1. Be Stubborn and Flexible
According to Bezos, good entrepreneurs must be stubborn and flexible. When referring to Amazon, Bezos says, “We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details.”
Sticking to the vision is the first part, and being flexible about the tactics is the second part. Bezos adds, “If you’re not stubborn, you’ll give up on experiments too soon. And if you’re not flexible, you’ll pound your head against the wall and you won’t see a different solution to a problem you’re trying to solve.”
2. Base your strategy on things that won’t change
Selling lipstick, tractor seats, e-book readers and data storage is all part of one big plan with three big constants: offer wider selection, lower prices and fast, reliable delivery
3. Determine what your customers need, and work backwards
Specs for Amazon’s big new projects such as its Kindle tablets and e-book readers have been defined by customers’ desires rather than engineers’ tastes. If customers don’t want something it’s gone, even if that means breaking apart a once powerful department.
4.Make employees think like owners
When Bezos wrote this in the first Amazon annual letter, Bezos had 614 employees, up from 158 a year earlier. It has 230,000 now.
One key component of the approach has been to use stock options in hiring. “We will continue to focus on hiring and retaining versatile and talented employees, and continue to weight their compensation to stock options rather than cash,” Bezos wrote in the 1997 letter. “We know our success will be largely affected by our ability to attract and retain a motivated employee base, each of whom must think like, and therefore must actually be, an owner.”
5. “We are willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time”
Many of Amazon’s expansions look like money-losing distractions at first. That sometimes sends the company’s stock price skidding and evokes analysts’ scorn. Bezos shrugs. If the new initiatives make strategic sense to him, a five-to-seven-year financial payoff is okay.
6. Build a culture that’s right for your company
Amazon’s own culture is famously breakneck-paced, and notoriously cost-conscious, as befits a company that has run only a small profit, or a loss, under generally accepted accounting principles for most of its life as a public company.
“We never claim that our approach is the right one — just that it’s ours,” Bezos wrote in the 2015 letter. “Over the last two decades, we’ve collected a large group of like-minded people. Folks who find our approach energising and meaningful.”
SOURCE: KNOWSTARTUP
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