November
23
Tags
The future is faster than one click
I am deep in the thought-provoking book, One~Click – Jeff Bezos and the rise of amazon.com. by Richard L. Brandt. It is an engaging read that goes behind the scenes on how a business like Amazon comes into being. This is not a story of a single brainstorming moment of conception. At its heart, the narrative surrounds an entrepreneur with the ability to look at the same world you and I look at and see it in a different way. Like an artist working with raw materials, techniques, vision and the desire to create something that is more than the sum of the individual parts, Jeff Bezos is a business artist. An artist exists to bring about emotional changes in status for an audience. That is what Amazon does persistently. One Click makes you shift from engagement to conversion status in the blink of an eye. Algorithms shift us into up-sell and competition dismissing states in seconds. The book is packed with insights into the mindset of a naturally intelligent strategist who gave up a comfortable job in finance, was prepared to risk losing everything, surrounded himself with the best (not always the most experienced) talent he could find and gave them a share of the action. I particularly liked the terrible names that Jeff first dreamed up for the company. The fact that Amazon doesn’t always get it right first time shows us how we should all stop worrying about failure and focus on working at something until we get it right. The internet giant’s progressive master stroke is to ensure that competitors are so busy looking at what Amazon is doing that they forget to look after the interests of their own customers. If you want to know how to go about creating an organisation driven by customer satisfaction, this is the book for you. What it doesn’t tell us is how Amazon intends to make purchasing even faster than their patent-protected one-click button. It does, however, give a few hints. Anyone for purchase at the speed of gesture or thought?
