John Rossman, Alvarez & Marsal, Author of "The Amazon Way", Lessons B2B Enterprises can learn from "The Amazon Way"

Lessons B2B Enterprises Can Learn from “The Amazon Way”

Why the Urgency?

Seventy percent of Fortune 1000 companies over the past decade are new

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The Empty Chair: The Most Important Person In the Room

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“We’re not competitor obsessed, we’re customer obsessed. We start with what the customer needs and we work backwards.”

– Jeff Bezos

Instrumentation – A Core Design Requirement

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“If you can stand a barrage of questions, then you have picked the right metric. But you had better have your stuff together. The best number wins.” – Manfred Bluemel, Former Senior Market Researcher at Amazon

• All system components• Financial drivers

Real time metrics for:• Customer experience• Processes

Example: Perfect Order Percentage (POP)

• Measures percentage of orders that are perfectly accepted, processed and fulfilled.

• Comprised of ~13 different sub measurements

Invent and Simplify

“Leaders expect and require innovation from their teams and always find a way to simplify. They are externally aware, look for new ideas

from everywhere, and are not limited by ‘not invented here.”7

Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit

The Two-Pizza Team

Other People’s Work

“You know, it’s funny. A writer was just interviewing me and asked, ‘How did you get all of that data onto your site?’ I told

him that I had nothing to do with it. We just created some tools and let them loose. The data all came from everyone else!”

– Jeff Bezos

Forcing Function

A forcing function is an approach for systematically enforcing a strategy

Start Projects with A Future Press Release

Are You a Platform?

“I am emphasizing the self-service nature of these platforms because it is important for a reason I think is somewhat non-obvious. Even well-meaning gatekeepers slow

innovation. When a platform is self-service, even improbable ideas get tried, because there’s no expert gatekeeper ready to say ‘That will never work!’ Guess what? Many

of those improbable ideas do work.”-Jeff Bezos, 2011 Letter to Shareholders

What’s Your Flywheel?

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“Companies that pursue a flywheel-business model focus on building the kind of long-term capabilities that allow them to

prevail against rivals and capture new opportunities for growth.”-Tim Laseter and Jeff Bennett in Building a Flywheel Business

Evaluating the Disruption Potential – The Amazon Way

Share of Industry Revenue

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1. Value Chain and Profit Pool Analysis

2. Who are the “gate keepers” ?

3. Are there middle men and brokers?

4. Is selection/demand disaggregated?

5. Is pricing transparent?

7. Can customer experience be reinvented?- buying experience- operating experience- self service

6. Can the provisioning or ownership model be changed?

Your Principles -- Make Them Real

Thank You!

Email: [email protected]

Twitter: @johnerossman

Blog: www.on-amzn.com