When I grow up, I want to be an inventor
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"If you do it right, a few years after a surprising invention, the new thing has become normal. People yawn. That yawn is the greatest compliment an inventor can receive."
Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos, who last week stepped aside as CEO of Amazon, doesn't spring to mind as a paragon of healthy work/life balance. Certainly, ongoing disputes about unionisation of the company's workforce put him at odds with idealistic views on work culture.
It's impossible, though, not to admire the scale of Bezos' achievement in creating not one, but multiple category-defining businesses that have changed our understanding, not just of how we shop, but of how and where we do business.
I'm idly speculating, but if you'd asked a ten-year-old Jeff Bezos "what do you want to be when you grow up?", I'm reasonably sure that his response would have been, "an inventor".
Take Amazon's four guiding principles as evidence, for example:
Customer obsession
Eagerness to invent
Long-term thinking
Operational excellence
I've just started recording series three of Take My Advice (I'm Not Using It) and my guest this week is Elvin Turner, an innovation expert whose clients include some of the world’s most groundbreaking organisations in the finance, technology, music, drinks and publishing industries. His book Be Less Zombie breaks down very practically how to create an innovation culture within an organisation.
What's clear is that, like Amazon, you have to be intentional in the way you approach innovation, whether it's focused on a product, service or, indeed, how we work.
Have a listen to the podcast and read the book for some great insights and framework to apply, but here are a few key takeaways and how you could use these to improve our work/lives.
Fall in love with the problem: It's easy to get bogged down in the day-to-day work and life and lose sight of why you're doing all of 'this'. Purpose matters, because it's the motivation that keeps you pushing for new solutions and improvements. In Amazon's case, their mission is to to be Earth's most customer-centric company. I'm driven by helping people find a way to work less while achieving more. What problem is your business solving? What is the thing that's getting you out of bed every morning?
Ask 'catalytic questions': The best way to stimulate creative thought is to develop a set of questions that help continually focus on the problem you're looking to solve. Returning to the childhood theme, we all learned how to make a hypothesis in teenage science lessons. Well, by framing assumptions about the questions you're asking, you're more likely to achieve meaningful results. What actually needs to happen because of our idea? What specific progress do we need to create? For whom? In what context? In what manner? With what constraints?
Continuously run small experiments: AWS, Kindle and Prime are now multi-billion businesses in their own right, but each of them started as a low-level experiment (low-level in the context of one of the world’s largest companies, of course). Amazon continuously tests new ideas and only scales them once validated. The lesson here is that experimentation can be cheap, must be fast and present the opportunity to learn. What's the first experiment you can run in your business? Have a company-wide Fika (tea break) every afternoon? Reserve mornings for uninterrupted, focused work? Agree to cancel all meetings for a week?
I've had numerous conversations with businesses recently who are at a work/life inflection point. While the early stages of the pandemic showed that collectively we're able to adapt quickly to a new way of working, the next step seems to be presenting more difficulties. Where’s the best place to start?
Rather than feel overwhelmed by the scale of the challenge, approach it like any other innovation project - through gradual iteration.
In this respect, it's useful to consider how the challenge-skills gap determines the ability to enter a flow state. I spoke to the author Steven Kotler last week and as he has explained:
"Flow appears near the emotional midpoint between boredom and anxiety, in what scientists call the flow channel — the spot where the task is hard enough to make us stretch but not hard enough to make us snap. How hard is that? Answers vary, but the general thinking is about 4 per cent. That's it. That's the sweet spot. If you want to trigger flow, the challenge should be four per cent greater than the skills."
The compounding effect of an ongoing four per cent improvement, of course, eventually adds up to something great, so think like an inventor and start by putting some time in to experiment.
Have a good week,
Ollie
Any Other Business:
I don’t know about you, but the reality of the past year has really started to catch up with me over the past few weeks. I’ve never been more conscious of the negative impact on mental health and, this article in the FT does a fantastic job of summarising the overwhelming feelings of stress and anxiety on people all over the world.
On a similar note, I always look out for anything written by my former podcast guest Alyssa Westring and Stew Friedman and for any working parents out there, this article is well worth reading.
Interesting to read that Salesforce has joined some of the other tech giants to announce permanent changes in how they expect their employees to work. As well as location, though, they’ve also made the positive step of introducing flexible hours.
And finally, a couple of interesting tweets from Wharton professor, Ethan Mollick:
