Through the growth and appreciation of Amazon, Jeff Bezos has become one of the wealthiest and most influential people on earth. He shares some insights into his philosophy in a recent interview titled “Lessons in Management at I.A. Gala 2017.” Here are some of the highlights:
- Amazon is and always will be “Customer Obsessed.” Everything they do is geared towards creating a better experience for the customer. Jeff says to invent on your customer's behalf. It’s not their job to know what you should
invent to make their life easier and their experience better, that’s your job. - Amazon thinks long-term. The results this quarter are pre-determined based on what you were doing 2-3 years ago. All overnight successes take at least 10 years.
- In baseball, you can swing for a home run but you might strike out. The best case is a grand slam (4 runs) and the worst case is a strikeout. In business, the risk-reward is much different. You can swing the bat and sometimes score 1,000 runs. This is why you have to experiment and be willing to fail. Experimenting is the good kind of failure, poor execution is the bad kind. Experiment and invent until you find something with those exponential returns.
- Inventing something does not make it disruptive. You’re only disruptive if the customer will adopt it. Cool ideas are only cool if the customer will actually use it.
- His advice for any entrepreneur or organization is to identify the big ideas, 2 or 3 of them. Enforce great execution against those big ideas. For Amazon, those ideas
are: low prices, fast delivery, vast selection. How do we reduce our cost and deliver things faster? We know for a fact that in 10 years customers will still love low prices and fast delivery. Pick and focus on the big things that will still be there 10 and 20 years from now.
Any business can benefit from customer obsession, long-term