In this interview with Bezos, he said his seasoned manufacturing expert at Amazon told him that he needed to pace the release his ideas at rate the the organization could accept them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJcUQDtpkpY

He thought that was profound, even though obvious, and it made him change his approach to incorporate more discipline in prioritizing his ideas.

I think many Day 2 execs will stop there and say, “See! That’s what we do and we are doing it right!”

But, then he flipped the script (at the 2 minute mark) and built an organization that could handle more ideas. “We built a company that is very good at doing more than one thing at a time.”

Bingo.

Though, I wonder…Bezos makes it sound like all the ideas came from him. I’ve read elsewhere that Amazon had an open culture to ideas, so that they didn’t all have to come from leadership.

It’s an odd behavior. It’s standard practice in the rest of the business to benchmark the way they do things against what are considered leaders in those areas to get ideas on how they can improve.

But, innovation is a blind spot. Maybe a sore spot. To even suggest that there might be companies out there that are better at it is like poking the bear. Leaders take it personally. They see innovation as a reflection of their abilities and they don’t like their abilities questioned.

It’s like when running a household, you might not care enough about plumbing, so you hire a plumber to do it right.

But, if someone tries to tell you how to raise your kids, you take it personally.

Leaders of businesses seem to view innovation as that.

I believe the post I was looking for was the first one, but I feel I touched on this concept a long time before that, but I haven’t found that post yet.

There are no such thrones. Which one has more sales is not all that meaningful, at least not any newsworthy sense.

Search for Amazon Day 1 and Day 2 on this blog if you want to know more about what that means.

My assumption that those professions require objectivity is obviously flawed, because they never seem to pay a professional price for their biases.

Scientists and journalists come to mind.

I see it in less publicly visible professions, too. In my experience, market researchers have super biases. And these folks know bias. They carefully construct surveys to avoid these biases.

But, then they turn around and let their super biases influence their interpretations of their research data. Those biases lead to spurious conclusions that cause business leaders to bark up the wrong trees with business initiatives.

When those business initiatives fail, it doesn’t occur to the managers to push the market researchers on whether their conclusions are valid. Rather, they have them do more market research and produce more spurious conclusions heavily influenced by their bias.

Eventually, the managers get fired because all of their initiatives fail to move the needle. The market researchers keep their jobs and tell the next set of managers spurious conclusions based on their biased interpretations. Rinse and repeat.

Then see what happens.

Are they interested and want to learn more about it?

Or do they pretend that they didn’t even hear you?

For years, I went around telling folks about a big success I had in my career. Nobody asked any questions. I thought that was strange.

I noticed something subtle in a business. It hurt way too much to be wrong and there was often way too much riding on being right.

That is a sign of a culture that needs some work.

Why does it hurt so much to be wrong? Because the culture doesn’t know how to try things in low stakes ways to find out.

Rather, they make big bets. To convince bosses to make a big bet, you need a good sales pitch. A good sales pitch promises something great when you don’t know if that will happen.

When bosses make big bets, they put the company’s resources and their own egos on the line.

If it turns out that the great things promised don’t happen, it hurts. It wastes a lot of company resources and bruises a few egos and reputations.

When I find myself in situations where there is so much riding on being right, I think about what’s causing that and how can I change it?

Great companies will have tens of things in the next 1-2 years and hundreds or thousands of ideas cooking with a 3-5 year or longer launch horizon.

Mediocre companies will have a few things for 1-2 years and nothing on the drawing board after that.

Next, ask why they feel really good about those things?

Great companies will point to results from their proof of concepts, pilots, scalability and operational tests.

Mediocre companies will tell you they have a really good feeling that their new stuff will be game changers, but are short on actual, real world results to support it.

Finally, ask how of an impact do you think the ideas will have on the company’s performance?

Ask them to put some numbers to it. 1%, 3-5%, 5-10%, 10% or more growth in revenue or earnings?

Great companies will have a reasonable idea because they’ve been learning that through pilots and testing how well it will do.

Mediocre companies will tell you they hope it will be big, but we’ll just have to wait and see. But, they don’t really know because they do not piloted or tested in the real world, yet.

If I was advising a Board on hiring a leadership team, I’d advise them to look for candidates that had answers that sounded like the great companies.

I know it may not seem believable for business leaders to have the mediocre mindset above. But, I have experienced sample of about a couple dozen leadership teams at mature businesses that would give the mediocre answers and none that would give the great answers.

And, based on what I read about other businesses, gather from contacts I’ve made over the years at other places and who have come from other places, that’s pretty common.

That’s rarely true.

The cost of most discounts and promotions are subsidized by other customers who pay more.