Hot Strategy Is About Taking Many Small Risks
These days, strategy is about placing a series of small bets
“When you look at something like, go back in time when we started working on Kindle almost seven years ago. … There you just have to place a bet. If you place enough of those bets, and if you place them early enough, none of them are ever betting the company. By the time you are betting the company, it means you haven’t invented for too long.
If you invent frequently and are willing to fail, then you never get to that point where you really need to bet the whole company.
JEFF BEZOS, quoted in Business Insider (7 June 2011
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I’ve always liked Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com, and regular readers of this column will know he features here often.
He has revolutionised web commerce in his time, and come up with one dramatic innovation after another.
His company was dismissed by analysts as “Amazon.toast” soon after its inception in the 1990s.
Well, it has been raising toast after toast celebrating its successes ever since. Bezos is at the heart of this success. he comes across as plain-talking and likable, with an infectious laugh.
I often show video clips of him talking at my seminars and teaching events, simply so that other CEOs can see authenticity in action.
Systematic innovation
Bezos was in full flow recently, in one of his trademark unscripted spiels. he referred to Amazon’s very successful Kindle e-reader product – see excerpt shown.
The thing strategists should note is this: Kindle was not a “bet-the-company” product. even though it has been transformational for Amazon and the book trade (e-books are gradually taking over from traditional printed books), it was not conceived as such.
Bezos advises that systematic innovation is about inventing frequently and continuously, and being willing to fail. Kindle was one of many, many bets the company placed on its future some years ago. Some succeeded, others failed. Kindle ended up in the “success” group, and is now lauded as a breakthrough innovation.
The point is this: the modern strategic landscape is so unpredictable, so prone to disruption, that everyone is guessing at the future. No one can work it out precisely.
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