“Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.” Jeff Bezos letter to shareholders 2016
Takeaway
Companies that get complacent die.
Bigger companies are even more at risk because growth and scale make it harder to move quickly when you spot an opportunity.
To stay alive, big companies must strive to make decisions and act faster than startups.
Challenge
At Amazon, it is always Day 1— it’s a powerful refrain that has featured in every shareholder letter since the original.
Day 1 represents originality, enthusiasm, and an eagerness to delight customers.
Day 2, for Bezos, is a powerful concept that embodies everything he fears could happen to Amazon and that does happen to many large organizations.
It is the idea that all of the tools you used to grow, all of the processes you used to scale, and all of the work you did to get to where you are become the company’s undoing. People get stuck in their processes.
Day 2 is the failure to adapt. And the bigger an organization gets, the harder it needs to work to stave off complacency.
Solution
- measure yourself by your customers. They are always “beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied,” in Bezos’ words, and if you focus on always trying to make them happier, it’s hard to go wrong.
- Bezos warns against allowing process to turn into proxy. When you abstract a task into a process, it’s easy to start managing to the process rather than to the outcome you want. Soon, you have people getting the wrong end result and justifying their actions by saying they “followed the process.”
Bezos suggests that you always keep one eye on the outcome, not whether someone has ticked off every box on a list of steps.
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. Links 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
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