Bezos’s perpetual message is that it’s Amazon’s nature to swing for
the fences on a regular basis. But the analogy is wrong: in baseball, a
grand slam only scores four runs. By comparison, the home runs of
Amazon Prime and AWS produced several thousand runs when the
Seattle firm connected with the ball. As Bezos wrote in Amazon’s first
annual letter, in 1997, “Given a 10 percent chance of a hundred times
payout, you should take that bet every time.”^51
Needless to say, most CEOs don’t think this way. Most won’t even
take risks that have less than a 50 percent chance of success—no
matter how big the potential payoff. This is a big reason why old-
economy firms are leaking value to new-economy firms. Today’s
successful companies may have the assets, cash flow, and brand