Invent and Wander: Ideas on Innovation from Jeff Bezos and Amazon
Search for “creativity and the arts” on Amazon and you’ll get over 20,000 results. Search for “creativity and business” and you’ll see over 30,000. Why? Because it’s harder to be creative in business than it is in the arts. Unless you’re a non-profit, the measure of success in business is simple and objective: profit. Art can be measured by the money a work of art generates, but financial success isn’t the only, or even most important, way of assessing the success of a work of art or an artist. The tens of thousands of results on “creativity and business” (mostly books) attest to the market value that being creative in business can generate—and no company has ever created more market value faster than Amazon.
A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.
—Jeff Bezos
Whether you’re a fan of Amazon or a critic, the business that Bezos and the company have built is worth studying, but not just because the company has been so successful financially. Amazon has done something rare in business: they have simultaneously created successful businesses in very different categories. That fact tells you that there’s an approach—a model of creating and nurturing ideas—that’s worth studying and learning from. Studying and learning from Amazon isn’t an endorsement of Amazon. Their success has also come at a cost—to workers, to small businesses, and to our cultural fabric to name just a few of the areas that warrant discussion. I don’t want to diminish those issues, but regardless of what you think about the company, there’s value in understanding how they have accomplished what they have—and using those ideas in your work if it’s to your advantage.
The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos
Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos gathers Bezos’s annual shareholder letters from 1997 to 2019, along with selected speeches and interviews. The book includes an introduction by Walter Isaacson, best known for his biographies of Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, and Steve Jobs to name just a few of the cultural heavyweights he’s written about. In his lengthy introduction, Isaacson explores the personality traits he thinks innovators have in common and makes the case why Bezos belongs in the esteemed company of the other innovators he’s written about. Isaacson's list includes curiosity, a love for the arts and sciences, the capacity to create a reality-distortion field, the ability to “think different”, and the ability to keep a childlike sense of wonder. He believes Bezos checks off the complete list.
Isaacson calls out the following five “key lessons” from Bezos’s writings:
Focus on the long-term
Focus relentlessly and passionately on the customer
Avoid PowerPoint and slide presentations
Focus on the big decisions
Hire the right people
I’m adding a key lesson to the list: Invent and wander.
Let’s look at these key lessons more closely to see what we can learn that might apply to our focus: tools for a productive creative life.
Focus on the Long-Term
In his first shareholder letter in 1997 Bezos boldly declared “it’s all about the long term.” To his credit, he never wavered from this founding principle, even when Amazon’s stock dropped 80% in the 2000 dot-com market crash. His commitment to building for the long term and his capacity for creating a reality-distortion field, convinced Wall Street to give him a pass on short-term profit. Bezos continued to invest in delighting customers, earning their trust, and building out the company’s infrastructure. As a result, Amazon was ideally positioned when e-commerce took off.
Another thing that I would recommend to people is that they always take a long-term point of view. I think this is something about which there’s a lot of controversy. A lot of people—and I’m just not one of them—believe that you should live for the now.
I think what you do is think about the great expanse of time ahead of you and try to make sure that you’re planning for that in a way that’s going to leave you ultimately satisfied. This is the way it works for me. There are a lot of paths to satisfaction and you need to find one that works for you.
—Jeff Bezos
What does focusing on the long-term mean in practice? Vision, flexibility, patience, and a willingness to fail. Focusing on the long term begins with having a clear destination. You need to know where you’re heading, even if the path to get there isn’t clear. Flexibility is also critical. Achieving long-term goals is an exercise in learning as you go. There are always steps along the way that will require you to adjust your assumptions and plans, even some that force you to retrace your steps. And patience, a first cousin to faith… There’s always pressure, internal and/or external, to get there faster, but long-term goals are usually complex goals, and solving big problems takes time. Finally, a willingness to fail. In his 2019 shareholder letter Bezos wrote: “If the size of your failures isn’t growing, you’re not going to be inventing at a size that can actually move the needle.” Long-term thinking isn’t about finding the perfect path, it’s about curiosity, experimentation, and a beginner’s mindset.
Focusing on the long-term is equally relevant to creative work:
Vision: You need to have a vision, for your career and for each project, and it has to be ambitious, so you’re pushing yourself and growing.
Flexibility: You need to be open to new ways of seeing your work; to new materials, tools, and workflows; and to alternative ways of expressing yourself.
Patience: You need to be patient with yourself. Learning your craft and finding your voice takes time. Building an audience takes time.
A willingness to fail: A creative project is a bet, and not every bet pays out. Take smart risks—ones where the rewards of success outweigh the cost of failure—but don’t expect every bet to be a winner. Even Michael Jordan, arguably the best basketball player of all time, missed 43% of his shots! Show up, do the work. Trust that your work will get noticed if your bets on yourself are big enough.
Focus Relentlessly and Passionately on the Customer
Amazon’s business is built on four pillars: price, selection, convenience, and customer service. Over and over you’ll hear Bezos return to the same theme: “If there’s one thing Amazon is about its obsessive attention to the customer experience, end-to-end.” Their customer services reflect this obsession: 1-Click ordering, Amazon Prime, Amazon Smile, and Free Returns to name just a few of the ways Amazon makes it easy for customers to shop. These branded, customer-focused services ensure that the dividends of their obsession accrue to the broader Amazon brand. The result: intense customer loyalty.
If you're competitor-focused, you have to wait until there is a competitor doing something. Being customer-focused allows you to be more pioneering.
—Jeff Bezos
But what can artists learn from Amazon’s relentless and passionate focus on customers? As Seth Godin writes in his book The Practice, art is “The human act of doing something that might not work, something generous, something that will make a difference. The emotional act of doing personal, self-directed work to make a change that we can be proud of.”
If you're making art because you want to change someone or something, you need to create with intent and empathy. You need to ask and answer three questions:
Who is the work for, or who are you trying to change?
What change are you trying to make?
How will you know if it worked?
Your customer is that person or group of people who your work is for. The people whose lives you are trying to change. Godin continues:
Some intuitive artists simply work for themselves. They bet that if the work moves them, it will move someone like them. They don’t have to extend themselves at all, because there’s already a successful alignment between their taste and needs and those they seek to change.
If that’s already working for you, congratulations. You’re one of the few. Professionals don’t usually have this luxury.
It’s worth noting that this isn’t a moral choice, it’s simply a practical one. If you’re committing to the process, you’ll need to choose. Choose who it’s for and what it’s for. And the more different the person you serve is from you, the more empathy you’ll need to create the change you seek to make.
Your obsession is expressed by the depth of your empathy. The more you know and care about your audience, your customers, the more likely it is that your work will connect with them, will change their lives in the way you intend.
Avoid PowerPoint and Slide Presentations
Amazon is famous for being a “No PowerPoint Zone.” Instead, meetings are centered around “the 6-pager”—a standardized six page narrative made up of six sections that introduces the issue being discussed, the metrics for measuring success, the vision/inspirational pillars, the state of the business, the lessons learned from the available data, and the strategic plan being proposed.
Meetings begin with everyone in the room reading the 6-pager silently. Attendees jot down their notes on their copy of the 6-pager, which is returned to the author(s) at the end of the meeting. Bezos believes that this discipline forces a clarity of thinking, both by the team and those in the meeting. The fact that it’s a ritual, that every significant decision meeting is structured this way, builds familiarity, trust, a sense of fairness, and buy-in. Everyone understands the 6-pager centered meeting is the way the company makes significant decisions. Everyone’s issue gets an equal hearing, and once the group has decided, everyone sets aside their differences and moves ahead.
Writing a six-page memo for every creative project you undertake may not make sense, but developing your own disciplines for clarifying your thinking does. The 6-pager works because it’s a form of storytelling and stories are powerful. I mentioned Bezos’ ability to create a reality-distortion field—that’s a byproduct of effective storytelling. The visualization exercises athletes use to enhance their performance are also forms of storytelling.
You can’t skip steps. You have to put one foot in front of the other. Things take time. There are no shortcuts. But you want to do those steps with passion and ferocity.
—Jeff Bezos
Bezos’s motto is “gradatim ferociter,” Latin for “step-by-step courageously.”
Take the time to write your story. What are your core beliefs? Where have you been and where are you going? What kind of work and career are you trying to create? How are you measuring your progress? What lessons have you learned along the way? What’s next? The more you invest in creating and telling your story, the stronger your reality-distortion field will be. Go forward with passion and ferocity.
Focus on the Big Decisions
Amazon is a data-driven company, which in their case doesn’t just mean executives use data to inform their decisions, it also means the company relies on data-driven systems to actually make decisions. Not all decisions certainly, but those where machine-learning-driven algorithms are better at parsing, analyzing, and predicting than humans could ever be. Areas such as demand forecasting, product search ranking, product and deals recommendations, merchandising placements, and more.
As a senior executive, what do you really get paid to do? You get paid to make a small number of high quality decisions. Your job is not to make thousands of decisions every day.
—Jeff Bezos
Bezos divides decisions into two categories: those that can be walked back and those that are irrevocable. Decisions that can be walked back can be approved by one of hundreds of executives who are empowered to green-light ideas. Bezos calls this highly decentralized process “multiple paths to yes.” It’s designed to promote a culture of experimentation and an acceptance of failures—a natural byproduct of taking risks.
Irrevocable decisions follow a different path. These decisions have the potential to change the company culture, dramatically impact the bottom line, or change the direction of the company. Bezos sees himself as the “chief slowdown officer” for these decisions. His goal is to ensure the idea is truly differentiated, not a “me-too” offering. He wants to know the idea will scale, that it has the potential to grow into something significant. Finally, he wants to know if it is a fit and can scale, that it will also deliver a meaningful return on investment.
Bezos’s distinction between decisions that can be walked back and irrevocable decisions is useful in any endeavor, including creative work. A work of art is the byproduct of an incalculable number of small decisions. Having a mindset that enables multiple paths to “yes” enables you to reduce your cognitive load, freeing yourself to focus on the more significant irrevocable decisions. Close your eyes and imagine your key influencers, the voices you wrestle with whenever you’re trying to make an important decision. Imagine them sitting around a big boardroom table. How many of them have you empowered to green-light your ideas, your decisions? If it’s not the majority, you need a new board of directors!
If you can make a decision with analysis, you should do so. But it turns out in life that your most important decisions are always made with instinct and intuition, taste, heart.
—Jeff Bezos
How do you evaluate your irrevocable decisions? What values and implications inform those decisions? Most of us can’t list the three most important criteria we use for evaluating these big decisions. If that’s you, take time to think about and document the values and implications that matter most to you.
Hire the Right People
Amazon has a rigorous hiring process. The company invests an unusual amount of time in interviewing and vetting applicants. Bezos asks hiring managers to answer three critical questions before hiring a candidate:
Will you admire this person? - Bezos wants hiring managers to admire the people they bring into the company. He wants new hires to be an example to others.
Will this person raise the average level of effectiveness of the group they’re hiring? - The goal, Bezos says, is to raise the hiring bar for the company, hire by hire.
Along what dimensions might this person be a superstar? - Bezos asks managers to look for people who will “help cultivate a fun and interesting work environment.”
Life’s too short to hang out with people who aren’t resourceful.
—Jeff Bezos
Many of us aren’t responsible for hiring, but all of us work with other people directly or indirectly from time to time. Your team may be people you’re learning from, people you’re collaborating with, people you’re hiring for a task, or people you’re sourcing materials from. How do you choose these people? Do you admire them, their work, their values? Are you choosing people who help you elevate your work to new heights? Are the people you surround yourself with fun, interesting, and superstars in their own right? Remember, if you’re working on your own or in a small team, you are responsible for your “company” culture—your work environment, relationships, and outcomes. Choose wisely!
Invent and Wander
The five lessons above provide valuable insights into the principles and practices that have helped Amazon succeed in a wide variety of different businesses. I want to add one more to the list, because it’s important to Amazon’s success and it’s important to a life focused on creative work: invent and wander. Bezos’s 2018 shareholder letter on this idea is worth quoting at length:
From very early on in Amazon’s life, we knew we wanted to create a culture of builders—people who are curious, explorers. They like to invent. Even when they’re experts, they are 'fresh' with a beginner’s mind. They see the way we do things as just the way we do things now. A builder’s mentality helps us approach big, hard-to-solve opportunities with a humble conviction that success can come through iteration: invent, launch, reinvent, relaunch, start over, rinse, repeat, again and again. They know the path to success is anything but straight.
Sometimes (often actually) in business, you do know where you’re going, and when you do, you can be efficient. Put in place a plan and execute. In contrast, wandering in business is not efficient—but it’s also not random. It’s guided—by hunch, gut, intuition, curiosity, and powered by a deep conviction that the prize for customers is big enough that it’s worth being a little messy and tangential to find our way there. Wandering is an essential counterbalance to efficiency. You need to employ both. The outsized discoveries—the 'nonlinear' ones—are highly likely to require wandering.
This idea is so important that Bezos used it for the title of his book, Invent and Wander. All three words in this phrase are equally important: sometimes the path ahead is clear, sometimes not. Companies that only make safe bets or only wander usually have short lifespans. You need the revenue of safe bets to invest in wandering, and you need wandering to find the big ideas that eventually become your next source of reliable revenue.
Notice, however, that Bezos isn’t promoting random wandering, he’s endorsing guided wandering: “guided by hunch, gut, intuition, curiosity, and powered by a deep conviction that the prize … is big enough that it’s worth being a little messy and tangential to find our way there.”
“Invent and wander” is a keystone idea for a creative life. It balances the daily practice of creative work (“invent, launch, reinvent, relaunch, start over, rinse, repeat, again and again”) with what Bezos calls “the biggest needle movers,” the ideas that people aren’t asking for, but need. He continues, “We must invent on their behalf. We have to tap into our own inner imagination about what’s possible.” This is what creativity is and it’s what artists do.
In Closing…
Bezos’s shareholder letters, speeches, and interviews return again and again to the idea that it’s “Day 1” for Amazon.com. Day 1, Bezos says, is “a mindset that keeps Amazon on a continuous cycle of experimentation, innovation, iteration, and even failure…” This is also the artist’s mindset.
In closing, I turn to now of the most influential and innovative artists of our time, David Bowie. He was also a brilliant marketer and innovative business person. Bowie was an early champion of the Internet, a savvy entrepreneur who introduced “Bowie bonds” (an idea that enabled investors to buy a share of his future royalties), and a superb recruiter. Bowie surrounded himself with talented musicians, artists, designers, and producers who constantly challenged him to raise the bar on his creative work. Most importantly, Bowie maintained a Day 1 mindset throughout his career. He remained open to ideas from every part of life, including business.
Amazon is not an unqualified success story, but it is a significant success story with valuable insights and lessons on long-term thinking, customer/audience focus, storytelling, decision making, team building, and innovation. Learn from Amazon’s successes—and mistakes. Bowie would!