Denise Shiffman’s Engage Daily Blog

In an article in the Harvard Business Review, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, provides some timely insight.

Bezos comments that “It helps to base your strategy on things that won’t change.”

It took me a moment to consume that idea. I spent over 20 years in the computer industry where all you think about is change, what’s next, and what is everybody else doing. Instead of just asking his team to create the next breakthrough, Bezos asks “What’s not going to change in the next five to ten years?”

“At Amazon we’re always trying to figure that out because you can really spin up flywheels around those things. All the energy you invest in them today will still be paying you dividends ten years from now. Whereas if you base your strategy first and foremost on more transitory things — who your competitors are, what kind of technologies are available and so on — those things are going to change so rapidly that you’re going to change your strategy very rapidly, too.”

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This entry was posted on Friday, January 25th, 2008 at 10:22 am and is filed under Marketing fundamentals, Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.