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Businessman:
I see this precept as a call for open-mindedness, a willingness to
explore any opportunity no matter how bizarre it might seem at first
blush, at least until it’s well understood and evaluated. In other
words, it’s about thinking outside the proverbial box… Few
companies do it better than Amazon. After surviving the dot-com
bubble which destroyed most internet startups of that era, Amazon
has grown up to become what is arguably the world’s best business-
model innovation organization. While most companies tend to focus
on refining what they’re already good at, branching out only in
narrow ways, Amazon has been able to identify and grasp onto
opportunities that virtually no one else saw coming. In the words of
their CEO Jeff Bezos, “If you want to continuously revitalize the
service that you offer to your customers, you cannot stop at what you
are good at. You have to ask what your customers need and want,
and then, no matter how hard it is, you better get good at those
things.”
Sounds simple, but it takes fearlessness, discipline, drive, money,
and the willingness to get it wrong from time to time in order to make
that happen. To quickly recap their evolution as an enterprise,
Amazon originally set out to change the way people bought books.
When they found that they had excess capacity they began
brokering an online marketplace with other sellers, expanding their
core e-retailing model to cover a plethora of products far beyond
books. Nowadays it’s tough to find anything (legal) that you can’t buy
on their website. With an extremely efficient supply chain and
delivery processes, they can either directly sell or broker everything
from consumer electronics to handyman services, clothing, sporting
goods, and fresh groceries. Their “Prime” subscription service used
to be a way to get free shipping, yet now it leverages their IT
investments to come with streaming movies and music, cloud photo
storage, and a Kindle sharing library.
Speaking of Kindle, their e-reading platform leverages an application
that can be downloaded onto smartphones and computers or used
on their inexpensive tablets so that customers can be continuously in
touch with their content no matter where they are or on what device
they wish to access it with... And, much like Apple’s iTunes, Amazon
takes a small cut out on every transaction. They even own a
publishing house, CreateSpace, to help their user base generate
original content such as books and videos. Leveraging the
technologies that built their own website and vast IT infrastructure,
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has commercialized cloud computing
to grow their application hosting service into a multibillion-dollar
business too. All these innovations flowed from their core business
as it continuously expanded, but they did so in unconventional ways.
Clearly not every business has a culture that can embrace risk-
taking or become as entrepreneurial as Amazon. We may not be
Amazon, or want to be for that matter, but we certainly can learn
from them. We all need to innovate, but not just in products or
services. We also need to be able to identify opportunities to create
and deploy new business models too. For example, we must ask
ourselves how we can utilize excess capacity better in our
enterprise; find ways to leverage our resources toward optimal
business value much as Amazon used excess IT capacity to build
their AWS hosting services. This requires creative thinking.
Everyone has the capacity to be creative, in most cases our
imaginations ran wild as kids, but many of us have had the creativity
socialized out of us as we grew up. In other words, in school we
discovered that there’s only one right answer, which by implication
means that everything else is wrong. That may be true in
mathematics, but in business more often than not that’s simply not
the case. There really is more than one right way to do everything,
yet some are more profitable and less risky than others. This means
that we need to do the hard work of innovating, churning through,
trying out, and discounting ideas, in order to discover the best ones.
Oftentimes this means failing along the way… It’s okay to fail from
time to time, but it’s not okay to give up. For instance, Thomas
Edison created nearly 3,000 different ideas for lighting, evaluating
each of them for practicality and profitability, before inventing the
light bulb that he became famous for. Clearly creativity isn’t just
throwing out a bunch of ideas to see what sticks, it requires hard
work, but the end results are worth it.
A challenge, however, is that creative thinking draws critics in much
the same way that fresh manure draws flies. After all, if we come up
with something that has not been done before, our innovation
challenges the status quo. It’s threatening. But, we can prove the
naysayers wrong, even when it is our own selves who get in our way.
For example, a decade or so ago I published an editorial in
ForeWord Magazine
titled “Romancing the Tome, An Ode to the
printed book.” As you can no doubt guess from the title, I wasn’t a
big fan of e-readers back then, yet today I do virtually all of my
recreational reading on a Kindle or via the Kindle app on my
smartphone. At the time I wrote the article I meant every word of it,
but it turns out that I was mistaken… After evaluating the benefits
like cost and convenience I was also willing to admit that I was
wrong and embrace the change.
We must all force ourselves to be open-minded in order to be able to
adopt valuable new ideas. Albert Einstein once said, “Imagination is
more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we
now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire
world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” If we wish
to be truly innovative, to break from customary beliefs, we must let
our imaginations soar free.
In this precept, Musashi was spot on.
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