Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos on the ‘meaning’ of failure – Times of India

NEW DELHI: There’s ‘good failure’ and ‘bad failure‘ as per world’s richest man and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. “There’s experimental failure — that’s the kind of failure you should be happy with. And there’s operational failure. We’ve built hundreds of fulfillment centers at Amazon over the years, and we know how to do that. If we build a new fulfillment center and it’s a disaster, that’s just bad execution. That’s not good failure. But when we are developing a new product or service or experimenting in some way, and it doesn’t work, that’s okay. That’s great failure. And you need to distinguish between those two types of failure and really be seeking invention and innovation,” says Bezos while talking about business failure in the book titled ‘Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos‘.
The book is a collection of writings and public statements by Bezos, with an introduction by journalist and biographer Walter Isaacson. The excerpts of the book have been published in Business Insider.
In the book Bezos talks about how Amazon has had so much practice of failure, “We’ve failed so many times — I think of this as a great place to fail. We’re good at it. We’ve had so much practice.” He goes on to list several failures that Amazon has seen over the years. These include Amazon Auctions, Amazon Fire phone and zShops.
“We started Amazon Auctions. Nobody came. Then we opened zShops, which was fixed-price auctions. Again nobody came. Each one of these failures was like a year or a year and a half long. We finally came across this idea of putting the third-party selection on the same product-detail pages as our own retail inventory. We called this Marketplace, and it started working right away. That resourcefulness of trying new things to figure out what customers really want? It pays off and it is core to everything we do…,” writes Bezos.
Amazon CEO goes on to add how failure is simply a matter of perspective and keeping faith. But at the same time, he cautions that tolerance for failure too has its limits.
The book also talks about how the CEO of the world’s biggest e-commerce company tries to read emails that customers from across the globe send him. Though Bezos accepts that he is not able to read all emails he gets, but he still sees a lot of them. He considers the problems highlighted by customers in these emails as an opportunity to improve. And as to how he picks which email to read? “…I use my curiosity to pick out certain emails,” says Bezos in the book.
Giving an example he writes that usually customers write to him about problems or defects in the orders they have received from Amazon. “Whenever something may seem a little odd about the problem, I’ll ask the Amazon team to do a case study and find the real root cause or causes — and then do real root fixes. So then, when you fix it, you’re not just fixing it for that one customer. You’re fixing it for every customer, and that process is a gigantic part of what we do. So if I have a failed order or a bad customer experience, I treat it just like that,” he explains.