“My manager wants me to Think Big. How do I do that?” This was probably the most common question I would get during mentoring discussions at Amazon, because ‘Think Big’ is an Amazon Leadership Principle that everyone is evaluated on. There are versions of this elsewhere: ‘think outside the box’, think different’, ‘10x thinking’, and so on.
The problem with this phrase is that is it is backwards. An idea can be big post-implementation. But it can be debilitating to think of a ‘big’ idea from a blank space. What we need are ways to approach solving problems in non-obvious ways, to look for opportunities where the streetlights don’t shine.
“If I gave you a billion dollars”
It was the summer of 2019 and Jeff Bezos was not happy. The Wall Street Journal had published an article stating that Amazon has ceded control of its site to third-party sellers who were selling counterfeit, unsafe, and mislabeled products. The US Trade Representative had added Amazon to its list of ‘notorious markets’ for counterfeiting. And, worst of all, he was receiving dozens of emails from customers who were unhappy about the quality of products they were purchasing from Amazon. He asked his team for ideas to improve this and reviewed plans for the next year. The plans included incremental improvements, which left him dissatisfied.
He laid out a challenge – “If I gave you a billion dollars, how will you clean this mess up?” This, suddenly freed up the teams from constraining their thinking to annual budgets and current headcount, and think afresh. Without boring you with the details, we came up with a few different ideas that were implemented over the next three years that made a dramatic improvement in the quality of the store and of the third-party sellers selling on the store. The kicker is that we needed only a tiny fraction of the billion dollars to make the changes.
“Let’s take a goal that we will miss”
Everyone thought we were incompetent idiots. It was taking us three months, on average, to onboard a business to become a seller on Amazon, after we ensured that they complied with European regulations. This had slowed down growth and had frustrated all sellers on Amazon even before they sold anything. We had a plan to reduce this time by 10% for the next year. I was sitting in my manager’s office telling him about everyone that was screaming at me and we were wondering what we could do.
After a few minutes of silence, he said, “Let’s take a goal that we will miss. Instead of reducing the onboarding time by 10%, what if we took a goal to reduce it by 90%?” It was ridiculous, but it was also a spark that forced us to approach the problem completely differently. We ended the year by reducing the onboarding time by 70%. We missed our goal, but did hell of a lot better than the 10% we had set out to do earlier.
“Creativity is just connecting things”
New ideas emerge from connecting the boundaries between different fields, specializations, and points of views. There are too many examples to cite: from how reading The Hitchhiker’s Guide triggered an idea that we implemented in a product to how learning about a process in China led us to incorporate a feature in another product. One time, I rejected an idea our team came up with until an expert in Operations showed me that the idea would not only make it a better experience for customers, it would also save us millions of dollars from operational efficiency.
I have learned that reading widely, being insatiably curious, and being open to others’ points of views leads you to new ideas. Steve Jobs said, “Creativity is just connecting things”. Who am I to disagree with that?
“What could go right?”
There you have it: temporarily get rid of constraints, set goals that are a little silly but not completely unattainable, and seek the intersection of diverse fields of thought. These will allow you to escape the gravitational pull of conventional thinking. Last, remember that new ideas are fragile and ill-formed, so I always ask myself a question when looking at new ideas: “what could go right?”
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