Sometime around the last holiday season, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos announced a plan to home-deliver merchandise within 30 minutes of the order being placed . . . by a little helicopter drone. That’s right. He claims, when the system is ready some years in the future, you’ll call Amazon, place your order, and 30 minutes later your stuff will be plopped right on your front doorstep.
At first, I thought it was a gag . . . maybe some sort of publicity stunt. I mean, c’mon, little helicopter drones flying all over the place dropping packages at peoples’ homes? I bet the FAA just loves that idea. But then I thought, maybe there’s actually some method to the madness here. After all, Bezos is, if nothing else, a world-class innovator. So maybe there’s a clue here about how innovation can take place.
For more on this, please read below.
“Make no little plans.”
Famed architect and urban planner Daniel Burnham said that, and apparently Jeff Bezos took Burnham’s admonition to heart. Wouldn’t you love to have been a fly on the wall when Bezos announced his 30-minute delivery plan to his staff? I imagine it might have gone something like this.
BEZOS: OK everybody, listen up. We’ve got to improve our delivery times. When people order stuff from us, they don’t want to wait a day or two to get it.
STAFF: We dunno, Boss. It’s pretty tough as it is to get people their stuff in one or two days. What do you have in mind?
BEZOS: Thirty minutes.
STAFF: You want us to improve delivery times by 30 minutes?
BEZOS: No, 30 minutes total from the time the order is placed until it is delivered.
STAFF: Seriously?
BEZOS: Yeah, although I was hoping we could use the Star Trek transporter and beam stuff to people within just a few seconds, but I don’t think that’s going to work out. Still, I think 30 minutes will be OK. People want their stuff fast, but I think they’ll wait 30 minutes.
STAFF: Holy crap, boss, how’re we supposed to do that?
BEZOS: I have no idea, but you guys will think of something. Give me your plan by the end of the week. Oh, and by the way, have a nice day!
So what’s this got to do with innovation?
It seems to me that when you set a relatively modest goal . . . let’s say to increase year-over-year sales revenue by five per cent . . . what’s the message? The message is, just tune things up a bit, nothing drastic, just a tweek here, a tweek there. And what’s the message when you set an impossibly high goal, like delivery in 30 minutes? The message is, no amount of tweeking is going to get us to this goal. We have to go back to the drawing board, completely rethink our delivery system, and come up with something totally new. In short, we’re going to have to innovate.
To paraphrase the old axiom, necessity really is the mother of innovation. As long as our old ways are working just fine and getting us where we want to go, there’s no incentive to rock the boat. It’s only when there’s a compelling need for change that innovation happens.
But here’s the problem. By definition, innovating is trying something new, something that hasn’t been done before. Therefore, it’s not just possible that you will fail, it’s probable. You may not fail entirely, but you will probably fail to fully achieve the impossibly lofty goal you set for yourself . . . at least not on the first try. So how do you keep the spirit of innovation alive in your organization when the slam dunk, flat out victories are few and far between. Winston Churchill once said, “Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” Great, but how do you do that?
If you want an organization that embraces innovation, your culture needs to move beyond a fear of failure. Tom Watson, legendary leader of IBM, told his people, “The way to succeed is to double your failure rate.” As he struggled to invent the first light bulb, Thomas Edison put a positive spin on it saying, “I haven’t failed. I’ve found 10,000 ways that don’t work.” The point is, we learn more from our failures than from our successes, and it’s just as important to understand what doesn’t work as it is to understand what does.
If your culture accepts failure as the price for being a learning, growing organization, then innovation will stay alive and well.
