The Only Advice I'd Actually Take From Jeff Bezos

So there's no business that ever started without someone having a really good idea. It's very common that founders typically think that their ideas are their value to the company. It's one of the only things that they really hold as like a trophy on their chest. But ideas are cheap and execution is everything. Too many ideas introduced too fast can kill your business. If you are a founder, you're not going to be able to stop your brain from coming up with ideas. But you do have to figure out which ones are good ones, which ones are bad ones. And if you want to be able to introduce more ideas into the business, you need to figure out ways of building a more effective business that can take on more ideas. Amazon's one of the largest businesses in the world. And while I wouldn't trust Jeff Bezos with advice on treating employees well or giving people toilet breaks, I do think there's a lot that we can learn from the way they structure their business. Cuz ideas like selling books online to ideas like AWS takes a specific type of organizational structure. Everyone in your business has jobs to do. They've probably already got things that they're doing. And there's processes in place and there's a whole bunch of execution that happens. Every idea that you bring in introduces cognitive debt which is basically when people have more than one thing on their mind, they can't focus on the one thing as well. Bringing the ideas in can interrupt the flow of other work. So things you've already committed to or assessed and realized are a good idea that you want to deliver. The new idea can come in and interrupt that completely. And if they come from a founder, just by the nature of you delivering the idea, it's going to signal to the team that there's a priority to the idea, even if there's other things that are more important for the business. There's sort of two biases at play with your team. One of them is recency bias. So whatever you hear last, you're more likely to be thinking about and working on in your head, but the cost of making everyone think about it can be astronomical to the business. And then the other one is a leadership bias where say for example you're either walking through the office or you're just scrolling through Slack looking at the people that are online and you have a curiosity come up. If you go up to Jared and you say hey mate I was just wondering if we had this data available would you be able to send it to me? He might say initially oh yeah that's it's probably a bit too difficult to work on. And you say okay don't worry about it. It's not important. You walk away 30 minutes later Jared's like here I got that data for you. As a senior person, by forcing something into someone else's mind, like an idea or a request, you are going to hijack their recency bias. They're going to think it's the most important thing because they heard it the most recently. People only have so much time and they only have so much mental space to bring in new ideas. What you need to be able to do is only introduce ideas and work at a capacity that the organization can absorb. But you can't just map capacity for new ideas to time because it doesn't really work like that because everyone has a million and one things to do and the time that you don't take up will be filled by something else. The operational capacity is about how much context every team has, how much clarity they have on the idea, how experienced the team is, and how stable the current flow is. So sometimes what you need to be doing is fixing broken things before you can implement new ideas. And if you're constantly jamming new ideas into the system, the time won't be made to fix the operational things. And this becomes like a a self-feeding prophecy. Asking people to do new work, it requires time to adapt and change. And you need to be able to figure out what your current team's bandwidth for new and different work is. New work is always going to take the team time to adapt and change. And you've got to keep in mind that any new work is going to be done alongside existing work as well. So you need to get a really good sense of what the team's bandwidth is for new work and different work to what they're already doing because the team might have capacity to add more of X which they're already doing. Like say the team was doing customer support and you were like we're going to bring on 500 new customers and they would be like okay well that's another 800 tickets. The team's at 80% capacity but adding 800 tickets doesn't scale linearly against what's already there. So it's pretty easy to sort of fit that in. But if you then said to that team, I've got an idea. We're just going to hit the streets, do user research, and you got to spend a couple of hours a day outdoor asking people questions. Those are two completely different things. You might need less of the thing that's different to the thing that they're already doing, but you can fit a lot more of what they're already doing in their current capacity versus trying to introduce something new that's completely different. So, knowing all that, this is how you need to think through an idea, how you validate it before you decide if you go or you don't go. A lot of ideas and inspiration is going to come from seeing someone else doing something, but you can't forget that you need to bring it back to the context of your business. Everything always looks shiny and great on the outside, but no two businesses are the same. Even if you're in the same market, say your two CRM, what works for you will not necessarily work for another person. They could be a different size. They could have a different ideal customer profile. There's no direct comparisons that you can make between two businesses. And it's very true that the same idea presented by you to your team and the same idea presented by another founder to another team could have wildly different results. It could be the extra capacity the team has, the experience the team has that you're presenting it to. And the questions you're going to want to be asking yourself is what problem is it solving? Whether you're a SAS platform and your promise is that the product will do something that takes less of their time or you're a coach and you can help someone increase the amount of money. No matter what business you are, you're sort of making a promise to the customer to solve a specific problem. Now, if you can look at your idea from the lens of what problem is it solving, it gets much easier to narrow down whether or not it's a good idea for your business because the problem space your business is operating in is going to be it should be innately known by you. You should know exactly what problem you're trying to solve with your business and you'll be able to filter out a lot of ideas really quickly this way. The next question to ask is, is it the right problem to be solving? It might be around the core problem that your business or product is promising to solve, but the new idea is it taking the problem space in the right direction? You should know the sort of problems you want to be solving for the customer in 5 years time because you should have been looking at your numbers and figuring out this will only last so long. I need to be doing this. I need to extend into another vertical here. I need to grow my team here. Is this problem, this idea right now moving close enough to the current problems your business is promising to solve or moving you towards the problems that you want to be solving for customers in the future? And then that'll lean well into helping you figure out if it's the right time to be solving this problem. There might be macro factors going on. The industry might be changing like for example adopting AI into your business. I would say that a lot of people sort of panic implemented AI in the case that they weren't really looking is this going to help solve a problem for my customer immediately as much as they were getting pressure from top down that was saying well everyone else has got AI we have to address this we have to put it into the product. If you were able to two years ago when product development was very much focused on implementing AI features say is this solving the right problem for our customer at this time then you might have saved a bit of money you might have saved a bit of implementation problems let other people test and figure out what works and what doesn't because all of the services around that are just better and better now and the it's easier to implement now than it ever was. So that comes into what's going to break if we don't do it. So in the AI example, a lot of companies would have gone really far into this really early on because they were afraid that the entire business would collapse if they didn't do it immediately. How difficult is it to implement this idea? Now you're never going to have a full understanding. Like implement it from start to finish to it's in market, it's being sold, it's being supported. As a founder, you're going to overestimate and focus on the benefits because you're thinking pie in the sky. and you're going to underestimate the complexities and the costs. The consequences of consistently adding ideas and dumping ideas onto people's desks is that the distractions go up, the costs go up, and the organization spraws out. The more and more you do this, the more you introduce with ideas and the more different things that you end up doing, the less time and capacity you have for more ideas. And not having more space for ideas is the entire underlying problem. And it's the thing that you're trying to avoid. There's such a huge amount of hidden work under everything. Nothing's ever simple. No idea is ever a quick 10-minute fix, not to a business longterm. There's operational debt to everything. Every time you introduce a new thing people have to do, there's a new process. There's a new person getting distracted when they're reading through your knowledge base and looking at a line item that they're not even meant to look at. And maybe it's a process that doesn't exist anymore. These things all have huge operational costs over time. But there is one other alternative to doing it or not doing it, and it's the thing that's going to make the biggest difference. It's what happens if you wait. What if you don't make a decision? Your idea is going to be the worst at the moment you come up with it. It's never going to be less informed, less well put together, less considered than it is when you first come up with it. So, if you've come up with an idea and you haven't even done the assessment and you introduce it the moment it comes to your mind, it's the least likely to succeed. The longer you can wait on an idea, the better. Because every moment where you don't act, you have more data. Now, that's not to say never act. You should have tons of ideas going out at all times. And I'll clarify at the end what I mean by that. But the ideas are only going to get better with age. And the competitive risk of not acting on an idea is lower than the operational cost of acting on too many ideas and not doing anything properly. So, the idea is never static. It's always changing dynamically over time. And that could be external forces like the market changing, the technology changing. Or it could be internal forces like the business makes more money now, so the business has more customers now, so the team is more experienced now. Everything's always changing and shifting. And the more time the idea ruminates, the better. So over time, the idea will do one of a few things. Either it will decay, but if it's important, it's going to bubble up again. Now, like I said, the length of time you wait on anything and sit on anything is going to depend. probably scales at opposite ends to complexity and market risk. So if you had like something that was really high risk, you can't wait on it as long. You have to take action much faster. And the same thing if you have something simple, you're probably not going to wait for as much time and as much data before you start doing it. And the other benefit to the time is during that time you're not flatting ideas onto people. They have more operational space to make the business better at taking on more ideas. So you can do less assessment before you bring more stuff into the business and you start throwing things back onto people's plates. So say for example, Ken just sent a video the other day of the new onboarding flow and when it's processing a website, I'm thinking to myself, "Oh, it' be cool if we had like a little indicator to say we're just grabbing your website results with a little shimmer text." Like, yeah, of course the idea would be cool. It would feel cool, but it also costs a lot in everyone's minds to think about and discuss. Every time something's suggested, everyone has to go through their own validation framework in their head. You can't see that cost. It might be done in 10 seconds if it's like a really tiny idea. But nothing's free. Everything adds up. And every idea that you freely give cuz it's very cheap to give ideas. Just typy type. Enter. Done. Move on with your life. Usually that's what happens with the tiny ideas. You just throw them out there and you don't think much of them. It's a Slack message everyone has to read. someone might recall that in memory randomly 5 years later and you're like why is that in my brain like that that's your fault you sent a random Slack message that did that all of those things have cost and as a byproduct of being able to reduce that by putting your ideas on ice and only shipping them into the business at a rate it can absorb it the business spends more time working on the right ideas and they have more time to improve the entire organizational system for its capacity to take on more ideas because what you're ultimately trying to do take more shots at the right ideas at the right times, giving you more chances to hit the jackpot. Right? Nothing you build the first time is going to be perfect. And nothing you improve over time is ever going to be right for everyone all the time. There is an unlimited amount of things that anyone can do to sell things in business. And you want to try and get as many chances as possible at testing the right ways because ultimately that's going to help someone solve a problem that you can capitalize on the difference. And this is I think where so much hunger is coming from for the promises of the AI tools is like, oh, now I can do more. Now I can execute on more ideas. Now I can do this, now I can do that with less people in a faster amount of time. People are essentially trying to have more shots at getting it right, getting the jackpot, getting the thing that customers want so they can make money. And you want that for your business. So you have to be looking for ways of reducing cognitive overload. And ideas is a really good one to start with, especially if you're a business leader and you're constantly coming in going like, "Hey guys, look at this. I think we should do this. Should we integrate with Canva today?" Like there's sometimes you just have to get out of the business's way and make time and space for it to make more time and space and give the ideas time to ferment or decay and hopefully get better over time. I think if you can start clocking into how often do you throw ideas into the ether with no real consideration of the cost to the business, you'll realize this is actually like a tiny area of change for me that could be a huge improvement to the business. Especially if you're bringing up ideas in board meetings or meetings with 5, 10, 50 people. And if you do check in with yourself doing this and you're noticing a significant improvement, consider passing it on to the next people and also having everyone like chill out on the idea downloading. Never stop having the ideas. Always do the thought experiments that you need because that brain practice that's going to make the business good and everything, but stop downloading your ideas onto other people as fast. Start thinking about when is the right time to download these things into the business and inseminate them out into the business and does the business have capacity? What other things are going on? Try and prioritize against everything else that's going on in the business, which you'll need to have a good sense of what's going on if you want to be able to do that. Well, obviously. So everything you put out has a cost to the business and to the people in your business. And the fun thing about this is if you've listened this far, this is an idea and it's going to take up space in your brain for a little while now before you go on to forget it because you watched some other video. Thanks for stopping by. base.