“We have the good fortune of a large, inventive team and a patient, pioneering, customer-obsessed culture — great innovations, large and small, are happening everyday on behalf of customers, and at all levels throughout the company. This decentralized distribution of invention throughout the company — not limited to the company’s senior leaders — is the only way to get robust, high-throughput innovation.”
Takeaway
Innovation comes from distributed decision-making. Top-down teams are effective at optimizing existing processes and enforcing the completion of work, but only decentralized, bottom-up teams can consistently generate new ideas.
Challenge
In most big companies, command-and-control is the way that work gets done. Ensuring that important decisions only get made by those at the top maintains a certain level of quality and keeps everything stable.
Building a business that is continuously throwing off new ideas and innovating, on the other hand, requires that your people have leeway. You need autonomous teams that can exercise their own judgment rather than having to submit every idea they have to a committee. It requires your company to recalibrate how it hires, how it takes risks, and the opportunity it offers to even junior employees.
Solution
Its culture of creativity is a large part of why Amazon has been so successful on so many fronts, and why it has risen to the second-largest company by market cap in the world.
That creativity is often actually a function of the proactive way Amazon thinks about customers. Rather than wait for their customers to tell them about something they want, Bezos says, Amazon would always rather create the thing they don’t even know they want yet.
To encourage this kind of innovation inside your company, however, you need to have distributed decision-making and autonomy for more than just your senior staff.
At Amazon, employees who have an idea are encouraged to pursue it, even if they have to upset traditional corporate rules to do it.
Great innovations come from a “large, inventive team” with a “patient, pioneering, customer-obsessed culture” rather than from a small braintrust.
If you’re a junior employee at Amazon and you have an idea for some new way to delight customers, Bezos writes, you’re just as encouraged to give it a try as a senior leader. Experiments can start small. The downside of a small failed experiment is low, but the potential upside can be very high.
Jeff Bezos letters to shareholders
Jeff Bezos has been writing a letter to shareholders since 1997 and looking at all if them gives an insight to the organisation and a masterclass in leadership. This is a series of short blogs that gives you a snap shot / key takes outs of each letter, along with links to them all.
link to all letters to shareholders
- 1997: Bring on shareholders who align with your values
Jeff Bezos Letter to Shareholders 1997
- 1998: Stay terrified of your customers
Jeff Bezos Letter to Shareholders 1998
- 1999: Build on top of infrastructure that’s improving on its own
Jeff Bezos Letter to Shareholders 1999
- 2000: In lean times, build a cash moat
Jeff Bezos Letter to Shareholders 2000
- 2001: Measure your company by your free cash flow
Jeff Bezos Letter to Shareholders 2001
- 2002: Build your business on your fixed costs
Jeff Bezos Letter to Shareholders 2002
- 2003: Long-term thinking is rooted in ownership
Jeff Bezos Letter to Shareholders 2003
- 2004: Free cash flow enables more innovation
Jeff Bezos Letter to Shareholders 2004
- 2005: Don’t get fixated on short-term numbers
Jeff Bezos Letter to Shareholders 2005
- 2006: Nurture your seedlings to build big lines of business
Jeff Bezos Letter to Shareholders 2006
- 2007: Missionaries build better products
Jeff Bezos Letter to Shareholders 2007
- 2008: Work backwards from customer needs to know what to build next
Jeff Bezos Letter to Shareholders 2008
- 2009: Focus on inputs — the outputs will take care of themselves
Jeff Bezos Letter to Shareholders 2009
- 2010: R&D should pervade every department
Jeff Bezos Letter to Shareholders 2010
- 2011: Self-service platforms unlock innovation
Jeff Bezos Letter to Shareholders 2011
- 2012: Surprise and delight your customers to build long-term trust
Jeff Bezos Letter to Shareholders 2012
- 2013: Decentralize decision-making to generate innovation
Jeff Bezos Letter to Shareholders 2013
- 2014: Bet on ideas that have unlimited upside
Jeff Bezos Letter to Shareholders 2014
- 2015: Don’t deliberate over easily reversible decisions
Jeff Bezos Letter to Shareholders 2015
- 2016: Move fast and focus on outcomes
Jeff Bezos Letter to Shareholders 2016
- 2017: Build high standards into company culture
Jeff Bezos Letter to Shareholders 2017
- 2018: Wandering is an essential counterbalance to efficiency
Jeff Bezos Letter to Shareholders 2018
Data Pulses storytelling 