I’m currently reading Brad Stone’s The Everything Store1, a history of Amazon.com. One of the early chapters is about the very early days of the company, which at that point was only selling books. In addition to showing information about products, founder Jeff Bezos wanted the site to include customer reviews of individual books.

Of course, some customer reviews were negative. Mr. Bezos received an angry letter from a book publishing executive, arguing that Amazon was in the business of selling books, not trashing them. But that was not the Amazon way. Per Mr. Bezos,

When I read that letter, I thought, we don’t make money when we sell things. We make money when we help customers make purchase decisions.

These two sentences struck me as a key insight: the particular sale isn’t the ultimate goal of the interaction; building the overall relationship with the customer is.

Long-term thinking is rare in business — especially in a fast-paced environment such as the early web. Nascent Amazon was under a great deal of pressure to prove itself, to grow. Driving more immediate sales would’ve seemed the more prudent approach. And yet, the team chose the long-term relationship. That’s values in action.

In your work, you may sometimes be called to choose between a feature that “drives the needle” in the short term versus one that builds an ongoing relationship. How do you choose? How do you measure the cost either way?

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