PSIFebruary2018

A mind-set for success?
This month Jim Rathbone takes
inspiration from the richest man
in the world...
o 2018 is underway. Did you set clear goals
Sfor the year and if so are they still in focus?
Are you optimistic about the year? What is
your mind-set?
I was struck reading the 2017 letter from
Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos, written when the
company has achieved a valuation of 100 billion
dollars, only 20 years after it was founded.
Bezos compares "Day 1" companies —
companies that are at the beginning of their
potential — with "Day 2" companies. A “Day 2”
mind-set means stagnation followed by painful
decline and death. Bezos wants Amazon to
retain its mind-set as a “Day 1” company. For
him there are 2 imperatives, 2 main hallmarks of
a “Day 1” company. I believe they have
resonance for security installers.
Bezos credits Amazon's precise and
unwavering focus on customer outcomes for the
company's success. He says that Amazon
focuses on always giving customers something
better, even if it means inventing something
totally new, like Amazon Prime. The company
has also embraced outside trends like cloud
computing and AI. While trends like those can
be easy to spot, Bezos suggests that "Day 2"
organisations resist them.
To take advantage of emerging opportunities
and market developments, Bezos stresses the
importance of "high-velocity decisions." That
doesn't mean making low-quality decisions, but
it does mean most decisions should probably be
made with somewhere around 70 percent of the
information you wish you had.
"You need to be good at quickly recognising
and correcting bad decisions. If you're good at
course correcting, being wrong may be less
costly than you think," Bezos says.
Take five minutes and read Jeff Bezos' 2017
Amazon Annual Letter online and share it with
your team and explore how it is relevant to your
business.
"You need to be good
at quickly recognising
and correcting bad
decisions”
Jim Rathbone is the Managing
Director of Rathbone Results.
Contact him at
jim@rathboneresults.com
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