If you want to learn a successful business strategy, then you might as well learn from the absolute best. Jeff Bezos went from running a small online bookstore out of a garage in Seattle to being the world’s wealthiest man.
In this article, I describe some of the strategies that Jeff Bezos used to propel Amazon into becoming one of the planet’s best-known companies.
Adaptability
An example of how Jeff Bezos used this strategy to succeed would be his takeover of the Washington Post in 2013. It seemed a strange marriage at the time. After all, Bezos was at the forefront of technology and the Washington Post was an ailing remnant of an era when print journalism was king.
But Bezos saw the potential in the Washington Post brand. He said that the paper had two choices, accept the new reality and wither away, or embrace it as an opportunity and find a new way forward.
In an ABC interview, Bezos said – “What we need to do is always lean into the future. When the world changes around you and when it changes against you — what used to be a tailwind is now a headwind — you must lean into that and figure out what to do, because complaining isn’t a strategy.”
Within three years of taking over, the Washington Post was a modern enterprise that had doubled its online traffic.
Stay “young at heart”
Jeff Bezos is on record as saying that his incredible success is down to him remaining young at heart and ensuring his businesses did the same.
When he was asked in an interview about the ailing Blackberry mobile phone company, he said that they hadn’t remained innovative, and the market had left them behind. In the interview, with ABC, he said –
“If your customer base is aging with you, then eventually you are going to become obsolete or irrelevant. You need to be constantly figuring out who are your new customers and what are you doing to stay forever young.”
Don’t be afraid to experiment!
Amazon’s success is built on the company’s willingness to experiment. The Kindle is one shining example of success through experimentation. This one experiment remains the biggest shake-up in the history of the publishing industry.
But not all experiments are successful, and Amazon has had its share of failures. Projects such as Amazon Auctions, Amazon Fire Phone, and Amazon Local, are all examples of failed experiments. These failures aren’t something that overly worries Bezos though, in an interview with Fortune magazine he was quoted as saying – “Experiments are key to innovation because they rarely turn out as you expect, and you learn so much.”
Stay a “day one” company
Jeff Bezos has always referred to startups as “day one” companies. Bright and eager and always looking to experiment and adapt. However, as they mature this urge to innovate is lost and they become “day two” companies.
He is quoted as saying – “Day two is stasis, followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why, for Amazon, it is always day one.”
Just to be sure he never forgets his own advice, he named the building he works in as day one.