Business Is That Simple, If You Stick To The Blue Print

The simple formula Jeff Bezos used to turn Amazon into a $480 billion company

1. Distinguish between high and low impact

As Jeff Bezos explained to Amazon shareholders in his 2015 letter, there are two categories of decisions. Type 1 are the mission-critical, high-impact choices that influence the larger strategy, while Type 2 are the lower stakes choices that can easily be reversed if need be.

Given that most large companies have a very fuzzy distinction between the two, they fall into the trap of immediacy and their ability to direct resources to the truly important things suffers.

Most of your time should always be spent on Type 1 decisions. Type 2 decisions should either be delegated, or they should be batched together with other less critical choices for later.

All you need to know

Amazon is one of the most successful corporations of our day. They have many things going for them, but the key determinant of their success is arguably their decision-making process.

It’s easy to neglect the idea of having a framework in place to make choices. It’s something we have an intuitive process for, but it’s useful to remember that our intuition has known gaps.

Good decision-making not only removes those gaps, but it also filters signal from the noise.

(QZ.com)