Lessons B2B Enterprises Can Learn from “The Amazon Way”
Why the Urgency?
Seventy percent of Fortune 1000 companies over the past decade are new
3
The Empty Chair: The Most Important Person In the Room
4
“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
5
“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?
14
“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
Op
era
tin
g M
arg
in
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
