adsense

Wednesday 25 April 2018

Jeff Bezos Reveals 3 Strategies for Amazon's Success

 
- Entrepreneur Staff
Associate Editor
Jeff Bezos Reveals 3 Strategies for Amazon's Success

A Note From The Editor

Think your company has what it takes to make our Top Company Cultures list? Apply now.

Apply now »
“It remains Day 1.” That’s how Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, signed off in his 2018 letter to shareholders. He’s been propagating the “day 1” mantra for decades, and it’s meant as a reminder that Amazon should never stop acting like a startup -- even though the company now boasts more than 560,000 employees and more than 100 million members of Amazon Prime, the company’s paid service for free shipping on select items.
Here are some of the most useful nuggets of wisdom Bezos shared in his letter and during a recent onstage interview.
1. Standards are contagious.
Bezos says he believes high standards are teachable rather than intrinsic. 
“Bring a new person onto a high standards team, and they’ll quickly adapt,” he writes. “The opposite is also true.”
If a company or team operates with low standards, a new employee will often -- perhaps even unwittingly -- adjust their work ethic accordingly. He also says
 that high standards in one area don’t automatically translate to high 
standards in 
another -- it’s important for people to discover their “blind spots.” 
Try making a list
 of your duties, then ask trusted colleagues to tell you which responsibilities 
are your 
greatest strengths. If certain things from the list don’t come up during the conversation, 
it might be useful to think about how you can up your personal standards 
in those areas.

2. Set clear, realistic expectations.
If you’re looking to raise your standards in a particular area, the first
 course of action is to outline what quality looks like in that area. 
The second is to set realistic expectations for yourself -- or for your 
team -- regarding how much 
work it will take to achieve that level of quality.
Exhibit A: You won’t find a single PowerPoint presentation at an
 Amazon company meeting. Instead, teams write six-page narrative 
memos to prepare everyone else for the meeting. Bezos says the
 quality of the memos vary greatly because writers don’t always 
recognize the scope of the work required to reach high standards.
“They mistakenly believe a
 high-standards, six-page memo 
can be written in one or two days 
or even a few hours, when really 
it might take a week or more!” Bezos writes. 
3. Stay involved with the people
 you’re serving.
Whether you’re selling a product 
or service, it’s a good idea to 
make sure you never lose touch 
when it comes to the people
 you’re serving -- no matter how high up the ladder you climb.
Bezos says he still reads emails from
his public inbox (jeff@amazon.com
as a way to keep his finger on the pulse of what’s happening with Amazon 
. He says he believes focusing on what 
customers are saying is much more important for success than focusing on 
what competitors
 are doing, and he often compares customer feedback to company data to see 
where they misalign.
“When the anecdotes and the data disagree," Bezos said at a recent
leadership forumat the George W. Bush Presidential Center, "
the anecdotes are usually right.”

No comments: