This month for our business book I decided to take a dive into learning about the company that everyone knows and has had some pretty dramatic and huge gains since their beginning: Amazon. As someone who is building a business/in business you have to have a level of respect for all that they’ve managed to accomplish and the fact that by and large they’ve got a good reputation. On the other hand of course they’re not my favorite company because of how they dominate business and do slide by on some things because they’re so big. But I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to learn about the foundation of what makes them so successful in “Working Backward: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon” by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr (both guys who worked at Amazon in leadership for many years).
One of the things that stood out to me in the book is what became Amazon’s commitment to doing a really deep dive on things they’re considering adding to their business. This commitment to investigation and putting out a product/service they can be proud of and is desired by the customer started with Jeff Bezos’ commitment to customers first, not competition. By having the various teams in Amazon go through an extensive process to get from idea to proof of concept to launch, not only do they work out many of the kinks, but they’re able to deliver a better product/service too. I know that most of us don’t have the financial resources available to us that Amazon does to do things like this, but I do think we can learn from it and apply the lesson of really doing our homework and researching before we just throw something out into the market and hope it sells.
This ties in with a related point that’s very important: failure isn’t the enemy. One of Amazon’s biggest commitments is to innovation and to never being “too big” to innovate and work on new things. But as we all know, they don’t get it right 100% of the time. Often it’s a case of something that has to be developed a little more, or is a little early for widespread adoption, but sometimes they do completely fail, in which case they accept the lessons they learned and move on. It doesn’t mean that people forgot that they failed, but what company is as big as them that doesn’t have a few failures along the way? So once you’ve done your research as we discussed in the previous point, go ahead and put it out there, even if it only has moderate or minimal success, or downright fails. Why? Because the lessons you’ll learn and new customers you’ll connect with might be exactly what you need to help get you to the next level.
Finally, one of Amazon’s big focuses is on the long term rather than the short term. Of course they want customers to be happy with the order they placed today, but they’re not just focused on the short term wins, they want to be a successful company for decades to come. This extends to their employees as well, because they have a focus on not only hiring (quality) people who will stay with the company for at least 5 years, but also continuing to answer and address the question of what kind of company do we have to be for an employee to want to stay with the company for 5 plus years? Do you make a point in your business of tending to and planning for both present and future? Or are you so busy putting out fires today that you don’t have any time or resources left to plan (and dream) for the future?
There are so many other lessons that we could learn from Amazon that weren’t shared in the book, lessons that apply to us even if we don’t have (and don’t want) a business the size of Amazon, but still can be helpful in building our business. What are some of the things you’ve learned from them?