{"id":32898,"date":"2019-01-16T11:26:31","date_gmt":"2019-01-16T10:26:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.limbicnutrition.com\/blog\/?p=32898"},"modified":"2020-09-26T21:55:24","modified_gmt":"2020-09-26T19:55:24","slug":"jeff-bezos-on-day-1-vs-day-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.limbicnutrition.com\/blog\/jeff-bezos-on-day-1-vs-day-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Jeff Bezos on Day 1 vs Day 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

I love this letter from Jeff Bezos and wanted to quote it at length. The full letter is at Recode<\/a>.<\/p>\n

 2016 Letter to Shareholders<\/em><\/p>\n

April 12, 2017<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cJeff, what does Day 2 look like?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

That\u2019s a question I just got at our most recent all-hands meeting. I\u2019ve been reminding people that it\u2019s Day 1 for a couple of decades. I work in an Amazon building named Day 1, and when I moved buildings, I took the name with me. I spend time thinking about this topic.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cDay 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

To be sure, this kind of decline would happen in extreme slow motion. An established company might harvest Day 2 for decades, but the final result would still come.<\/em><\/p>\n

I\u2019m interested in the question, how do you fend off Day 2? What are the techniques and tactics? How do you keep the vitality of Day 1, even inside a large organization?<\/em><\/p>\n

Such a question can\u2019t have a simple answer. There will be many elements, multiple paths, and many traps. I don\u2019t know the whole answer, but I may know bits of it. Here\u2019s a starter pack of essentials for Day 1 defense: customer obsession, a skeptical view of proxies, the eager adoption of external trends, and high-velocity decision making.<\/em><\/p>\n

True Customer Obsession<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

There are many ways to center a business. You can be competitor focused, you can be product focused, you can be technology focused, you can be business model focused, and there are more. But in my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of Day 1 vitality.<\/em><\/p>\n

Why? There are many advantages to a customer-centric approach, but here\u2019s the big one: customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great. Even when they don\u2019t yet know it, customers want something better, and your desire to delight customers will drive you to invent on their behalf. No customer ever asked Amazon to create the Prime membership program, but it sure turns out they wanted it, and I could give you many such examples.<\/em><\/p>\n

Staying in Day 1 requires you to experiment patiently, accept failures, plant seeds, protect saplings, and double down when you see customer delight. A customer-obsessed culture best creates the conditions where all of that can happen.<\/em><\/p>\n

Resist Proxies<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

As companies get larger and more complex, there\u2019s a tendency to manage to proxies. This comes in many shapes and sizes, and it\u2019s dangerous, subtle, and very Day 2.<\/em><\/p>\n

A common example is process as proxy. Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you\u2019re not watchful, the process can become the thing. This can happen very easily in large organizations. The process becomes the proxy for the result you want. You stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you\u2019re doing the process right. Gulp. It\u2019s not that rare to hear a junior leader defend a bad outcome with something like, \u201cWell, we followed the process.\u201d A more experienced leader will use it as an opportunity to investigate and improve the process. The process is not the thing. It\u2019s always worth asking, do we own the process or does the process own us? In a Day 2 company, you might find it\u2019s the second.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2026Good inventors and designers deeply understand their customer. They spend tremendous energy developing that intuition. They study and understand many anecdotes rather than only the averages you\u2019ll find on surveys. They live with the design.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2026Embrace External Trends<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The outside world can push you into Day 2 if you won\u2019t or can\u2019t embrace powerful trends quickly. If you fight them, you\u2019re probably fighting the future. Embrace them and you have a tailwind.<\/em><\/p>\n

These big trends are not that hard to spot (they get talked and written about a lot), but they can be strangely hard for large organizations to embrace. We\u2019re in the middle of an obvious one right now: machine learning and artificial intelligence.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2026High-Velocity Decision Making<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Day 2 companies make high-quality decisions, but they make high-quality decisions slowly. To keep the energy and dynamism of Day 1, you have to somehow make high-quality, high-velocity decisions. Easy for start-ups and very challenging for large organizations. The senior team at Amazon is determined to keep our decision-making velocity high. Speed matters in business \u2013 plus a high-velocity decision making environment is more fun too. We don\u2019t know all the answers, but here are some thoughts.<\/em><\/p>\n

First, never use a one-size-fits-all decision-making process. Many decisions are reversible, two-way doors. Those decisions can use a light-weight process. For those, so what if you\u2019re wrong?<\/em><\/p>\n

Second, most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you\u2019re probably being slow. Plus, either way, you need to be good at quickly recognizing and correcting bad decisions. If you\u2019re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure.<\/em><\/p>\n

Third, use the phrase \u201cdisagree and commit.\u201d This phrase will save a lot of time. If you have conviction on a particular direction even though there\u2019s no consensus, it\u2019s helpful to say, \u201cLook, I know we disagree on this but will you gamble with me on it? Disagree and commit?\u201d By the time you\u2019re at this point, no one can know the answer for sure, and you\u2019ll probably get a quick yes.<\/em><\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t one way. If you\u2019re the boss, you should do this too. I disagree and commit all the time.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2026Fourth, recognize true misalignment issues early and escalate them immediately. Sometimes teams have different objectives and fundamentally different views. They are not aligned. No amount of discussion, no number of meetings will resolve that deep misalignment. Without escalation, the default dispute resolution mechanism for this scenario is exhaustion. Whoever has more stamina carries the decision.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019ve worn me down\u201d is an awful decision-making process. It\u2019s slow and de-energizing. Go for quick escalation instead \u2013 it\u2019s better.<\/em><\/p>\n

So, have you settled only for decision quality, or are you mindful of decision velocity too? Are the world\u2019s trends tailwinds for you? Are you falling prey to proxies, or do they serve you? And most important of all, are you delighting customers? We can have the scope and capabilities of a large company and the spirit and heart of a small one. But we have to choose it.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I love this letter from Jeff Bezos and wanted to quote it at length. The full letter is at Recode.  2016 Letter to Shareholders April 12, 2017 \u201cJeff, what does Day 2 look like?\u201d That\u2019s a question I just got at our most recent all-hands meeting. I\u2019ve been reminding people that it\u2019s Day 1 for … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[130,32,135,139,141,3,148,149,295,42,19],"tags":[300,296],"class_list":["post-32898","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business-psychology","category-business","category-communications","category-critical-thinking","category-decision-making","category-engineering","category-leadership","category-management","category-principles","category-psychology","category-sociology-social-sciences","tag-processed","tag-published"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/prY0k-8yC","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":32808,"url":"https:\/\/www.limbicnutrition.com\/blog\/taylor-pearson-on-procrastination\/","url_meta":{"origin":32898,"position":0},"title":"Taylor Pearson on Procrastination","author":"Limbic","date":"August 11, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Taylor Pearson really\u00a0has become a fine essayist. 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It is a great discussion and well worth the listen, especially about how in many ways Apple and Amazon resemble their\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Business Psychology"","block_context":{"text":"Business Psychology","link":"https:\/\/www.limbicnutrition.com\/blog\/category\/business\/business-psychology\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":15930,"url":"https:\/\/www.limbicnutrition.com\/blog\/c-s-lewis-on-masturbation\/","url_meta":{"origin":32898,"position":3},"title":"C.S. 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