What Entrepreneurs Can Learn From Amazon. Part 2 : Be Unafraid of Failure
The second in my six-part series where I dive into the most valuable things I learned after several years at Amazon, and what this can teach entrepreneurs, CEOs, start-ups and new businesses.
Part 2: Be unafraid of failure.
Failure can be unsettling. Whether a failure has a relatively small impact (how your ego copes), or an epic one (the impact on your business’s success), it can be difficult to pick yourself up and keep going after it happens.
Amazon have experienced a lot of failures since the beginning – the Firephone, Amazon Resturants, Amazon Tickets, the list goes on. However, in spite of several public (and expensive) fails, the business takes a positive attitude towards it. Rather than being seen as a negative, failure is embraced, viewed as a chance to learn and to become even better This attitude enabled them to turn the failed Amazon Auction into Marketplace; the home of third party sellers is now worth twice as much as Amazon’s own retail business.
There is however a right way and a wrong way to fail. If you set yourself up so that you can fail in the right way, you’ll be able to use it to your advantage, to celebrate it and get better. Because the chances are, if an idea doesn’t carry a risk of failure, it’s not big enough.
Here’s what I know about failing the right way.
1) Build a positive culture where failure is embraced.
As with any culture, this must start at the top. If you can facilitate a culture where failure is talked about openly and without judgement, your team will be more willing to take risks and think big. Let people talk about their failures, discuss them broadly and embrace it as a learning experience. If your team know that they won’t be punished for a failure, you’ll enable them to be unafraid of it.
2) Focus on what failure teaches you.
When something fails, don’t focus on the person. Focus on the failure. There’s a big difference between asking ‘Who failed here?’ and ‘What failed here?’. If you see everything you do as an opportunity to learn and improve, you’ll have the chance to learn from the process and not just the outcome. Instead of asking, ‘what did you do?’ focus on things like ‘how did we get here? Why didn’t this work?’ What do we need to do differently? What can we learn from this?
3) Be smart with your risk taking.
While failure can be good, failing recklessly is not. Make sure you’re very clear on your objectives and your customer. You need to know why you’re doing something, what you want to achieve and how you’re going to measure it. Even when you’re going into the unknown, mitigate your risk wherever possible. How quickly will you know if its working? Will you need to pull the plug if it doesn’t? Give yourself a way to pivot.
4) Fail big and small.
The bigger the potential failure, the more time and planning needs to go into it. If a failure will be small, do it fast, learn from it and iterate. For instance, it can be worth assigning a percentage of your marketing budget to higher risk activity while the rest is focused on growing what you already know works. It might not work, but you might find something new which could take you to the next level.
Strategic thinker. Brand builder. Creator. Collaborator. Working with start-ups and entrepreneurs to build brands, create marketing plans and find their point of difference. Get in touch to find out how I can help your brilliant ideas meet their potential.
lpaton.com | lauren@lpaton.com