Scaling Lessons from the Jeff Bezos Letters with Steve Anderson
In a rapidly changing market, the need to experiment and test new ideas is more important than ever. Businesses that stick to the formula they’ve always done will fall behind, while those that take risks have a much higher chance of scaling beyond 8-figures.
Strategic risk expert and author Steve Anderson joins this new week’s episode to share his powerful insights into the mind behind one of the world’s biggest companies. He talks about how to leverage risk, prioritize customers, the value of choosing product experimentation, not innovation, and more.
Tune in to this insightful new episode ▶️ Scaling Lessons from the Jeff Bezos Letters with Steve Anderson.
Key points covered in this episode:
✔️There’s much to learn from disruptive companies that have come and gone. There is more we should duplicate from those that sustain the lead, like Amazon. Steve Anderson shares how his interest was piqued by reading every shareholder letter from 1997 to 2017 by Amazon champion Jeff Bezos. He created a book from that wealth of valuable information that became a Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and international bestseller.
✔️ Adapt Bezos’ Day 1 Mindset. The idea of day one is a thread that goes through every letter he wrote. “It’s not a day, but this mindset of going into your business every day and thinking, this is the first day we’re in business. The excitement, the challenge, the how do we serve our customers best? And that mindset really is infused throughout Amazon still to this day.”
✔️ “To be the Earth’s most customer-centric company.” Amazon created multiple billion-dollar businesses by being willing to think about the customer first. Steve shares how Bezos uses the phrase frequently and invents new solutions on the customer’s behalf. The Kindle, for example, completely changed the publishing business. “Did they innovate on the book, or did they invent a whole new way of consuming books? When Jeff talks about the Kindle, he says they had the audacious goal of replacing the book that’s been around for 500 years and being able to start reading a book in 60 seconds or less; that was the goal.”
✔️Encouraging successful failure. Bezos always emphasized the need to build a company culture that allows experimentation to take place without punishment. “Employees know that they can try out new ideas, test them, even the crazy ones that actually could work. Bezos says that when you do an experiment when you’re testing something by its very nature, you will fail. An experiment means you don’t know the outcome. And if you know the outcome, it’s not an experiment.“