Читать книгу The Amazon Management System - Ram Charan - Страница 34

As Bezos put it, “One thing I love about customers is that they are divinely discontent. Their expectations are never static – they go up. It’s human nature.”12

How do we not just meet but stay ahead of the customers’ ever-rising expectations? The only way to do this is through continuous innovation and relentless invention. In this way, the divinely discontent customers became the sources of continuous inspiration for Amazon’s invention machine.

Many traditional companies also pay serious attention to innovation and improvement, but they normally do so because of competitive or performance pressure. They may seek marginal iterations around the edges, trying to tweak here and there, especially the packaging, but rarely make systematic overhauls for completely new ideas.

What Amazon aspires to is way beyond such minor innovation. At Amazon, the relentless drive to invent dramatic new ways to delight customers never stops. They focus on very big, potentially global consumer needs by visualizing the ultimate inevitability of customer needs, things that will not change in the next ten years (price, selection, and convenience).

Unlike traditional companies that primarily use technology for cost reduction, Amazon focuses on using technology to totally transform the existing customer existing experience, and to imagine an experience that does not exist today, and invent on behalf of the customers, such as Amazon Go.

Take Kindle as another example. It was never meant to out-book the book; it was designed instead to have new capabilities impossible with the traditional book, such as having millions of titles on sale, finding a book and having it in 60 seconds, being able to underline passages and create notes and saving them in the cloud.

In the spirit of relentless drive to invent, Amazon single-handedly created entirely new markets with huge global potential, such as cloud services (AWS) and smart speakers (Echo). As Bezos pointed out:

“No one asked for AWS. No one. Turns out the world was in fact ready and hungry for an offering like AWS but didn’t know it. We had a hunch, followed our curiosity, took the necessary financial risks, and began building – reworking, experimenting, and iterating countless times as we proceeded.”13