Billionaire Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, sets his mind that it is always day one. In the early days, he wrote a letter to his shareholders and described his business philosophy called “Day One”. The idea is that if the people within an organization always acted like it was day 1, then they would show up every day like a brand-new, start-up company. Start-up’s are more likely to stay truly focused on customers and driven by results, rather than being attached to a process.

Here are some of the key points of the day 1 manifesto taken from his letter to shareholders:

1. True Customer Obsession

“You can be competitor focused, you can be product focused, you can be technology focused, you can be business model focused, and there are more. But in my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of Day 1 vitality. Why? There are many advantages to a customer-centric approach, but here’s the big one: customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great. Even when they don’t yet know it, customers want something better, and your desire to delight customers will drive you to invent it on their behalf.”

2. Resist Proxies – Focus on Results Not Process

“A common example is process. Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing. This can happen very easily in large organizations. The process becomes the proxy for the result you want. You stop looking at outcomes and just make sure the process is right. Gulp. It’s not that rare to hear a junior leader defend a bad outcome with something like, “Well, we followed the process.” A more experienced leader will use it as an opportunity to investigate and improve the process. The process is not the thing. It’s always worth asking, “do we own the process or does the process own us?”

3. Embrace External Trends

“The outside world can push you into Day 2 if you won’t or can’t embrace powerful trends quickly”

The moment you fight changing trends, you are fighting the future. This would be like having a fistfight with a giant mountain of Jell-O. Sure, you will do damage, but the mess it will make will be far larger. When you embrace change rather than resist, you are acting like a small start-up company and closer to Day 1 than Day 2. These big trends are not that hard to spot (they get talked and written about a lot), but they can be strangely hard for large organizations to embrace. We’re in the middle of an obvious one right now: machine learning and artificial intelligence.”

4. High-Velocity Decision Making

“Day 2 companies make high-quality decisions, but they make high-quality decisions slowly. To keep the energy and dynamism of Day 1, you have to somehow make high-quality, high-velocity decisions. Easy for start-ups and very challenging for large organizations.”

What’s Day 2 look like? The Amazon founder says simply that, Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.” Being a Day 2 company doesn’t mean instant decline, rather the decline could take decades and might end up being a painful train-wreck watched in slow motion. 

Answer the Following: Are you more like Day 1 or Day 2? 

·    True Customer Obsession – 

o  What would you describe as True Customer Obsessed? 

o Is the customer still treated as they were on Day 1? 

·    Focus on Results Not the Process

o   Are you more attached to the way things are done, or are you focused on the results? 

o  What are you pretending not to know is broken in your business? 

·    Embrace External Trends

o  Where do you see the next problem in your business, and how could you get ahead to meet the demands of your customer? 

o  What are you still doing that you’ve always done, just because that’s the way it’s always been done?

·    High-Velocity Decision Making

o  Successful businesses make decisions quickly and change their minds very slowly. While unsuccessful businesses make decisions slowly and then change direction quickly.

o  How many steps are there in the decision-making process now, and how many where there when you were a start-up company? 

o  What change is needed to make faster decisions within your organization? 

One thing Bezos knows is how important it is to maintain the Day 1 Philosophy at Amazon. How you set your mind not only has implications for you, it affects every relationship in your life. Amazon has over 600,000 employees counting on the way Jeff Bezos sets his mind. How many is affected by the way you set your mind?

TODAY IS MY DAY ONE, AND SO IS TOMORROW!