While experiencing the wave of digitalization, all walks of life in China are also actively carrying out digital innovation practices. Many of these customers have become very interested in Amazon's innovation culture and methods, and have done a lot of research to see how it has grown from a company in a garage to a huge business in just two decades. The empire is far ahead in many fields.
Amazon's success stems from its unique innovation genes and its complete system to keep this increasingly large and sophisticated organization motivated to innovate. Amazon takes "to be the most customer-centric company on earth" as its mission, and its unique and distinctive "customer-centric" culture is the cornerstone of continuous innovation. On this basis, Amazon faces the opportunities and challenges in innovation through four pillars: culture, mechanism, structure and organization.
Amazon has established itself on a mission since its inception: to be the most customer-centric company on Earth. This mission sounds very ambitious and broad. But it is precisely because of this setting that Amazon can set foot in any field that can bring value to customers without setting limits.
On the other hand, the mission is very specific—highly customer-focused. Whenever we face different opportunities to make choices, the decisive question is always: "Which direction can best meet customer needs? For our customers, what is the best?" Different customers have different needs and chance point. These needs and opportunities spur us to continue to innovate and develop new solutions so that different customers can have an easier, faster and better experience.
More importantly, Amazon does not just stop the mission in language, but puts this mission on every employee through the mechanism, so that the whole company can burst out with strong driving force and creativity.
The cornerstone is to start from the customer, start with the end in mind, and push forward the work in reverse. All ideas start with a deep understanding of customers—understanding their pain points and understanding what they need. The reason for this, Amazon’s founder Bezos gave the answer in the 2016 “Letter to Shareholders”: “The customer-centric approach has many advantages, but the biggest advantage is: even if the customer expresses pleasure and Acknowledge that our business is great, but there will always be a certain dissatisfaction among them. Sometimes they don't even realize it themselves, customers always want better experience and service, and your desire to please customers will drive your representative They create."
Because of its focus on customer needs, Amazon has a wide range of products and services. Starting from retail, to cloud technology, hardware equipment business, streaming media content, offline consumer goods, Amazon Fresh, physical retail, unmanned supermarkets, Amazon bookstores, four-star stores, and entering these seemingly unrelated fields The origin is the customer needs we keep discovering, even if they were not our business before.
The famous business flywheel was drawn by Bezos on a napkin in the early days of Amazon to outline Amazon's retail business model, how to understand the current needs of retail customers, and their future needs. Bezos uses this flywheel to allow everyone to calm down and focus on the long-term needs of customers without getting lost in the rapidly iterative changes in the retail industry.
What are the "long-term" needs of retail customers? Lower prices, more options, and a more convenient experience. When you satisfy these long-term, foundational needs, you can create a sustainable, self-driving flywheel.
With the continuous expansion of Amazon's business, we found that this flywheel theory can actually be applied to different businesses. It can range from the entire retail e-commerce company to a certain category; from the entire cloud technology to a certain business unit of ours.
Every business can have its own business flywheel. As long as you use the flywheel to clearly see the needs of customers, you can focus on the most important things and achieve long-term and sustainable success.