I get tired of listening to “experts” explain how leaders need to be bolder. Usually what they are advocating for is more disruptive innovation, less business as usual. But this completely ignores the impact of context and ends up patronizing behavior that may actually be well-grounded. It depends on which zone you are operating out of.
In the Performance Zone, the goal is to deliver on the quarterly plan. It is not the time or place for disruptive innovation. Leadership means getting your team to the finish line despite whatever roadblocks may crop up. Grit and resourcefulness, combined with attention to tactics, is what is wanted here.
In the Productivity Zone, the goal is to be there for the long haul. Again, disruptive innovation is not on the docket. Analysis and optimization are the keys here, and leaders must be willing to step back, take a systems view of things, and invest in efforts that will enable the Performance Zone to perform better in the future.
By contrast, the Incubation Zone is all about disruptive innovation, and most pundits champion a leadership style that is a perfect fit for this zone. So, if you are in this zone, by all means embrace hypothesis testing, agility, fast failure and the like. Just remember that what works here does not work well in any of the other three zones.
Finally, the Transformation Zone is where the pundits ought to be focusing because transformation is a bear, and no one can ever really tame it. Business lore celebrates the amazing disrupters here — Jobs, Musk, Bezos, etc. — as well we should. But in so doing we should not ignore the amazing disruptees, the leaders who redirected their enterprises to bring them kicking and screaming into a new age — Gerstner, Nadella, Iger, and company. For my money, their leadership style is the single most important one for any aspiring CEO to master.
That’s what I think. What do you think?
Image Credit: Pexels
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The realm of space exploration, once dominated exclusively by government bodies like NASA and Roscosmos, is witnessing a paradigm shift. Private companies and startups are breaking through the frontiers, making commercial space travel increasingly accessible. This transformative phase offers not just the thrill of adventure, but the promise of lasting benefits for humanity. Here, we’ll explore the visionary steps commercial enterprises are taking as they race towards the ultimate frontier, alongside examining key case studies that exemplify the strides made in space innovation.
The Dawn of Commercial Space Travel
Commercial space travel represents a seismic activity in the landscape of exploration. The unimaginable is becoming achievable as companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin demonstrate the viability and potential of private missions. These endeavors extend beyond mere tourism; they encompass satellite deployment, space station servicing, and even prospective Mars colonization.
Traditional spacefaring nations still operator as significant players, but private companies infuse new energy and financial resources into the sector. This symbiotic relationship vastly accelerates advancements that could otherwise take decades. The collaborative effort between government agencies and private enterprises presents a scenario where the sky is not the limit—space is.
Case Study 1: SpaceX
Redefining Space Accessibility
SpaceX, under Elon Musk’s visionary leadership, has transformed the dream of space travel into a near-commercial reality. The company’s Falcon and Starship reusable rockets are now legendary. By significantly reducing the cost of sending payloads to space, SpaceX has essentially opened the doors to nearly any organization willing to venture beyond our atmosphere.
One of their landmark achievements is the Crew Dragon mission, which successfully transported astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) and brought them back safely. This first-ever crewed mission by a private company signals a new era where commercial outfits play an instrumental role in human spaceflight.
Moreover, SpaceX’s ambitious Starlink project aims to provide global high-speed internet coverage through a constellation of low-Earth orbit satellites, potentially connecting underserved regions and thereby sparking socioeconomic transformations.
Case Study 2: Blue Origin
Building the Infrastructure for Space Habitats
Founded by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Blue Origin serves a vision that extends beyond mere travel—to actual habitation and sustainable life in space. Their reusable suborbital rocket, New Shepard, successfully takes humans and research payloads on brief spaceflights, aiming to democratize access to space.
More impressively, Blue Origin is developing New Glenn, a heavy-lift orbital launch vehicle that could support missions ranging from lunar landings to deep-space exploration. The company’s push towards creating a robust space infrastructure also includes concepts for orbital habitats, such as the O’Neill cylinders, which could house human populations and industries in the vacuum of space.
By focusing on reusability and sustainability, Blue Origin is laying the groundwork for turning science fiction into science reality. Their commitment isn’t solely to space tourism but to establishing the foundational structure necessary for long-term human presence beyond Earth.
Beyond Earth: The Ultimate Frontier
As we look towards the next decade, the focus expands from visiting space to living and working there. Visions of lunar bases and Mars colonies are no longer fanciful imaginations but tangible targets. The fusion of government support and private ingenuity stands as a pivotal catalyst for achieving these milestones.
Moreover, the quest for resources in space, like mining asteroids for rare minerals, could redefine entire industries on Earth, fostering a new gold rush—this time, in the cosmos. Recently, nations have started drafting regulations and policies ensuring that space resources are managed sustainably and ethically.
Conclusion
The future of space exploration promises to be a confluence of unprecedented challenges and exhilarating opportunities. With commercial players stepping onto the field, the pace of innovation accelerates, pushing humanity closer to new horizons. Companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin exemplify the possibilities when vision and technology converge. As this new epoch unfolds, one truth becomes increasingly clear: the sky is not the limit; it’s just the beginning.
SPECIAL BONUS: The very best change planners use a visual, collaborative approach to create their deliverables. A methodology and tools like those in Change Planning Toolkit™ can empower anyone to become great change planners themselves.
Image credit: Pixabay
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It is not too often that the leader of a Fortune 500 gives you an insight into how their company achieves competitive advantage in the marketplace in a letter to shareholders, instead of launching into a page or two of flowery prose written by the Public Relations (PR) team that works for them. The former is what Jeff Bezos tends to deliver year after year. This year’s letter is particularly interesting.
The two key insights in this year’s letter were that:
#1 – Amazon strives to view itself as a startup champion riding to the rescue of customers
#2 – Amazon chooses to be customer-obsessed, not customer-focused or customer-centric, but customer-obsessed
Both of these are crucial to sustaining innovation, and are supported by Jeff’s other main pieces of advice:
– Resisting proxies
– Embracing external trends
– Practicing high velocity decision making
But, I won’t steal Jeff’s thunder. I encourage you to read Jeff’s letter to shareholders in its entirety, check out the bonus video interview at the end, and add comments to share what you find particularly interesting in the letter.
Keep innovating!
—————————————————————- 2016 Letter to Amazon Shareholders
April 12, 2017
“Jeff, what does Day 2 look like?”
That’s a question I just got at our most recent all-hands meeting. I’ve been reminding people that it’s Day 1 for a couple of decades. I work in an Amazon building named Day 1, and when I moved buildings, I took the name with me. I spend time thinking about this topic.
“Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.”
To be sure, this kind of decline would happen in extreme slow motion. An established company might harvest Day 2 for decades, but the final result would still come.
I’m interested in the question, how do you fend off Day 2? What are the techniques and tactics? How do you keep the vitality of Day 1, even inside a large organization?
Such a question can’t have a simple answer. There will be many elements, multiple paths, and many traps. I don’t know the whole answer, but I may know bits of it. Here’s a starter pack of essentials for Day 1 defense: customer obsession, a skeptical view of proxies, the eager adoption of external trends, and high-velocity decision making.
True Customer Obsession
There are many ways to center a business. You can be competitor focused, you can be product focused, you can be technology focused, you can be business model focused, and there are more. But in my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of Day 1 vitality.
Why? There are many advantages to a customer-centric approach, but here’s the big one: customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great. Even when they don’t yet know it, customers want something better, and your desire to delight customers will drive you to invent on their behalf. No customer ever asked Amazon to create the Prime membership program, but it sure turns out they wanted it, and I could give you many such examples.
Staying in Day 1 requires you to experiment patiently, accept failures, plant seeds, protect saplings, and double down when you see customer delight. A customer-obsessed culture best creates the conditions where all of that can happen.
Resist Proxies
As companies get larger and more complex, there’s a tendency to manage to proxies. This comes in many shapes and sizes, and it’s dangerous, subtle, and very Day 2.
A common example is process as proxy. Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing. This can happen very easily in large organizations. The process becomes the proxy for the result you want. You stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you’re doing the process right. Gulp. It’s not that rare to hear a junior leader defend a bad outcome with something like, “Well, we followed the process.” A more experienced leader will use it as an opportunity to investigate and improve the process. The process is not the thing. It’s always worth asking, do we own the process or does the process own us? In a Day 2 company, you might find it’s the second.
Another example: market research and customer surveys can become proxies for customers – something that’s especially dangerous when you’re inventing and designing products. “Fifty-five percent of beta testers report being satisfied with this feature. That is up from 47% in the first survey.” That’s hard to interpret and could unintentionally mislead.
Good inventors and designers deeply understand their customer. They spend tremendous energy developing that intuition. They study and understand many anecdotes rather than only the averages you’ll find on surveys. They live with the design.
I’m not against beta testing or surveys. But you, the product or service owner, must understand the customer, have a vision, and love the offering. Then, beta testing and research can help you find your blind spots. A remarkable customer experience starts with heart, intuition, curiosity, play, guts, taste. You won’t find any of it in a survey.
Embrace External Trends
The outside world can push you into Day 2 if you won’t or can’t embrace powerful trends quickly. If you fight them, you’re probably fighting the future. Embrace them and you have a tailwind.
These big trends are not that hard to spot (they get talked and written about a lot), but they can be strangely hard for large organizations to embrace. We’re in the middle of an obvious one right now: machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Over the past decades computers have broadly automated tasks that programmers could describe with clear rules and algorithms. Modern machine learning techniques now allow us to do the same for tasks where describing the precise rules is much harder.
At Amazon, we’ve been engaged in the practical application of machine learning for many years now. Some of this work is highly visible: our autonomous Prime Air delivery drones; the Amazon Go convenience store that uses machine vision to eliminate checkout lines; and Alexa, our cloud-based AI assistant. (We still struggle to keep Echo in stock, despite our best efforts. A high-quality problem, but a problem. We’re working on it.)
But much of what we do with machine learning happens beneath the surface. Machine learning drives our algorithms for demand forecasting, product search ranking, product and deals recommendations, merchandising placements, fraud detection, translations, and much more. Though less visible, much of the impact of machine learning will be of this type – quietly but meaningfully improving core operations.
Inside AWS, we’re excited to lower the costs and barriers to machine learning and AI so organizations of all sizes can take advantage of these advanced techniques.
Using our pre-packaged versions of popular deep learning frameworks running on P2 compute instances (optimized for this workload), customers are already developing powerful systems ranging everywhere from early disease detection to increasing crop yields. And we’ve also made Amazon’s higher level services available in a convenient form. Amazon Lex (what’s inside Alexa), Amazon Polly, and Amazon Rekognition remove the heavy lifting from natural language understanding, speech generation, and image analysis. They can be accessed with simple API calls – no machine learning expertise required. Watch this space. Much more to come.
High-Velocity Decision Making
Day 2 companies make high-quality decisions, but they make high-quality decisions slowly. To keep the energy and dynamism of Day 1, you have to somehow make high-quality, high-velocity decisions. Easy for start-ups and very challenging for large organizations. The senior team at Amazon is determined to keep our decision-making velocity high. Speed matters in business – plus a high-velocity decision making environment is more fun too. We don’t know all the answers, but here are some thoughts.
First, never use a one-size-fits-all decision-making process. Many decisions are reversible, two-way doors. Those decisions can use a light-weight process. For those, so what if you’re wrong? I wrote about this in more detail in last year’s letter.
Second, most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow. Plus, either way, you need to be good at quickly recognizing and correcting bad decisions. If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure.
Third, use the phrase “disagree and commit.” This phrase will save a lot of time. If you have conviction on a particular direction even though there’s no consensus, it’s helpful to say, “Look, I know we disagree on this but will you gamble with me on it? Disagree and commit?” By the time you’re at this point, no one can know the answer for sure, and you’ll probably get a quick yes.
This isn’t one way. If you’re the boss, you should do this too. I disagree and commit all the time. We recently greenlit a particular Amazon Studios original. I told the team my view: debatable whether it would be interesting enough, complicated to produce, the business terms aren’t that good, and we have lots of other opportunities. They had a completely different opinion and wanted to go ahead. I wrote back right away with “I disagree and commit and hope it becomes the most watched thing we’ve ever made.” Consider how much slower this decision cycle would have been if the team had actually had to convince me rather than simply get my commitment.
Note what this example is not: it’s not me thinking to myself “well, these guys are wrong and missing the point, but this isn’t worth me chasing.” It’s a genuine disagreement of opinion, a candid expression of my view, a chance for the team to weigh my view, and a quick, sincere commitment to go their way. And given that this team has already brought home 11 Emmys, 6 Golden Globes, and 3 Oscars, I’m just glad they let me in the room at all!
Fourth, recognize true misalignment issues early and escalate them immediately. Sometimes teams have different objectives and fundamentally different views. They are not aligned. No amount of discussion, no number of meetings will resolve that deep misalignment. Without escalation, the default dispute resolution mechanism for this scenario is exhaustion. Whoever has more stamina carries the decision.
I’ve seen many examples of sincere misalignment at Amazon over the years. When we decided to invite third party sellers to compete directly against us on our own product detail pages – that was a big one. Many smart, well-intentioned Amazonians were simply not at all aligned with the direction. The big decision set up hundreds of smaller decisions, many of which needed to be escalated to the senior team.
“You’ve worn me down” is an awful decision-making process. It’s slow and de-energizing. Go for quick escalation instead – it’s better.
So, have you settled only for decision quality, or are you mindful of decision velocity too? Are the world’s trends tailwinds for you? Are you falling prey to proxies, or do they serve you? And most important of all, are you delighting customers? We can have the scope and capabilities of a large company and the spirit and heart of a small one. But we have to choose it.
A huge thank you to each and every customer for allowing us to serve you, to our shareowners for your support, and to Amazonians everywhere for your hard work, your ingenuity, and your passion.
As always, I attach a copy of our original 1997 letter. It remains Day 1.
Sincerely,
Jeff
———————————
If you’d like dive deeper into the mind of Jeff Bezos, then check out this interview with him conducted by Walt Mossberg of The Verge last year at Code Conference 2016:
And here is another fascinating peek inside the mind of Jeff Bezos from 1997:
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What may have started with a question from @evanjacobs at Amazon.com’s shareholder meeting one year ago, ended with interesting commentary from Amazon’s CEO – Jeff Bezos – on their philosophy around invention, innovation, and risk taking.
The key insights I extracted from Bezos’ response to the question about their lack of big visible market failures and whether Amazon is continuing to take bold enough risks are as follows:
1. Invention versus Innovation
It was very interesting that Jeff Bezos only used the word innovation once in his response, choosing instead to focus on talking about invention. I think that there is an interesting distinction and an important point there. Innovation is not something you do it’s something you’ve done. It’s backward looking to some extent because innovation requires widespread adoption. Innovation definitely can be a goal, while invention can be seen as a component of the pursuit, the attempt to innovate. One important point to remember is that inventions typically cross the bridge from invention to innovation because the solution is not only useful but it is valuable, and the customer makes this determination not you. Another important point – not made by Bezos – is that there are many other factors that go along with invention to create innovation that must be managed, including: psychology, communications, education, trends, politics, legal, and more. This leads me to the second insight extracted from Bezos’ response.
2. “We are willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time”
You may have a great vision for what is possible, but customers may not be ready. There may be incremental improvements or complementary products that must come onto the marketplace before your product can succeed. The political or legal climate may not be right for the transformation your product or service may enable (think Segway). You must seek to understand where you will be misunderstood so you can make plans to address the misunderstandings. If you assume people will ‘just get it once they see it’ you will fail. Also, the more disruptive or radical an innovation the more your communications must shift from explanation to education. But frankly, you can invent amazing things but just be too early. Corning’s Gorilla Glass was invented 50 years ago, and only now is becoming successful. Kindle wasn’t an overnight success, neither was Amazon’s third party seller effort – it took three tries to get it right. Which leads me to the third insight…
3. “We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details”
How many leaders can make this distinction accurately between vision and details? How many leaders can throw away their execution to start again in service of their vision? Apple threw away the Motorola ROKR and tried again and came up with the iPhone. Amazon tried three different times to get the third-party sellers just right because they believed in the vision that opening up their store to outside sellers was the right direction to take their business. The key distinction here and the questions to ask yourself when something is failing are the following:
“Do we have the wrong vision for where the market is moving or do we have the wrong details?”
“Have we misjudged key timing, legal, political, or other aspects in our pursuit of this vision?”
4. “We are planting more seeds right now, and it is too early to talk about them”
This is one of the keys to the pursuit of innovation – not going public too early. Bezos’ captures it perfectly with his comment about it being very difficult to innovate “if you are not willing to be misunderstood”, and I would add that it is very difficult if you are not PREPARED to be misunderstood. You must have a plan. So, innovate early and often, place lots of small bets, continue to invest in the ones that fit your vision and overcome key hurdles, and most importantly keep things quiet until you have a good grasp on exactly how you plan to explain your invention or educate people on its potential value BEFORE you go public – or the road from invention to innovation will only get harder.
What do you think about the Jeff Bezos commentary below?
Continue reading for an excerpt of the text of Bezos’ response, transcribed from the company’s webcast.
“You should anticipate a certain amount of failure. Our two big initiatives, AWS and Kindle — two big, clean-sheet initiatives — have worked out very well. Ninety-plus percent of the innovation at Amazon is incremental and critical and much less risky. We know how to open new product categories. We know how to open new geographies. That doesn’t mean that these things are guaranteed to work, but we have a lot of expertise and a lot of knowledge. We know how to open new fulfillment centers, whether to open one, where to locate it, how big to make it. All of these things based on our operating history are things that we can analyze quantitatively rather than to have to make intuitive judgments.
When you look at something like, go back in time when we started working on Kindle almost seven years ago…. There you just have to place a bet. If you place enough of those bets, and if you place them early enough, none of them are ever betting the company. By the time you are betting the company, it means you haven’t invented for too long.
If you invent frequently and are willing to fail, then you never get to that point where you really need to bet the whole company. AWS also started about six or seven years ago. We are planting more seeds right now, and it is too early to talk about them, but we are going to continue to plant seeds. And I can guarantee you that everything we do will not work. And, I am never concerned about that…. We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details…. We don’t give up on things easily. Our third-party seller business is an example of that. It took us three tries to get the third-party seller business to work. We didn’t give up.
But. if you get to a point where you look at it and you say look, we are continuing invest a lot of money in this, and it’s not working and we have a bunch of other good businesses, and this is a hypothetical scenario, and we are going to give up on this. On the day you decide to give up on it, what happens? Your operating margins go up because you stopped investing in something that wasn’t working. Is that really such a bad day?
So, my mind never lets me get in a place where I think we can’t afford to take these bets, because the bad case never seems that bad to me. And, I think to have that point of view, requires a corporate culture that does a few things. I don’t think every company can do that, can take that point of view. A big piece of the story we tell ourselves about who we are, is that we are willing to invent. We are willing to think long-term. We start with the customer and work backwards. And, very importantly, we are willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.
I believe if you don’t have that set of things in your corporate culture, then you can’t do large-scale invention. You can do incremental invention, which is critically important for any company. But it is very difficult — if you are not willing to be misunderstood. People will misunderstand you.
Any time you do something big, that’s disruptive — Kindle, AWS — there will be critics. And there will be at least two kinds of critics. There will be well-meaning critics who genuinely misunderstand what you are doing or genuinely have a different opinion. And there will be the self-interested critics that have a vested interest in not liking what you are doing and they will have reason to misunderstand. And you have to be willing to ignore both types of critics. You listen to them, because you want to see, always testing, is it possible they are right?
But if you hold back and you say, ‘No, we believe in this vision,’ then you just stay heads down, stay focused and you build out your vision.”
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“Because, you know, resilience – if you think of it in terms of the Gold Rush, then you’d be pretty depressed right now because the last nugget of gold would be gone. But the good thing is, with innovation, there isn’t a last nugget. Every new thing creates two new questions and two new opportunities.”
– Jeff Bezos
– Submitted by Mim (Milana Karlo) Bizic
“Knowledge Management is more about ‘How do I?’ while Innovation is more about ‘Why don’t we?'”
– Braden Kelley
What are some of your favorite innovation quotes?
Add one or more to the comments, listing the quote and who said it, and I’ll share the best of the submissions as future innovation quotes of the day!
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It is not too often that the leader of a Fortune 500 gives you an insight into how their company achieves competitive advantage in the marketplace in a letter to shareholders, instead of launching into a page or two of flowery prose written by the Public Relations (PR) team that works for them. The former is what Jeff Bezos tends to deliver year after year. This year’s letter is particularly interesting.
