What's inside Jeff's head and why its always Day 1 over at Amazon.

In yesterday’s article I wrote about the possible threat of Grocery Chains applying their own start-up / disruptor mindsets and hunting in Foodservice territory for profits. Prompting foodservice players to in turn adopt their own disruptor / Start-up mind to reimagine their own business in a new landscape in which I envision the lines between foodservice and retail becoming even more blurred.

Then last night with all that at the back of my mind I was scrolling through BBC Sounds and I found a documentary entitled ‘inside the mind of Jeff Bezos’ and it talked about his obsession with maintaining a start-up / disruptor philosophy all the way through the growth of Amazon, a philosophy he called ‘Day 1’.

In a letter to shareholders in 1996 he laid out his four-part ‘Day 1’ manifesto –

1.      Jeff explained that as a company grows, it becomes easy to rely on process rather than the result. In that case, the process becomes "the thing". When that happens, sometimes companies stop looking at outcomes and only consider whether they have followed the process correctly, not whether the desired outcome was achieved.

2.      Make decisions quickly - He wrote that start-ups have no problem making high-quality, high-velocity decisions, but large organizations struggle with doing the same. He stated: “The senior team at Amazon is determined to keep our decision-making velocity high. Speed matters in business— plus a high-velocity decision making environment is more fun too." To make that happen, the “Day 1″ process has a "disagree and commit” system for employees. The idea is that not everyone will agree on a decision, but it is still possible for people who disagree to work toward the same goal.

3.      Look outside the company - The most telling insight into the “Day 1” philosophy is: "The outside world can push you into Day 2 if you won't or can't embrace powerful trends quickly, if you fight them, you're probably fighting the future. Embrace them and you have a tailwind.” He presents that that big trends are not that hard to spot, but many times large companies have trouble embracing what is happening.

4.      Market research - Jeff wrote: “Another example: market research and customer surveys can become proxies for customers – something that’s especially dangerous when you’re inventing and designing products. ‘Fifty-five percent of beta testers report being satisfied with this feature. That is up from 47% in the first survey.’ That’s hard to interpret and could unintentionally mislead”. This premise is also some of the ideas that drove Steve Jobs at Apple.

So, Day 1 keeps you sharp, keeps you focused, keeps you agile and makes you the world’s richest man!

Jeff B maintains a Disruptor / Start-up mentality across a million employees, so how do us mere mortals reshape our own thinking? My first suggestion is simple, ask different questions. Typically, the questions we ask come from our typical patterns of thought. We focus on closing in on a problem so that we can find a solution. But we often fail to notice that in doing so we constrain the solution and make the solution also typical and if I dare say it, boring. Asking different questions helps slow down the process so we can ponder and think more. We begin to take in the full range of solutions available to us and consequently have a significantly wider set of possible options.

Finally, they interviewer then asked him to explain what Day 2 might look like? Jeff said “Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1 at Amazon.”