(Made with the help of iCrushALot)
Bruce pointed me to this interview with my innovation hero Jeff Bezos in Newsweek's interview issue. Bezos describes three elements of their success:
- Start with the customer and work backward, learning the skills necessary to serve them as you go
- Be an inventor, willing to go down unexplored pathways and be pleasantly and cheerfully disappointed in what you find; always think like it's "Day One" [edited by me]
- Have a long-term orientation
This excerpt is so, so true and it brings home the patience and persistence that it takes to be a repeat innovator:
There are two ways that companies can extend what they're doing. One is they can take an inventory of their skills and competencies, and then they can say, "OK, with this set of skills and competencies, what else can we do?" And that's a very useful technique that all companies should use. But there's a second method, which takes a longer-term orientation. It is to say, rather than ask what are we good at and what else can we do with that skill, you ask, who are our customers? What do they need? And then you say we're going to give that to them regardless of whether we currently have the skills to do so, and we will learn those skills no matter how long it takes. Kindle is a great example of that. It's been on the market for two years, but we worked on it for three years in earnest before that. We talked about it for a year before that. We had to go hire people to build a hardware--engineering team to build the device. We had to acquire new skills. There's a tendency, I think, for executives to think that the right course of action is to stick to the knitting—stick with what you're good at. That may be a generally good rule, but the problem is the world changes out from under you if you're not constantly adding to your skill set.
