Invent and wander

By Engr. Carlos V. Cornejo

This is a new approach to creativity from one of the most creative minds in our century: Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon.com that dominated the on-line selling in the U.S. as well as cloud computing and smart home devices.

The three fundamental mindsets that make Jeff Bezos a unique innovator from his book, “Invent and Wander:  The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos” are the following.

Maintain a “Day One” Mentality

Imagine you’ve just quit your job, and today you get to work on your new business full‐time. Your mind is full of ideas and you’re eager to solve your customer’s problems. If you treat each day like it’s the first day of your entrepreneurial journey, you’ll maintain your enthusiasm to solve problems and constantly iterate and innovate.

Bezos has brought a “day one” entrepreneurial spirit to work each day for the last 27 years at Amazon. Each morning, Bezos thinks back to the day he quit his job in New York and drove to Seattle to start Amazon and then brings the same energy and sense of urgency to work.

Most business leaders lose the “day one” mentality when they become profitable and pull ahead of their competition. But when Amazon became profitable and pulled ahead of their competition, Bezos didn’t lose the “day one” mentality because he remained obsessively

focused on the customer. Since customers are happy for about a day, each day is an opportunity to try things to improve the customer experience.

Adopt a Three‐Year Perspective

Bezos views business from a three‐year perspective. Adopting a three‐year perspective has allowed Bezos to take smart risks and maximize innovation opportunities.  Amazon Prime didn’t make much sense from a one‐year perspective. In fact, in the first 12 months, Amazon Prime lost millions of dollars. As Bezos says, “When you offer a free all‐you‐can‐eat buffet of two‐day shipping, the heavy eaters show up first. It’s scary. It’s like, ‘Oh my God, did I really say as many prawns as you can eat?'” But Bezos focused on the big picture and took a three‐year perspective. He saw that shipping costs were coming down, and the membership would eventually be a balance of high volume and low volume shippers and that his first few year losses would turn into profit.

Thinking out three years is long enough to filter out short‐term noise, but short enough to make predictions. When trying to predict what will matter in three years, ask yourself, “What’s not going to change over the next three years?” Bezos knew that Amazon customers would

always want lower prices, fast delivery, and a huge selection of products, so he focused on those things and ignored short‐term profit.

Fail Appropriately

Bezos says, “Failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment. Most large organizations embrace the idea of invention but are not willing to suffer the string of failed experiments necessary to get there.”

Amazon is a massive company that continuously innovates because Bezos insists Amazon’s failures increase as the company grows. The more money Amazon generates, the more unconventional products and services they must try. If Amazon’s not experiencing multi‐billion‐dollar failures, they’re doing something wrong according to Bezos.

Bezos surprised the world and became a dominant technology company when they are supposed to be an on-line store because he funded expensive technology product experiments

that failed. The most notable failure was the Fire phone. But the Fire Phone was a good failure because it allowed Amazonians to acquire the skills necessary to develop the Echo and the Alexa (best-selling smart home devices).

Bezos attitude towards innovation is expressed in his minimizing regrets mentality, “When I’m eighty, I want to have minimized the number of regrets that I have in my life, and most of our

regrets, are acts of omission, things we didn’t try, the path untraveled. Those are the things that haunt us.”