Tag: Bezos

Anticipating Amazon’s Next Moves With Principles, Then Speculation

Experts in my field are advancing “What Should Brands Expect From Amazon in 2019?” theories. These theories are expectedly speculative, ranging from data-driven to gut-driven. If you’re not up to speed with the data or the 2018 in review, these are two particularly good articles:

When it comes to theories, let’s remember that nobody can predict the future. Que sera sera. Let’s also agree that anticipation is an advanced leadership skill worth developing. Bezos just emphatically reiterated this in this short 60 second video (shared on Linkedin).

Any theories about the future should aspire to use principles as described Stephen Covey’s famous book and Ray Dahlio’s recent book, Principles. These naturally occurring rules about how things work produce stronger conclusions. For example, one applicable principle is that Amazon’s eComm business is governed by rules of a search engine. 75% of customers start their visit with a search (according to Amazon). Search engines have been around longer than Amazon, and there are more of them to study.

Amazon is a huge company, comprised of modularized units which is brilliantly described in this post by Ben Thompson. Because Amazon’s isolated modules behave differently from one another but on the whole the organization moves ore uniformly, theories founded in macro level behaviors (top-down) are superior to micro-level behaviors (bottom-up). An example of this is that Amazon’s responsibility to shareholders will supersede the responsibility of its individual teams like Amazon Fresh. Amazon will follow profit and scale wherever it exists.

Lastly, assume that past decisions are an unreliable foundation for generating conclusions about the future. Amazon is a company that moves fast, tries new things and thwarts convention. It’s better to look at Amazon Leadership Principles to anticipate what they’ll do: https://www.amazon.jobs/en/principles. Not only is this a solid foundation for developing hypotheses, but it’s also fun.

Hopefully this helps guide your interpretation of the predictions, and informs your ability to make your own theories.

Posted on by krobbu

Another Day in Paradise

It’s 2019 and conditions are perfect for young professionals with a knack for digital. Especially for optimists like me. After all, eCommerce is growing, Amazon is growing, business is growing. I’ve been able to ride the wave by showing up consistently with a desire to learn and grow. End-consumers and my clients are always willing to shop something that might be better than what they currently have. As Bezos says, “customers are divinely discontent.”

While I’m optimistic about the future, I am troubled. It is so rare to find a digital marketer painting something other than a rosy fucking picture of the future in this environment where everyone is always shopping. Keeping up with voraciously increasing expectations is not easy. To do it, you must be outstanding in a lot of areas. Few people are outstanding, and even fewer companies are outstanding.

Pretending to be outstanding is far easier than actually being outstanding. It’s a lot easier to pretend to be outstanding but only be average. Odds are that this will probably be an average blog. But I hope that in the process of writing a lot of average blog articles I’ll deliver some outstanding ones along the way.

…you can’t have good ideas unless you’re willing to generate a lot of bad ones.

Seth Godin
Posted on by krobbu