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This article summarizes Jeff Bezos’s session at Italian Tech Week 2025.

Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and Blue Origin / Photo credit: Blue Origin

“Kindness is a choice, cleverness is a gift.” Amazon founder Jeff Bezos offered this principle during a panel at Italian Tech Week 2025 with John Elkann, chairman of Ferrari and Stellantis. The conversation linked a personal philosophy with a vision for the future of industry, on Earth and beyond.

For Bezos, this vision is an extension of his core business principles, including long-term thinking and his belief that even market busts can build valuable infrastructure for the future.

The road trip that defined a philosophy

To explain his principle, Bezos shared a childhood memory from a family road trip that revealed the limits of pure intellect.

Confident in his math skills, a young Bezos calculated the years his grandmother had lost to smoking. He expected praise for his cleverness, but the result was a painful lesson in empathy. “I stood up in the back of the car and I proudly announced that she had taken seven years off of her life,” Bezos recalled. “And I thought in my 10-year-old brain that they were going to congratulate me… instead, she burst into tears.”

The emotional misstep prompted a quiet intervention. His grandfather pulled the car over, took him aside, and delivered a lesson that would define his worldview. Bezos recounts the pivotal words: “He said to me, ‘Jeff, one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than it is to be clever.'”

Putting the principle into practice
This lesson became a cornerstone of his business philosophy. As John Elkann noted, technology itself can be seen as “clever but not kind.”

Bezos explained he squares this principle in business by applying long-term thinking. A short-term view might prioritize a clever tactic to win a single deal. But a long-term perspective, which assumes you will be dealing with the same people for life, fundamentally changes the calculation.

“If you realize, ‘I’m probably going to deal with this person for the rest of my life,’” Bezos concluded, “you come to a different answer.”

Build your strategy on what will not change

This focus on long-term values is the core of his business strategy. Bezos builds durable companies by concentrating on customer needs that do not change over time. This approach allows a business to ignore tech trends and innovate on a stable foundation.

The approach’s core steps include:

• Identify foundational customer needs that remain stable over decades.
• Build the company’s long-term vision around serving those stable needs.
• Maintain complete flexibility on the tactical details of execution as technology evolves.
• Use this vision as a touchstone to prioritize ideas and allocate resources effectively.

Customers’ core desires are stable
Bezos argues, “you can build a strategy around customer needs that will have durability. Customers like fast deliveries. It would be impossible to imagine a customer saying ‘I love Amazon I just wish you delivered a little more slowly’ or ‘I love Amazon I just wish your prices were a little higher.'”

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