STREET DOGS

Extracts from Jeff Bezos's 2016 letter to investors:

“Jeff, what does Day 2 look like?” That’s a question I got at a recent meeting. I’ve been reminding people that it’s Day 1 for a couple of decades. Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death.… To be sure, this kind of decline would happen in 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? How do you keep the vitality of Day 1 inside a large organisation?

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 defence: customer obsession, a sceptical view of proxies, the eager adoption of external trends and high-velocity decision making.

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.

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.

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.

Day 2 companies make highquality decisions, but they make high-quality decisions slowly … you have to somehow make highquality, high-velocity decisions.

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.