10 Wonderful Ideas from Think Like Amazon

Think Like Amazon by John Rossman is a wonderful book for anyone interested in 21st Century digital leadership. If we adopt some of these principles our business will become better and more successful. Here are the ones that resonated with me. There are 50 ideas. I am just going through some of them.
Mercenary or Mission driven: This is the reason Amazon is so successful. You must obsess about the customer and deliver world class value. The customer is always right. Getting first time customers is great but if you want repeat business then you need to obsess about them and out deliver the competition. Establishing a personal mission is also a wonderful way to get excited.
Move forward to get back to Day 1: This is a key leadership principle. This is all about having the startup hunger. Never lose the hunger you once had to be the best you can be. Even if you have achieved everything you wanted to keep the hunger going. This means commit to a path that you want to undertake.
Deliver Results: Results are where the rubber meets the road. Results are everything. Nobody cares about strategic plans unless it is proven with results. Focus on results all the time. The key is to have strategic checkpoints to see progress against the standards defined. Most leaders have inspired standards and they also can deliver big time results.
Ownership for everyone: All true leaders make sure their entire team feel like owners. The entire team takes complete ownership for every activity they undertake. This is also the way you can keep your employees engaged.
Blow up the org chart: The only way you can get respect from your team is if you are fair to everyone and don’t play politics. So be fair to your team and treat everyone well. Care personally but challenge directly as mentioned by Kim Scott in Radical Candor. As Jim Collins said get the right people in the bus in the right seats then drive the bus. One way to achieve this is to decentralize and ditch hierarchy. Allow people at any level to give their views to improve any area of the organization.
Experiment, fail, rinse, repeat: This is like the lean startup culture. This is all about experimenting your way to success. You can never get it perfect first time so release minimum viable products and pivot to make it better.
Pizza for all: There is a famous thing that has gone around in business circles that Jeff Bezos said you cannot have a team that is larger than feeding it with two pizzas. This is all about agile autonomous teams. So small bi-directional teams are the key to organizational success in the 21st century in my opinion.
What’s your flywheel:  This concept from Good to Great is what made Amazon successful. The main thesis is find out what the main core area of business is and focus only on that avoiding the doom loop. Minor changes can cause extraordinarily results over an extended period.
Lies, Damn Lies, and Metrics:  This is basically doing the right thing even if it is difficult to do. Of course, if we have measurable metrics for every area of business then we wouldn’t be able to lie. So, find out what metrics makes sense and make sure that is done to excellence. What gets measured gets done.
Customer experience matters: Customer experience is the key to success. Creating a wonderful User interface is the key to winning customers for life. The competition is too heavy and the only way to differentiate yourself is by building a world class UI.
There you have it few of the ideas presented in the book. There are so many more which you would find interesting. One of the more useful business books in recent times.
 Thanks for reading this post. The views expressed here are my own and do not represent my organization.

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