Playing It Safe Is A Risk

BursaSnipers

Publish date: Sun, 20 Oct 2019, 03:22 PM

7 What if the top danger your business faces is not taking enough risk? Amazon leadership principles highlight this question.

And that’s the question that Steve Anderson, author of “The Bezos Letters: 14 Principles To Grow Your Business Like Amazon,” asks.

AmazonAMZN is the fastest company to reach $100 billion in sales. Anderson says “Jeff Bezos’ unique way to taking . . . risk and his commitment to . . . a culture for experimentation and invention” fueled Amazon’s growth.

Here’s how you can bring smart risk-taking to your business and life:

› Innovate from failure. Amazon’s Fire Phone is still considered one of its biggest failures, Anderson says. They couldn’t even give it away at $0.99. But the failure led that same group to create winners like the Amazon Echo Smart speaker and Alexa.

In Bezos’ 2013 letter to shareholders, he wrote failure is part of invention: “(We) believe in failing early and iterating until we get it right. When this process works, it means our failures are relatively small in size (most experiments can start small), and when we hit on something that is really working for customers, we doubledown on it.”

› Generate high-velocity decisions. Businesses don’t have the luxury of “taking their time” to make decisions, Anderson said. “Either a company becomes paralyzed into making no decisions or they rush into big decisions that expose them to unnecessary risk,” he said.

Bezos manages this by dividing big calls into two groups. Type 1 decisions hold big ripple effects. There’s no turning back. And Type 2 decisions are reversible and won’t be all that bad if you get them wrong.

“Bezos knows most failures are not fatal and most decisions are not irreversible,” Anderson says. “He encourages people to make decisions quickly by recognizing that most decisions are actually Type 2 decisions.”

› Embrace aggressiveness. If you want to be a breakthrough entrepreneur, forget small change and rethink everything. So says David McCourt, author of “Total Rethink: Why Entrepreneurs Should Act Like Revolutionaries.”

McCourt is also the founder and chairman of Granahan McCourt Capital.

“The incremental approach to business that yielded such amazing results is no longer a viable route to big numbers and massive growth,” McCourt said. “Technology is disrupting the status quo in every market.”

Arthur Yeung, co-author with Dave Ulrich of “Reinventing The Organization: How Companies Can Deliver Radically Greater Value In Fast-Changing Markets,” reminds that “rapid social, technological, and demographic changes in the world require organizations to adapt or decline.” And he says many well-known firms like Nokia, Kodak, Toys R Us and BlackBerry, simply didn’t change fast enough.

› Don’t waste time complaining. In business, entrepreneurs should “never complain about anything,” McCourt says.

“Instead, be proactive and find a solution yourself,” he said. “Be curious and optimistic. And these two qualities are essential for mining great ideas and for finding your way to interesting people.”

In addition, be brutally honest with yourself about what your strengths are, then look for ways to develop them, McCourt says.

› Practice what you preach. Amazon’s core value is dynamic invention and innovation. And that means everyone is looking to improve all the time, Anderson says.

“At Amazon, invention (and innovation) are ingrained into the daily culture from the first day on the job,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if you are a recent college graduate newly hired or a seasoned sales representative.”

Bezos also wrote in his 2013 shareholder letter: “Invention is in our DNA and technology is the fundamental tool we wield to evolve and improve every aspect of the experience we provide our customers.”

› Create strategic agility. Focus on the future, anticipate opportunity, change quickly, and always learn, Ulrich says.

His advice is to “seek market opportunity, not market share.”

McCourt quotes Walt Disney, who said “time and conditions change so rapidly that we must keep our aim constantly focused on the future.”

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