Strategy
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Amazon is 24 years old. Jeff Bezos knows that if he isn't careful, Amazon could be just another big company that dies by age 30. Here are the strategies he uses to make sure that doesn't happen.
- Jeff Bezos keeps talking about the fact that Amazon is going to die some day.
- That's because the average US public company only lives to be about 30 years old.
- But there are some strategies leaders can use to stay innovative and delay a company's death.
- Bezos outlined 4 strategies he uses to stay in "Day 1," the growth phase of a company, in his 2017 shareholder letter.
- They are: true customer obsession, resisting proxies, embracing external trends, and high-velocity decision making.
"Amazon is not too big to fail. In fact, I predict Amazon will fail."
That's what Jeff Bezos, CEO and founder of Amazon, said to his staff during an all-hands meeting in 2018.
"Amazon will go bankrupt," he continued. If you look at large companies, their lifespans tend to be 30-plus years, not a hundred-plus years."
Bezos is right. The average US public company is dying younger than ever, around age 30, according to Martin Reeves, a strategist who gave a popular TED talk about how to build a company that lasts for 100 years.
Another startling statistic: Reeves says 32% of companies won't exist 5 years from now, whether they're acquired or they flat-out fail.
How do you keep a company from dying?
Bezos says his goal is not to keep Amazon from dying, it's to keep it from dying during his lifetime. To do this, he uses an innovation philosophy dubbed "Day 1."
I recently gave a talk on Bezos' Day 1 strategies at an Axel Springer Leadership Summit in Germany. Here's the playbook Bezos uses to build a company that lasts.