What Can We Learn From Amazon.com’s Approach to Entrepreneurship
Amazon’s founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos is probably the most thought of regarding entrepreneurship. The story of how Amazon started in 1994 might not be known by everyone yet there is a lot to learn about the approach to the entrepreneurial opportunity that lifted Amazon from startup to stardom. It is completely right to think of Amazon as a retail store it helps us learn a lot as Optometry practices. It is also right to think of Amazon as a marketplace that turns our curiosity to know what role versatility plays in paving the road to successful entrepreneurship.
When we look at Amazon today’s sales we find that media and digital goods constitute more than 40% of its sales, yet when Amazon started, those products and services were not their history stronghold of products and services. Amazon started with physical products in 1994 but went on identifying and acting on one entrepreneurial opportunity after another starting with selling a large selection of books on the internet at affordable prices. Jeff Bezos did not stop at selling books, a decade later he was able to lead Amazon to become a leader in selling printed books and CD music. The years that followed brought Amazon to lead the market of DVDs as well. Amazon started with printed books that were historical products available in the market however, they did not stop at printed books and they did not wait for the market to show insights about e-books and other digital products; they decided to lead the charge. They jumped into e-books, digital online music, streaming music, and other media knowing that if they can provide those products even if they have to go out of the comfort of their market, they can lead new markets and they don’t have to follow incumbents in existing markets.
You cannot pass through this story without relating to Bezo’s famous quote “If you’re not stubborn, you’ll give up on experiments too soon. And if you’re not flexible, you’ll pound your head against the wall and you won’t see a different solution to a problem you’re trying to solve.” This explains two of the key characteristics of an entrepreneur which are obsession and innovation. You need to be stubborn to hold on to your idea and to be obsessed with it. Moreover, innovating without flexibility and creativity cannot exploit transformative technologies and cannot promote strategies that enable change in the organization.
As an Optometry practice, we constantly ask ourselves, where should we be often innovating? The answer I always think of is improving productivity above all. Other domains include reducing costs, outsmarting the competition, building new partnerships, filtering out bad relationships, and finding new ways to communicate value, increase profit, and improve brand recognition.