollar failures. Of course, we won’t undertake such experiments cavalierly. We will work hard to make them good bets, but not all good bets will ultimately pay out. This kind of large-scale risk taking is part of the service we as a large company can provide to our customers and to society. The good news for shareowners is that a single big winning bet can more than cover the cost of many losers.

随着公司的成长，一切都需要扩张，也包括失败实验的规模。如果失败的规模没有跟着长大，就无法取得真正有进展的进步。如果我们偶尔遇到数十亿美元的失败，我们还是会持续进行适当规模的试验。当然，我们不会轻蔑地低估试验。我们会努力使他们成为好赌注，但并非所有好赌注最终都能得到回报。作为一家大公司，这种大规模试验是我们可以为客户和社会提供的服务。对于股东来说，好消息是，一个成功的大赌注可以弥补许许多多失败的损失。

Development of the Fire phone and Echo was started around the same time. While the Fire phone was a failure, we were able to take our learnings (as well as the developers) and accelerate our efforts building Echo and Alexa. The vision for Echo and Alexa was inspired by the Star Trek computer. The idea also had origins in two other arenas where we’d been building and wandering for years: machine learning and the cloud. From Amazon’s early days, machine learning was an essential part of our product recommendations, and AWS gave us a front row seat to the capabilities of the cloud. After many years of development, Echo debuted in 2014, powered by Alexa, who lives in the AWS cloud.

Fire Phone和Echo的开发始于同一时期。Fire Phone失败后，我们（包括开发人员）吸取教训，因此加快了Echo和Alexa的工作。Echo和Alexa的构想受到《Star Trek》中计算器的启发。这个想法起源于我们已经耕耘多年的另外两个领域：机器学习和云技术。 从Amazon成立之初，机器学习就成为产品推荐功能必不可少的一部分，而AWS使我们在云技术领域处于领先位置。经过多年的研发，Echo于2014年首次亮相，并可使用透过Echo使用Alexa服务。

No customer was asking for Echo. This was definitely us wandering. Market research doesn’t help. If you had gone to a customer in 2013 and said “Would you like a black, always-on cylinder in your kitchen about the size of a Pringles can that you can talk to and ask questions, that also turns on your lights and plays music?” I guarantee you they’d have looked at you strangely and said “No, thank you.”

没有客户直接提出他们需要Echo。这是我们漫步的结果，市场调查无济于事。如果你在2013年去问任何一位客户：「你是否想在厨房里使用一个不断运转的黑色圆筒，差不多是一罐品客的尺寸。你可以与之交谈或要求它打开灯光和播音乐。」我向你保证，他们会用奇怪的眼神看着你说：「不用了，谢谢。」

Since that first-generation Echo, customers have purchased more than 100 million Alexa-enabled devices. Last year, we improved Alexa’s ability to understand requests and answer questions by more than 20%, while adding billions of facts to make Alexa more knowledgeable than ever. Developers doubled the number of Alexa skills to over 80,000, and customers spoke to Alexa tens of billions more times in 2018 compared to 2017. The number of devices with Alexa built-in more than doubled in 2018. There are now more than 150 different products available with Alexa built-in, from headphones and PCs to cars and smart home devices. Much more to come!

自从第一代Echo以来，客户已经购买了超过1亿个支持Alexa的设备。去年，我们将Alexa的理解请求和回答问题的能力提高20％，同时增加了数十亿个知识点，使Alexa比以往任何时候都更加知识渊博。开发人员将Alexa的技能数量增加一倍，达到8万项技能。与2017年相比，客户在2018年与Alexa交流的次数增加了数百亿次。内置Alexa的设备数量在2018年增加一倍以上。现在有150多种产品内置Alexa，从耳机、PC到汽车和智能家居设备。未来还会更多！

One last thing before closing. As I said in the first shareholder letter more than 20 years ago, our focus is on hiring and retaining versatile and talented employees who can think like owners. Achieving that requires investing in our employees, and, as with so many other things at Amazon, we use not just analysis but also intuition and heart to find our way forward.

结束前的最后一件事。正如我在20多年前的第一封股东信中所说，我们的重点是招聘和留住能像主人一样思考的人才。要做到这一点，需要向员工进行投资。和Amazon的其他事情一样，我们不仅分析，也会使用直觉和毅力来寻找前进的道路。

Last year, we raised our minimum wage to $15-an-hour for all full-time, part-time, temporary, and seasonal employees across the U.S. This wage hike benefitted more than 250,000 Amazon employees, as well as over 100,000 seasonal employees who worked at Amazon sites across the country last holiday. We strongly believe that this will benefit our business as we invest in our employees. But that is not what drove the decision. We had always offered competitive wages. But we decided it was time to lead – to offer wages that went beyond competitive. We did it because it seemed like the right thing to do.

去年，我们将全美所有全职、兼职、临时和季节性雇员的最低工资提高到每小时15美元。这次加薪使超过25万名Amazon员工以超过10万名季节性员工受益。我们坚信投资在员工身上有利于我们的业务。但这不是决定的原因。我们一直提供有竞争力的工资，但是我们现在认为是时候站出来－提供超乎其他人才竞争公司的工资。我们这样做，是因为我们认为这是正确的。

Today I challenge our top retail competitors (you know who you are!) to match our employee benefits and our $15 minimum wage. Do it! Better yet, go to $16 and throw the gauntlet back at us. It’s a kind of competition that will benefit everyone.

今天，我挑战顶级零售竞争对手（你知道我们在说谁！），提供和我们一样的员工福利和15美元最低工资。来吧！最好能给16美元，再把挑战抛回来给我们。这是一场使所有人受益的竞争。

Many of the other programs we have introduced for our employees came as much from the heart as the head. I’ve mentioned before the Career Choice program, which pays up to 95% of tuition and fees towards a certificate or diploma in qualified fields of study, leading to in-demand careers for our associates, even if those careers take them away from Amazon. More than 16,000 employees have now taken advantage of the program, which continues to grow. Similarly, our Career Skills program trains hourly associates in critical job skills like resume writing, how to communicate effectively, and computer basics. In October of last year, in continuation of these commitments, we signed the President’s Pledge to America’s Workers and announced we will be upskilling 50,000 U.S. employees through our range of innovative training programs.

我们为员工推出的许多计划。我之前提到过职业选择计划，此计划预付最高95％的学杂费，让员工可以取得学习领域的证书或文凭，从而给他们尝试新职业的机会，即使这些职业会不在Amazon。现在已有超过1.6万名员工从此计划中受益且人数持续。同样的，我们的职业技能计划（Career Skills）对员工进行关键工作技能的短期培训，例如简历写作、有效沟通和计算器基础知识。去年10月，为兑现这些承诺，我们签署了《President’s Pledge to America’s Workers》，宣布将透过一系列培训计划，提高5万名美国员工的技能。

Our investments are not limited to our current employees or even to the present. To train tomorrow’s workforce, we have pledged $50 million, including through our recently announced Amazon Future Engineer program, to support STEM and CS education around the country for elementary, high school, and university students, with a particular focus on attracting more girls and minorities to these professions. We also continue to take advantage of the incredible talents of our veterans. We are well on our way to meeting our pledge to hire 25,000 veterans and military spouses by 2021. And through the Amazon Technical Veterans Apprenticeship program, we are providing veterans on-the-job training in fields like cloud computing.

我们的投资不仅限于现有员工，甚至不局限于当下。为了培训明天的劳动力，我们已承诺投资5000万美元，包括Amazon未来工程师计划，这是一项支持全国小学、高中和大学生STEM和CS教育的计划，将会特别着重于吸引更多女孩和少数民族。我们将继续招聘退伍军人，让他们发挥绝佳的才能。我们正在努力实现承诺，在2021年前雇用2.5万名退伍军人及其配偶。透过Amazon的退伍军人技术培训计划（Technical Veterans Apprenticeship），我们将在云计算等领域提供退伍军人在职培训。

A huge thank you to our customers for allowing us to serve you while always challenging us to do even better, to our shareowners for your continuing support, and to all our employees worldwide for your hard work and pioneering spirit. Teams all across Amazon are listening to customers and wandering on their behalf!

非常感谢我们的客户，在为你们提供服务时，你们始终敦促我们做得更好。非常感谢我们的股东，谢谢你们持续给予我们支持。感谢全球Amazon员工的辛勤工作和开拓精神。Amazon各地的团队都在倾听客户的意见，并以客户为中心寻求提供更好的服务！

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,

Jeffrey P. Bezos

真诚的

杰夫·贝佐斯

Jeffrey P. Bezos

Founder and Chief Executive Officer

Amazon.com, Inc.

杰夫·贝索斯

Amazon创始人暨CEO

我的观点

这封信，贝索斯说，亚马逊的第三方卖家从开始的3%增长到了58%，第三方卖家正在击败官方，还说这是一个好的现象，说明他们的第三方服务做得很好。

创造者文化

亚马逊一开始想要营造一种创造者文化。

创造者文化是一种好奇者，探险者的文化，是喜欢发明的文化。即使已经是专家，他们还是具备初学者的好奇心。

创造者心态能帮助亚马逊以谦虚来把握重大的机会和难以解决的问题。相信成功可以透过迭代来实现：发明、推出、再发明、再推出、从头来过、一次又一次重复。

确实这就是创新者的整个创新流程，在你确定知道自己想要什么的时候，高效去做就行了。如果不清楚，那就去用直觉，预感和好奇心的引导，去漫步。 大的发明－尤其是「非线性」的发明，极需要漫步才有机会出现。

宽容的环境，好奇的人心，确实可以激励创新。

第二十一封信中英文对照：

To our shareowners:

致我们的股东：

The American Customer Satisfaction Index recently announced the results of its annual survey, and for the 8th year in a row customers ranked Amazon #1. The United Kingdom has a similar index, The U.K. Customer Satisfaction Index, put out by the Institute of Customer Service. For the 5th time in a row Amazon U.K. ranked #1 in that survey. Amazon was also just named the #1 business on LinkedIn’s 2018 Top Companies list, which ranks the most sought after places to work for professionals in the United States. And just a few weeks ago, Harris Poll released its annual Reputation Quotient, which surveys over 25,000 consumers on a broad range of topics from workplace environment to social responsibility to products and services, and for the 3rd year in a row Amazon ranked #1.

美国消费者满意度指数最近公布了其年度调查结果，连续八年将Amazon排在第一名。英国的消费者服务协会（Institute of Customer Service）公布了类似的指数，即「英国消费者满意度指数」，英国Amazon连续第五次在调查中排名第一。Amazon刚刚被LinkedIn评为2018年最佳公司排行榜第一名，此榜单旨在评选美国专业人士心目中的最受欢迎公司。就在几周前，Harris Poll发布了商誉商数（Reputation Quotient），此报告对超过2.5万多名消费者进行调查，主题包含工作环境、社会责任和产品服务，Amazon连续三年在排行榜排名第一。

Congratulations and thank you to the now over 560,000 Amazonians who come to work every day with unrelenting customer obsession, ingenuity, and commitment to operational excellence. And on behalf of Amazonians everywhere, I want to extend a huge thank you to customers. It’s incredibly energizing for us to see your responses to these surveys.

祝贺我们能得到这样的成绩。感谢超过56万名Amazon员工每天都专注于客户，承诺以独创性和卓越的运营服务客户。我代表世界各地的Amazon员工，向客户表示由衷感谢。我们非常开心能收到客户的高度评价。

One thing I love about customers is that they are divinely discontent. Their expectations are never static – they go up. It’s human nature. We didn’t ascend from our hunter-gatherer days by being satisfied. People have a voracious appetite for a better way, and yesterday’s ‘wow’ quickly becomes today’s ‘ordinary’. I see that cycle of improvement happening at a faster rate than ever before. It may be because customers have such easy access to more information than ever before – in only a few seconds and with a couple taps on their phones, customers can read reviews, compare prices from multiple retailers, see whether something’s in stock, find out how fast it will ship or be available for pick-up, and more. These examples are from retail, but I sense that the same customer empowerment phenomenon is happening broadly across everything we do at Amazon and most other industries as well. You cannot rest on your laurels in this world. Customers won’t have it.

我最喜欢客户的一点是－客户总是很不满意。他们的期待不会一成不变，而是会不断上升。这是人的本性。 我们并没有因此满足，而是不断精进自己。人们渴望会有更好的东西，昨天的「哇」很快就变成了今天的「普普通通」。我看到优化的速度比以往任何时候都快。与过去相比，客户可以更轻松地在网络上取得更多信息－只需几秒钟，轻按几下手机，客户就可以找到评论、多家零售商的价格、库存量、发货及提货时间。以上所说的是发生在零售行业的现象，但我认为我们在Amazon其他领域，甚至是其他的行业中也会发生这样的现象。在这个世界上，你不能止步于第一名，客户不会永远因此满足。

How do you stay ahead of ever-rising customer expectations? There’s no single way to do it – it’s a combination of many things. But high standards (widely deployed and at all levels of detail) are certainly a big part of it. We’ve had some successes over the years in our quest to meet the high expectations of customers. We’ve also had billions of dollars’ worth of failures along the way. With those experiences as backdrop, I’d like to share with you the essentials of what we’ve learned (so far) about high standards inside an organization.

你如何因应客户不断增长的期望？没办法一招吃遍天下，需要多种多样的结合。但是高标准（广泛施行且注重所有细节）无疑是其中很重要的部分。多年来，我们在满足客户的高期望方面取得了一些成功。在此过程中，我们曾损失数十亿美元。有了这些经验，我想和大家分享迄今为止我们了解的组织内高标准的基本知识。

Intrinsic or Teachable?

先天具备还是后天习得？

First, there’s a foundational question: are high standards intrinsic or teachable? If you take me on your basketball team, you can teach me many things, but you can’t teach me to be taller. Do we first and foremost need to select for “high standards” people? If so, this letter would need to be mostly about hiring practices, but I don’t think so. I believe high standards are teachable. In fact, people are pretty good at learning high standards simply through exposure. High standards are contagious. Bring a new person onto a high standards team, and they’ll quickly adapt. The opposite is also true. If low standards prevail, those too will quickly spread. And though exposure works well to teach high standards, I believe you can accelerate that rate of learning by articulating a few core principles of high standards, which I hope to share in this letter.

首先，最基本的问题是：高标准是先天具备还是可经由后天习得？如果你带我加入篮球队，你可以教给我很多东西，但是你无法教我变得更高。我们是否首先需要选择「高标准」的人？如果是这样的话，这封信的重点将会是聘用做法，但我认为不是这样的。我相信高标准是可以后天习得的。实际上，人们很擅长通过耳濡目染学习高标准。高标准具有传染性。将一个新成员带入高标准团队，他会迅速适应。反之亦然。如果盛行的是低标准，那么那些低标准也将迅速传染。尽管耳濡目染可以很好地传播高标准，但我相信你可以透过高标准的一些核心原则来加快学习速度，这正是我希望在这封信中与大家分享的知识。

Universal or Domain Specific?

普遍适用还是仅限特定领域？

Another important question is whether high standards are universal or domain specific. In other words, if you have high standards in one area, do you automatically have high standards elsewhere? I believe high standards are domain specific, and that you have to learn high standards separately in every arena of interest. When I started Amazon, I had high standards on inventing, on customer care, and (thankfully) on hiring. But I didn’t have high standards on operational process: how to keep fixed problems fixed, how to eliminate defects at the root, how to inspect processes, and much more. I had to learn and develop high standards on all of that (my colleagues were my tutors). Understanding this point is important because it keeps you humble. You can consider yourself a person of high standards in general and still have debilitating blind spots. There can be whole arenas of endeavor where you may not even know that your standards are low or non-existent, and certainly not world class. It’s critical to be open to that likelihood.

另一个重要的问题是：高标准是普遍适用还是仅限特定领域的？换句话说，如果你在一个领域中有高标准，那么你在其他地方会自动拥有高标准吗？我认为高标准是仅限特定领域的，

你必须在每个感兴趣的领域中各自学习高标准。当我创办Amazon时，我在发明、客户服务以及招聘（好险有）方面都有很高的标准。但是我对流程没有很高的标准：如何解决常见的问题、如何从根本上消除缺陷、如何进行流程检查等等。我必须在这些方面学习和制定高标准（我的同事就像是我在这些领域的家教）。理解这一点很重要，因为它会使你更谦逊。通常，你可以认为自己是一个高标准的人，但你依然会有盲点。在所有工作领域中，你甚至可能不知道自己的标准是非常低的、肯定不是一流的。了解到这一点至关重要。

Recognition and Scope

认知与范畴

What do you need to achieve high standards in a particular domain area? First, you have to be able to recognize what good looks like in that domain. Second, you must have realistic expectations for how hard it should be (how much work it will take) to achieve that result – the scope.

在特定领域内达到高标准，你需要什么条件？首先，你必须能够识别在那个领域中什么才称得上「好」？其次，你必须对达到高标准的难度进行合理预期－这称为范畴。

Let me give you two examples. One is a sort of toy illustration but it makes the point clearly, and another is a real one that comes up at Amazon all the time.

让我举两个例子。一个就像是玩具的说明书，它能很好地说明了这一点。另一个是玩具本身。

Perfect Handstands

完美的倒立

A close friend recently decided to learn to do a perfect free-standing handstand. No leaning against a wall. Not for just a few seconds. Instagram good. She decided to start her journey by taking a handstand workshop at her yoga studio. She then practiced for a while but wasn’t getting the results she wanted. So, she hired a handstand coach. Yes, I know what you’re thinking, but evidently this is an actual thing that exists. In the very first lesson, the coach gave her some wonderful advice. “Most people,” he said, “think that if they work hard, they should be able to master a handstand in about two weeks. The reality is that it takes about six months of daily practice. If you think you should be able to do it in two weeks, you’re just going to end up quitting.” Unrealistic beliefs on scope – often hidden and undiscussed – kill high standards. To achieve high standards yourself or as part of a team, you need to form and proactively communicate realistic beliefs about how hard something is going to be – something this coach understood well.

最近，我的一名好友决定学习如何完美的倒立。不能倚在墙上、不只是短短几秒。她决定透过瑜伽工作室学习倒立，以此开始自己的旅程。她练习了一段时间，但没有得到想要的结果。因此，她聘请了一名倒立教练。这显然是真实存在的实际情况。在第一堂课中，教练给她一些很棒的建议。他说：「大多数人认为，如果他们够努力，应该能够在两周内掌握倒立。但现实情况是大约需要每天练习，持之以恒六个月。如果你认为应该在两周内掌握倒立，那你最后只会放弃。」对范畴不切实际的想法（通常是隐藏且未经讨论的）扼杀了高标准。为了让自己成为高标准团队的一员，你需要主动沟通，以了解现实情况并对难度有合理预期。这位倒立教练对此理解透彻。

Six-Page Narratives

六页备忘录

We don’t do PowerPoint (or any other slide-oriented) presentations at Amazon. Instead, we write narratively structured six-page memos. We silently read one at the beginning of each meeting in a kind of “study hall.” Not surprisingly, the quality of these memos varies widely. Some have the clarity of angels singing. They are brilliant and thoughtful and set up the meeting for high-quality discussion. Sometimes they come in at the other end of the spectrum.

在Amazon，我们不会使用PowerPoint（或其他任何投影片展示工具）。相反，我们编写一份叙事结构的六页备忘录。在每次会议开始时，我们都会在「阅读室」中静静阅读备忘录。一点都不意外，这些备忘录的质量差距很大。有些人把备忘录写得就像是天使在歌唱。他们非常聪明，考虑到很多细节，并安排了高质量的会议讨论。有些备忘录则与之相反。

In the handstand example, it’s pretty straightforward to recognize high standards. It wouldn’t be difficult to lay out in detail the requirements of a well-executed handstand, and then you’re either doing it or you’re not. The writing example is very different. The difference between a great memo and an average one is much squishier. It would be extremely hard to write down the detailed requirements that make up a great memo. Nevertheless, I find that much of the time, readers react to great memos very similarly. They know it when they see it. The standard is there, and it is real, even if it’s not easily describable.

在倒立这个例子中，识别什么是高标准很简单。详细阐述什么是好的倒立并不难。你要么做对，要么做错。写作则没有这么显而易见的标准。一份出色的备忘录与一份平庸的备忘录的差距巨大。要列出好的备忘录的要求非常困难。尽管如此，我发现很多时候阅读者对好的备忘录的反应非常相似。他们一看到就知道这份备忘录写得很好。标准就在那里，即使不容易清晰描述，它就是真实存在的。

Here’s what we’ve figured out. Often, when a memo isn’t great, it’s not the writer’s inability to recognize the high standard, but instead a wrong expectation on scope: they mistakenly believe a high-standards, six-page memo can be written in one or two days or even a few hours, when really it might take a week or more! They’re trying to perfect a handstand in just two weeks, and we’re not coaching them right. The great memos are written and re-written, shared with colleagues who are asked to improve the work, set aside for a couple of days, and then edited again with a fresh mind. They simply can’t be done in a day or two. The key point here is that you can improve results through the simple act of teaching scope – that a great memo probably should take a week or more.

这就是我们想出的结论。通常来说，当一份备忘录不够好时，不是作者不知道什么是高标准，而是对范畴的错误期望：他们错误地认为可以在一两天内，甚至是几小时内就可以写出高标准的六页备忘录。事实上，他们实际需要一周或更长时间！他们就像是试图在短短两周内学会倒立，并我们没有正确地告诉他们、指导他们。好的备忘录写完之后可能会被重写。与同事分享写好的备忘录，然后把备忘录搁置几天，再以归零重来的心态重新整理备忘录。他们不可能在一两天内完成备忘录撰写。这里的关键点是，你可以透过学习来改善结果－学习认清事实，一份好的备忘录可能需要一周或更长时间。

Skill

技巧

Beyond recognizing the standard and having realistic expectations on scope, how about skill? Surely to write a world class memo, you have to be an extremely skilled writer? Is it another required element? In my view, not so much, at least not for the individual in the context of teams. The football coach doesn’t need to be able to throw, and a film director doesn’t need to be able to act. But they both do need to recognize high standards for those things and teach realistic expectations on scope. Even in the example of writing a six-page memo, that’s teamwork. Someone on the team needs to have the skill, but it doesn’t have to be you. (As a side note, by tradition at Amazon, authors’ names never appear on the memos – the memo is from the whole team.)

除了认清标准和范畴，那关于技巧呢？要写出一流的备忘录，你必须是一位非常熟练的作家吗？这是必要的吗？在我看来不必要，至少对于团队中的一员来说不必要。足球教练不需要射门，电影导演也不需要会演戏。但是他们都需要清楚知道这些事情的高标准为何，并就范畴提出符合实际的期待。以撰写六页备忘录为例，这也需要团队合作。团队中的某个人需要具备该技能，但不一定是你。（顺带一提，按照Amazon的传统，备忘录中永远不会出现作者个人的名字－备忘录的作者是整个团队。）

Benefits of High Standards

高标准带来的好处

Building a culture of high standards is well worth the effort, and there are many benefits. Naturally and most obviously, you’re going to build better products and services for customers – this would be reason enough! Perhaps a little less obvious: people are drawn to high standards – they help with recruiting and retention. More subtle: a culture of high standards is protective of all the “invisible” but crucial work that goes on in every company. I’m talking about the work that no one sees. The work that gets done when no one is watching. In a high standards culture, doing that work well is its own reward – it’s part of what it means to be a professional.

建立高标准的文化值得付出努力，而且也有很多好处。最明显的是，你将为客户打造更好的产品和服务－这已经足够了！也许不那么明显的是：人们会被高标准吸引－这有助于招聘和留住员工。更微妙的是：高标准文化可以确保「看不见」但至关重要的工作得到良好执行。我说的是那些没有镁光灯关注的工作。在高标准的文化中，做好工作是对自己的肯定－这是成为专业人士必须具备的素质。

And finally, high standards are fun! Once you’ve tasted high standards, there’s no going back.

最后，高标准非常有趣！就像你品尝了高标准的葡萄酒之后，就再也没有回头路了。

So, the four elements of high standards as we see it: they are teachable, they are domain specific, you must recognize them, and you must explicitly coach realistic scope. For us, these work at all levels of detail. Everything from writing memos to whole new, clean-sheet business initiatives. We hope they help you too.

我们所看到的高标准，通常具备四个要素：可后天习得、仅限特定领域、需要清楚认知何谓高标准、具备明确实际的范畴。对我们来说，这些都需要在各细节层面进行。从撰写备忘录到全新的业务计划，都需要注意这四个要素。我们希望这四个要素也能帮助到你。

Insist on the Highest Standards Leaders have relentlessly high standards – many people may think these standards are unreasonably high. — from the Amazon Leadership Principles
领导者实现高标准的方法就是坚持制定高标准－即使许多人可能认为这些标准高的不合理。－来自Amazon领导力原则

Recent Milestones

最近取得的里程碑

The high standards our leaders strive for have served us well. And while I certainly can’t do a handstand myself, I’m extremely proud to share some of the milestones we hit last year, each of which represents the fruition of many years of collective effort. We take none of them for granted.

领导者追求的高标准，为我们提供很好的服务。尽管我自己无法倒立，但我非常自豪地分享我们去年取得的一些里程碑。每个里程碑代表了多年集体努力的成果。我们都不把它们视为理所当然。

• Prime – 13 years post-launch, we have exceeded 100 million paid Prime members globally. In 2017 Amazon shipped more than five billion items with Prime worldwide, and more new members joined Prime than in any previous year – both worldwide and in the U.S. Members in the U.S. now receive unlimited free two-day shipping on over 100 million different items. We expanded Prime to Mexico, Singapore, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, and introduced Business Prime Shipping in the U.S. and Germany. We keep making Prime shipping faster as well, with Prime Free Same-Day and Prime Free One-Day delivery now in more than 8,000 cities and towns. Prime Now is available in more than 50 cities worldwide across nine countries. Prime Day 2017 was our biggest global shopping event ever (until surpassed by Cyber Monday), with more new Prime members joining Prime than any other day in our history.
• Prime－推出13年后，我们在全球已拥有超过1亿名付费Prime会员。2017年，Amazon在全球向会员配送了超过50亿件商品，新加入Prime的会员数量超过以往任何一年（无论是以全球或美国来说都是）。美国会员现在可以不受限制地享受两天内到货的免费服务，可配送超过1亿种不同商品。我们将Prime拓展到墨西哥、新加坡、荷兰和卢森堡，并在美国和德国引入了Business Prime Shipping。我们也不断提高Prime的配送速度，在超过8000个城镇提供Prime Free当日到货和Prime Free一日到货服务。在全球9个国家，超过50个城市中提供Prime Now。Prime Day 2017是我们有史以来最大的全球购物活动（直到被Cyber Monday超过），与历史上任何一天相比，Prime新会员的人数是最多的。
• AWS – It’s exciting to see Amazon Web Services, a $20 billion revenue run rate business, accelerate its already healthy growth. AWS has also accelerated its pace of innovation – especially in new areas such as machine learning and artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, and serverless computing. In 2017, AWS announced more than 1,400 significant services and features, including Amazon SageMaker, which radically changes the accessibility and ease of use for everyday developers to build sophisticated machine learning models. Tens of thousands of customers are also using a broad range of AWS machine learning services, with active users increasing more than 250 percent in the last year, spurred by the broad adoption of Amazon SageMaker. And in November, we held our sixth re:Invent conference with more than 40,000 attendees and over 60,000 streaming participants.
• AWS－令人振奋的是，营业额达200亿美元的AWS再次加速增长。AWS加快了创新步伐，尤其是在机器学习、人工智能、物联网和无服务器计算等新领域。2017年，AWS推出了超过1400种重要服务和功能，包括Amazon SageMaker，此服务从根本上改善了开发人员构建复杂的机器学习模型的易用性。数以万计的客户使用AWS机器学习服务，由于Amazon SageMaker的广泛采用，去年活跃用户增长超过250％。11月，我们举办了第六届re：Invent大会，与会者超过4万人，在线观看者超过6万名。
• Marketplace – In 2017, for the first time in our history, more than half of the units sold on Amazon worldwide were from our third-party sellers, including small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Over 300,000 U.S.-based SMBs started selling on Amazon in 2017, and Fulfillment by Amazon shipped billions of items for SMBs worldwide. Customers ordered more than 40 million items from SMBs worldwide during Prime Day 2017, growing their sales by more than 60 percent over Prime Day 2016. Our Global Selling program (enabling SMBs to sell products across national borders) grew by over 50% in 2017 and cross-border ecommerce by SMBs now represents more than 25% of total thirdparty sales.
• Marketplace－2017年，史上第一次在全球范围内售出的商品中有超过一半来自第三方卖家，包括中小企业（SMB）。2017年，超过30万个美国中小型企业在Amazon上销售商品，Amaozon会为全球中小型企业运送了数十亿件商品。2017年Prime Day期间，消费者从中小型企业订购了超过4千万件商品，与2016年Prime Day相比，销售额增长超过60％。全球销售计划（Global Selling，使中小型企业能够跨国贩卖商品）在2017年增长超过50％，如今中小企业的跨境电商交易额占第三方卖家总销售额25％以上。
• Alexa – Customer embrace of Alexa continues, with Alexa-enabled devices among the best-selling items across all of Amazon. We’re seeing extremely strong adoption by other companies and developers that want to create their own experiences with Alexa. There are now more than 30,000 skills for Alexa from outside developers, and customers can control more than 4,000 smart home devices from 1,200 unique brands with Alexa. The foundations of Alexa continue to get smarter every day too. We’ve developed and implemented an on-device fingerprinting technique, which keeps your device from waking up when it hears an Alexa commercial on TV. (This technology ensured that our Alexa Super Bowl commercial didn’t wake up millions of devices.) Far-field speech recognition (already very good) has improved by 15% over the last year; and in the U.S., U.K., and Germany, we’ve improved Alexa’s spoken language understanding by more than 25% over the last 12 months through enhancements in Alexa’s machine learning components and the use of semi-supervised learning techniques. (These semi-supervised learning techniques reduced the amount of labeled data needed to achieve the same accuracy improvement by 40 times!) Finally, we’ve dramatically reduced the amount of time required to teach Alexa new languages by using machine translation and transfer learning techniques, which allows us to serve customers in more countries (like India and Japan).
• Alexa－Alexa持续受到客户的喜爱，支持Alexa的设备遍及整个Amazon畅销榜。我们看到其他公司大力支持Alexa，与Alexa一起创造优质用户体验。现在，外部开发人员共计为Alexa提供超过3万种技术，消费者可以使用Alexa控制1200种品牌的4000多种智能家居设备。Alexa每天都在变得越来越聪明。我们已经开发并上线了一种终端指纹识别技术，可防止你的设备在听到电视上的Alexa广告时唤醒。（这项技术确保了我们的Alexa超级碗广告不会唤醒数百万个设备。）远场语音识别技术（已经非常好）去年提升了15％；在美国、英国和德国，过去12个月来，我们透过加强Alexa的机器学习组件和使用半监督学习技术，将Alexa的口语理解能力提高了25％以上。（这些半监督学习技术将同等能力提升所需的数据量减少了40倍！）最后，我们透过使用机器翻译和迁移学习技术极大地降低学习Alexa新语言所需的时间，使我们能够为更多国家（例如印度和日本）的客户提供服务。
• Amazon devices – 2017 was our best year yet for hardware sales. Customers bought tens of millions of Echo devices, and Echo Dot and Fire TV Stick with Alexa were the best-selling products across all of Amazon – across all categories and all manufacturers. Customers bought twice as many Fire TV Sticks and Kids Edition Fire Tablets this holiday season versus last year. 2017 marked the release of our all-new Echo with an improved design, better sound, and a lower price; Echo Plus with a built-in smart home hub; and Echo Spot, which is compact and beautiful with a circular screen. We released our next generation Fire TV, featuring 4K Ultra HD and HDR; and the Fire HD 10 Tablet, with 1080p Full HD display. And we celebrated the 10th anniversary of Kindle by releasing the all-new Kindle Oasis, our most advanced reader ever. It’s waterproof – take it in the bathtub – with a bigger 7” high-resolution 300 ppi display and has built-in audio so you can also listen to your books with Audible.
• Amazon devices－2017年是我们迄今为止硬件销售表现最好的一年。客户购买了数以千万计的Echo设备，而带有Alexa的Echo Dot和Fire TV Stick是Amazon所有类别和所有制造商中最畅销的商品。与去年同期相比，客户在此次假期中购买的Fire TV Stick和Kids Edition Fire Tablet的数量是去年的两倍。2017年标志着我们全新的Echo上市，改进的设计、更好的声音和更低的价。具备智能家居集线器的Echo Plus；采用圆形屏幕、小巧美观的Echo Spot。我们推出具有4K Ultra HD和HDR功能的新一代Fire TV，以及具有1080p高清显示屏的Fire HD 10 Tablet。为了庆祝Kindle 10周年，我们推出了全新的Kindle Oasis，这是迄今为止最先进的阅读器。防水－所以你可以放在浴缸里。更大的高清显示屏－7英寸300 ppi。内置音频，因此你可以直接使用Audible听书。
• Prime Video – Prime Video continues to drive Prime member adoption and retention. In the last year we made Prime Video even better for customers by adding new, award-winning Prime Originals to the service, like The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, winner of two Critics’ Choice Awards and two Golden Globes, and the Oscar-nominated movie The Big Sick. We’ve expanded our slate of programming across the globe, launching new seasons of Bosch and Sneaky Pete from the U.S., The Grand Tour from the U.K., and You Are Wanted from Germany, while adding new Sentosha shows from Japan, along with Breathe and the award-winning Inside Edge from India. Also this year, we expanded our Prime Channels offerings, adding CBS All Access in the U.S. and launching Channels in the U.K. and Germany. We debuted NFL Thursday Night Football on Prime Video, with more than 18 million total viewers over 11 games. In 2017, Prime Video Direct secured subscription video rights for more than 3,000 feature films and committed over $18 million in royalties to independent filmmakers and other rights holders. Looking forward, we’re also excited about our upcoming Prime Original series pipeline, which includes Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan starring John Krasinski; King Lear, starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson; The Romanoffs, executive produced by Matt Weiner; Carnival Row starring Orlando Bloom and Cara Delevingne; Good Omens starring Jon Hamm; and Homecoming, executive produced by Sam Esmail and starring Julia Roberts in her first television series. We acquired the global television rights for a multi-season production of The Lord of the Rings, as well as Cortés, a miniseries based on the epic saga of Hernán Cortés from executive producer Steven Spielberg, starring Javier Bardem, and we look forward to beginning work on those shows this year.
• Prime Video－Prime Video继续推动Prime会员的拉新与留存。去年，我们新增了屡获殊荣的全新Prime原创作品，从而使Prime Video给用户更好的服务，例如获得两次广播影评人协会奖和两次金球奖的《The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel》，以及获得奥斯卡提名的《The Big Sick》。我们的节目编排遍及全球，包括美国的《Bosch》和《Sneaky Pete》、英国的《The Grand Tour》、德国的《You Are Wanted》、日本的《Sentosha》、印度的《Breathe》和屡获殊荣的《Inside Edge》。同样时，我们扩增了Prime Channel的内容，在美国增加了CBS All Access，并在英国和德国推出许多新频道。在Prime Video上首次播放NFL周四足球夜（Thursday Night Football），在11场比赛中总计有1800万观众观看。2017年，Prime Video Direct取得超过3000部视频的订阅版权，将会为独立电影制片人和其他版权持有者带来超过1800万美元的版税。展望未来，我们也对即将推出的Prime原创电视剧感到兴奋。Tom Clancy创作的《Jack Ryan》，将由John Krasinski主演。《King Lear》将由Anthony Hopkins和Emma Thompson主演。Matt Weiner制作的《Romanoffs》。《Carnival Row》由Orlando Bloom和Cara Delevingne主演。《Good Omens》由Jon Hamm主演。由Sam Esmail制作，并由Julia Roberts主演的电视剧《Homecoming》，这是Julia Roberts的第一部电视剧。我们取得几季电视剧《The Lord of the Rings》的全球电视转播权。由Steven Spielberg制作的《Cortés》是一部以《HernánCortés》的传奇故事为背景的迷你剧，由Javier Bardem主演。我们非常期待今年的作品。
• Amazon Music – Amazon Music continues to grow fast and now has tens of millions of paid customers. Amazon Music Unlimited, our on-demand, ad-free offering, expanded to more than 30 new countries in 2017, and membership has more than doubled over the past six months.
• Amazon Music－Amazon音乐持续增长，现在拥有数千万付费会员。我们的按需计价无广告产品Amazon Music Unlimited，在2017年扩展市场到30多个国家，过去六个月中，会员数增加了一倍以上。
• Fashion – Amazon has become the destination for tens of millions of customers to shop for fashion. In 2017, we introduced our first fashion-oriented Prime benefit, Prime Wardrobe – a new service that brings the fitting room directly to the homes of Prime members so they can try on the latest styles before they buy. We introduced Nike and UGG on Amazon along with new celebrity collections by Drew Barrymore and Dwyane Wade, as well as dozens of new private brands, like Goodthreads and Core10. We’re also continuing to enable thousands of designers and artists to offer their exclusive designs and prints on demand through Merch by Amazon. We finished 2017 with the launch of our interactive shopping experience with Calvin Klein, including pop-up shops, on-site product customization, and fitting rooms with Alexa-controlled lighting, music, and more.
• Fashion－Amazon已经成为数千万顾客购买时尚名品的地方。2017年，我们推出了第一个时尚导向的Prime优惠－Prime Wardrobe。这是一项新服务，将未购买的商品直接送到Prime会员的住处，让消费者在家就可以试穿最新的款式。我们在Amazon上引入了Nike和UGG两个品牌、Drew Barrymore和Dwyane Wade的名人系列、Goodthreads和Core10等数十个新品牌。我们还将继续引入很多位设计师和艺术家，让他们能够透过Amazon Merch提供独家设计商品。我们在2017年与Calvin Klein推出互动购物体验，包括快闪店、现场产品订制以及由Alexa控制灯光音乐的试衣间。
• Whole Foods – When we closed our acquisition of Whole Foods Market last year, we announced our commitment to making high-quality, natural and organic food available for everyone, then immediately lowered prices on a selection of best-selling grocery staples, including avocados, organic brown eggs, and responsibly-farmed salmon. We followed this with a second round of price reductions in November, and our Prime member exclusive promotion broke Whole Foods’ all-time record for turkeys sold during the Thanksgiving season. In February, we introduced free two-hour delivery on orders over $35 for Prime members in select cities, followed by additional cities in March and April, and plan continued expansion across the U.S. throughout this year. We also expanded the benefits of the Amazon Prime Rewards Visa Card, enabling Prime members to get 5% back when shopping at Whole Foods Market. Beyond that, customers can purchase Whole Foods’ private label products like 365 Everyday Value on Amazon, purchase Echo and other Amazon devices in over a hundred Whole Foods stores, and pick-up or return Amazon packages at Amazon Lockers in hundreds of Whole Foods stores. We’ve also begun the technical work needed to recognize Prime members at the point of sale and look forward to offering more Prime benefits to Whole Foods shoppers once that work is completed.
• Whole Foods－去年我们收购了Whole Foods超市，并承诺未来将向所有人提供高质量、天然和有机食品，同时立即降低酪梨、有机鸡蛋、责任养殖的鲑鱼等畅销杂货。随后我们在11月进行了第二轮降价，我们推出Prime会员独家促销方案，打破了Whole Foods感恩节火鸡销量的的历史记录。2月，我们为部分城市的Prime会员提供两小时到货的免费配送服务，订单金额超过35美元即可使用。随后在3月和4月将服务拓展到其他城市，今年将在整个美国范围内继续拓展。我们还增加了Amazon Prime Rewards Visa卡的优惠，Prime会员在Whole Foods购物时可获得5％的现金返还。除此之外，客户还可以在Amazon上购买Whole Foods自有品牌产品，例如365 Everyday Value，也可以在一百多家Whole Foods中购买Echo和其他Amazon电子装置，在数百家Whole Foods中的Amazon Lockers取货或退货 。我们已开始着手将Prime会员从Whole Foods顾客中识别出来，以提供他们更多的Prime会员优惠。
• Amazon Go – Amazon Go, a new kind of store with no checkout required, opened to the public in January in Seattle. Since opening, we’ve been thrilled to hear many customers refer to their shopping experience as “magical.” What makes the magic possible is a custom-built combination of computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning, which come together to create Just Walk Out shopping. With JWO, customers are able to grab their favorite breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack, and grocery essentials more conveniently than ever before. Some of our top-selling items are not surprising – caffeinated beverages and water are popular – but our customers also love the Chicken Banh Mi sandwich, chocolate chip cookies, cut fruit, gummy bears, and our Amazon Meal Kits.
• Amazon Go－Amazon Go是一种无需结账的新型商店，1月在西雅图开放营业。开业以来，我们很高兴听到许多顾客称这样的购物体验为「神奇」。结合计算器视觉、传感器和深度学习，使这一切从魔术成为可能，创造出拿了就走的购物体验，我们称之为Just Walk Out Shopping。透过Just Walk Out Shopping，消费者取得自己喜欢的早餐、午餐、晚餐、点心和杂货会更加方便。我们的最畅销产品是－不足为奇的咖啡因饮料和水，但他们也喜欢Chicken Banh Mi三明治、巧克力曲奇饼干、水果、小熊软糖和我们的Amazon餐包。
• Treasure Truck – Treasure Truck expanded from a single truck in Seattle to a fleet of 35 trucks across 25 U.S. cities and 12 U.K. cities. Our bubble-blowing, music-pumping trucks fulfilled hundreds of thousands of orders, from porterhouse steaks to the latest Nintendo releases. Throughout the year, Treasure Truck also partnered with local communities to lift spirits and help those in need, including donating and delivering hundreds of car seats, thousands of toys, tens of thousands of socks, and many other essentials to community members needing relief, from those displaced by Hurricane Harvey, to the homeless, to kids needing holiday cheer.
• Treasure Truck－Treasure Truck从西雅图的一辆卡车起步，扩展为横跨25个美国城市、12个英国城市，总数35辆的卡车车队。我们的吹泡泡音乐泵车服务了数十万笔订单，从丁骨牛排到最新的任天堂游戏机。Treasure Truck与当地小区合作，振作人们的精神，帮助有需要的人。捐赠和运送数百个汽车座椅、数千个玩具、数万只袜子和许多必需品。给那些因哈维飓风而流离失所者、无家可归者和需要鼓励的孩子。
• India – http://Amazon.in is the fastest growing marketplace in India, and the most visited site on both desktop and mobile, according to comScore and SimilarWeb. The http://Amazon.in mobile shopping app was also the most downloaded shopping app in India in 2017, according to App Annie. Prime added more members in India in its first year than any previous geography in Amazon’s history. Prime selection in India now includes more than 40 million local products from third-party sellers, and Prime Video is investing in India original video content in a big way, including two recent premiers and over a dozen new shows in production.
• India－根据comScore和SimilarWeb的数据，Amazon印度站是印度增长最快的第三方卖家平台，也是PC和移动设备上流量最大的网站。根据App Annie的数据，Amazon购物App是2017年印度区下载量最多的购物App。在印度推出Prime会员的第一年度，Prime会员增长数就超过了Amazon历史上的任何地方的纪录。印度的Prime商品主要来自第三方卖家，超过4000万种当地商品。Prime Video正大量投资于印度的原创内容，包括两位主要人物和十多个新节目。
• Sustainability – We are committed to minimizing carbon emissions by optimizing our transportation network, improving product packaging, and enhancing energy efficiency in our operations, and we have a long-term goal to power our global infrastructure using 100% renewable energy. We recently launched Amazon Wind Farm Texas, our largest wind farm yet, which generates more than 1,000,000 megawatt hours of clean energy annually from over 100 turbines. We have plans to host solar energy systems at 50 fulfillment centers by 2020, and have launched 24 wind and solar projects across the U.S. with more than 29 additional projects to come. Together, Amazon’s renewable energy projects now produce enough clean energy to power over 330,000 homes annually. In 2017 we celebrated the 10-year anniversary of Frustration-Free Packaging, the first of a suite of sustainable packaging initiatives that have eliminated more than 244,000 tons of packaging materials over the past 10 years. In addition, in 2017 alone our programs significantly reduced packaging waste, eliminating the equivalent of 305 million shipping boxes. And across the world, Amazon is contracting with our service providers to launch our first low-pollution last-mile fleet. Already today, a portion of our European delivery fleet is comprised of low-pollution electric and natural gas vans and cars, and we have over 40 electric scooters and e-cargo bikes that complete local urban deliveries.
• Sustainability－我们致力于优化运输网络、改善产品包装和提高运营效率，最大程度地减少碳排放。我们的长期目标是使用100％可再生能源。我们最近启用了德州的Amazon风力发电场，这是我们迄今为止最大的风力发电场，100多个涡轮机能产生超过100万兆瓦时的清洁能源。我们计划2020年前在50个配送中心设置太阳能系统，在美国启动了24个风能和太阳能项目，另外还有29个即将成立的新项目。如今Amazon可再生能源项目共产生了足够33万个家庭使用的清洁能源。2017年是Frustration-Free包装计划的10周年，在过去十年此计划消除了超过24.4万吨包装材料。仅在2017年就大大减少了包装浪费，相当于减少了3.05亿个包装箱。Amazon正在与服务提供商签约，启动我们的第一个运送最后一英里的低污染车队。今天，我们在欧洲的运输车队中，已经有一部分由低污染的电动货车和天然气货车组成。我们拥有40多辆电动踏板车和电动货运自行车，可以完成当地城市运输任务。
• Empowering Small Business – Millions of small and medium-sized businesses worldwide now sell their products through Amazon to reach new customers around the globe. SMBs selling on Amazon come from every state in the U.S., and from more than 130 different countries around the world. More than 140,000 SMBs surpassed $100,000 in sales on Amazon in 2017, and over a thousand independent authors surpassed $100,000 in royalties in 2017 through Kindle Direct Publishing.
• Empowering Small Business－现在，全球数以百万个的中小型企业透过Amazon贩卖商品，吸引全球新客户。在Amazon上销售的中小企业商品，来自美国的各个州和全球130多个的国家。 2017年，超过14万名中小型企业在Amazon上的销售额超过10万美元。同时，有1000多名独立创作者透过Kindle Direct Publishing的版权费赚到超过10万美元。
• Investment & Job Creation – Since 2011, we have invested over $150 billion worldwide in our fulfillment networks, transportation capabilities, and technology infrastructure, including AWS data centers. Amazon has created over 1.7 million direct and indirect jobs around the world. In 2017 alone, we directly created more than 130,000 new Amazon jobs, not including acquisitions, bringing our global employee base to over 560,000. Our new jobs cover a wide range of professions, from artificial intelligence scientists to packaging specialists to fulfillment center associates. In addition to these direct hires, we estimate that Amazon Marketplace has created 900,000 more jobs worldwide, and that Amazon’s investments have created an additional 260,000 jobs in areas like construction, logistics, and other professional services.
• Investment & Job Creation－自2011年以来，我们已在全球投资超过1500亿美元在配送网络、运输功能和基础设施（包括AWS数据中心）上。Amazon在全球直接或间接创造超过170万个工作机会。仅在2017年，我们就直接创造了超过13万个新的工作机会（不包括收购），我们的全球员工总数因此超过56万人。我们的新工作涵盖了领域很广泛，从人工智能科学家、包装专家到配送中心员工。除了这些直接聘雇人员，我们估计Amazon在全球间接创造了90万个个工作机会。Amazon在建筑、物流和其他专业服务的投资一共创造了26万个工作机会。
• Career Choice – One employee program we’re particularly proud of is Amazon Career Choice. For hourly associates with more than one year of tenure, we pre-pay 95% of tuition, fees, and textbooks (up to $12,000) for certificates and associate degrees in high-demand occupations such as aircraft mechanics, computer-aided design, machine tool technologies, medical lab technologies, and nursing. We fund education in areas that are in high demand and do so regardless of whether those skills are relevant to a career at Amazon. Globally more than 16,000 associates (including more than 12,000 in the U.S.) have joined Career Choice since the program launched in 2012. Career Choice is live in ten countries and expanding to South Africa, Costa Rica, and Slovakia later this year. Commercial truck driving, healthcare, and information technology are the program’s most popular fields of study. We’ve built 39 Career Choice classrooms so far, and we locate them behind glass walls in high traffic areas inside our fulfillment centers so associates can be inspired by seeing their peers pursue new skills.
• Career Choice－我们特别引以为傲的计划就是职业选择计划（Career Choice）。对于任职时间超过一年的员工，我们预付95％的学杂费和教科书费用（最高1.2万元），为员工取得高要求职业证书（例如飞机修护师、计算器辅助设计、机器技术、医疗科技和护理）的证书和副学士学位。我们提供教育资金给需求量很大的地区，无论这些技能是否与员工在Amazon的职务相关都可以获得资助。自2012年推出此计划，全球已有1.6万名员工（包括美国的1.2万多名）加入职业选择计划。职业选择计划在10个国家实行，将于今年内拓展至南非、哥斯达黎加和斯洛伐克。商用卡车驾驶、医疗保健和IT技术是此计划最受欢迎的研究领域。到目前为止，我们已经建立了39个职业选择计划教室，它们位于配送中心最繁忙的区域，员工可以透过玻璃墙看到其他同事追求新技能，进而受到启发。

The credit for these milestones is deserved by many. Amazon is 560,000 employees. It’s also 2 million sellers, hundreds of thousands of authors, millions of AWS developers, and hundreds of millions of divinely discontent customers around the world who push to make us better each and every day.

这些里程碑确实值得赞扬。Amazon有56万名员工、200万名卖家、成千上万的作者、数百万AWS开发人员以及世界各地成千上万名需求未被满足的顾客，他们每天都在努力使我们变得更好。

Path Ahead

前方的路

This year marks the 20th anniversary of our first shareholder letter, and our core values and approach remain unchanged. We continue to aspire to be Earth’s most customer-centric company, and we recognize this to be no small or easy challenge. We know there is much we can do better, and we find tremendous energy in the many challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.

今年距离第一封致股东信刚好满20周年，我们的核心价值观和做事方法依旧不变。我们渴望成为地球上最以顾客为中心的公司。我们知道到这绝非易事，我们还有很多可以做得更好的地方。在即将到来的众多挑战和机遇中，我们看到巨大的潜力与活力。

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 ingenuity, your passion, and your high standards.

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、热情和高标准。

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,

Jeffrey P. Bezo

真诚的

杰夫·贝佐斯

Jeffrey P. Bezos

Founder and Chief Executive Officer

Amazon.com, Inc.

杰夫·贝佐斯

Amazon创始人暨CEO

我的想法

贝索斯说，他要感谢客户的不满意，顾客渴望更好的东西，让他们不断迭代，打造一个高标准的公司。

那怎么才能高标准呢，这里说了4个点。

1. 高标准是后天习得的。 高标准具有传染性，将一个新成员带入高标准团队，他会迅速适应。 其实低标准也是，公司就是大染缸，不被染的人很少。
2. 高标准仅限特定领域。 其实这很好理解，不可能人在所有领域都坚持高标准。
3. 高标准需要有清楚的认知。很多人不知道自己的标准是很低的，也不知道在领域里面什么是好。
4. 高标准有明确的范畴。 知道这事需要多久才能达到预期的期望。

贝索斯还举了一个例子，大多数人认为，他们努力，可以2周之内学习倒立。但是，现实情况是需要每天练习，六个月才能掌握。 这是因为你开始对这个事情的认知就不到位，充满了不切实际的想法，导致你不可能高标准，有了认知之后就会制定合理的预期。

高标准的好处

高标准可以为客户打造更好的产品和服务。最重要的一点是，高标准的文化可以确保看不见但是至关重要的工作可以得到良好的执行。

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。