Jeff Bezos
Always Day 1
What Day 2 looks like
Amazon shareholder letters, 2016 and 2015
Someone asked what Day 2 would look like. The answer, and the four parts he installed to keep it away.
What actually happened?
He named the headquarters Day 1. In 2016 somebody asked what Day 2 looks like, and he answered in the shareholder letter: Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1. What follows is not a slogan but a recipe: customer obsession, resisting proxies, embracing external trends, high-velocity decisions. The last is the most quoted — most decisions are two-way doors you can walk back through, so they belong to small teams moving fast, at seventy per cent of the information you wish you had.
Day 2 starts when process takes over from outcome
The first thing he names is the proxy: as an organisation grows, people start checking whether the process was followed rather than whether the customer was served. The process is not the thing, and it is a young manager's easiest confusion. When we followed the process becomes a defence, Day 2 has already begun.
When we went through every required review is treated as the conclusion of a post-mortem rather than the start of one, the process is now signing off on outcomes.
Sort the door before you set the speed
One-way doors — irreversible — should be slow and heavy; two-way doors fast and light. Most organisations apply one-way approval to everything and drag reversible decisions out for months. Sorting is step one; step two is handing the two-way ones to whoever is closest.
Label every proposal one-way or two-way. On the two-way ones cut two layers of approval and cap it at forty-eight hours. Speed itself grows a culture willing to try.
Customer obsession is the vaccine because customers are never satisfied
He ranks this first, and the reason is mechanical: customers are divinely discontent even when they say they are happy. Obsession with competitors goes mediocre as the competitors do; obsession with process calcifies. Only discontent is an engine that never stops.
Change the quarterly goal from beat the competitor to remove an annoyance the customer has stopped complaining about. The first has a finish line; the second does not, and only goals without one keep you young.
How do I use it today?
Where you are: the company has grown, everything is orderly, and it feels slower.
Ask first: of the last three significant decisions, which were one-way and which two-way? For the two-way ones, how long did they take and through how many layers?
Where it goes wrong: applying high velocity to the irreversible ones, or turning customer obsession into support scripts while the actual obsession stays on the dashboard.
Lines to keep
Day 2 is stasis, followed by irrelevance, then decline, then death.
Customers are divinely discontent, even when they report being happy.
Same situation, other people are asking
I explained it and what came back was not it.Everything is orderly now and we've somehow got slower.What I ask for and what I get are never the same thing.We added people and less gets finished than before.Nothing ships · all 12 questions →If this one named what you are going through,
send it to someone who needs it, or keep it somewhere you will find it again.