Success sometimes can grow to become a craft that leaves behind trails for others to follow. Jeff Bezos didn’t arrive at success through a stroke of luck. He worked hard to reach the top. His rise can teach business owners one or two lessons about raising their game in driving enterprise.
Peter Cohan, who is the founder of Peter S. Cohan & Associates pick some of the Bezos strategies that businesses can adopt in a bid to become the best in any sector.
These are the strategies:
1. Sustain intellectual humility by attracting geniuses and bringing out their best.
Bezos’s first idea was that the more successful a company becomes, the greater the risk that it will become complacent. And once complacency sets in, it is only a matter of time before the company stops adapting to its changing competitive environment, begins to lose market share, and eventually ceases to exist.
2. Obsess over customers by investing in your strengths that they value most. Bezos enjoys the challenge of satisfying its perennially delightfully dissatisfied customers. It is critical to take note of what your clients find most impressive about you. That is your competitive advantage. Build on it.
3. Embrace external trends that drive rivals’ rapid growth. Pay attention to the underlining trends that are fueling growth in the market. See which ones you can adopt so you won’t be sidelined by customers. Bezos emphasized the importance of changing a company’s strategy so that powerful external forces become growth-propelling tailwinds.
4. Make high quality decisions quickly by going with your gut. Combing everywhere for useful market information to make effective marketing decision isn’t bad. But it could turn out to be a disadvantage where the market is moving fast. You have to keep abreast of trends and train your inner man to crunch data faster enough to drive accurate actions. Bezos advocates making decisions quickly with 70 percent of the information rather than delaying to get the remaining 30 percent.
