STREET DOGS: Day 2
Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death …
Extracts from Jeff Bezos’s 2016 letter to investors: "Jeff, what does Day 2 look like?" That’s a question I got at a recent meeting. I’ve been reminding people that it’s Day 1 for a couple of decades. Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death.… To be sure, this kind of decline would happen in slow motion. An established company might harvest Day 2 for decades, but the final result would still come. I’m interested in the question, how do you fend off Day 2? How do you keep the vitality of Day 1 inside a large organisation? Such a question can’t have a simple answer. There will be many elements, multiple paths and many traps. I don’t know the whole answer, but I may know bits of it. Here’s a starter pack of essentials for Day 1 defence: customer obsession, a sceptical view of proxies, the eager adoption of external trends and high-velocity decision making. Staying in Day 1 requires you to experiment patiently, accept failure...
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