9 Ways To Change Course In 2024

Papercuts vs big ideas

You should put most of your energy into big, impactful ideas. The 80/20 principle applies here - spend 80% of your energy on big ideas and 20% on resolving paper cuts.

For Amazon, the Kindle was a big idea; the colour of their call to action button was a paper cut. Big ideas leap you forward; papercuts are small nudges.

Jeff mentioned that keeping focused is incredibly challenging, so stick to a few big things.

As a bonus, incorporate Tim Ferriss's framework - one action that solves many actions. An example of this at Amazon was one-click shopping - which fixed many online shopping checkout process problems.

Focus on things that will still matter ten years from now.

For Amazon, things that will still matter in 10 years are - low prices, fast shipping, customer service and selection of goods.

Or going back to the Kindle example - we'll still be reading books ten years from now.

Jeff suggests you don't want to invest too much energy into trends, or you can get stuck treading water, jumping from one thing to the next, rather than making a dent somewhere.

For example, note all the people on Linkedin, Twitter, etc., who were Web 3.0 slash NFT experts and are now AI experts. Next, they'll be.... experts. Marc Andreessen calls these people NPCs for the current thing.

Metrics are proxies for something else.

Amazon used to measure customer refunds as a proxy for customer happiness. But soon realised that was no longer a good proxy for happiness and further optimising for refund rates had no bearing on their customer satisfaction.

Proxies or metrics should be reviewed regularly. Often, what happens in business is metrics outlive the person who instated them; often, you'll find five years on, everyone is still managing by a metric, and no one knows why. They can become ingrained in your business structure.

• What's this a proxy for?

• Is this still relevant?

• Why is it relevant?

And a FUP to that... Anecdotes before metrics

When anecdotes and metrics conflict, trust the anecdote.

Jeff gave the example of call waiting times. Amazon's customer service team kept reporting an average call waiting time of <1 minute, yet they were flooded with complaints about long call waiting times. So, in a leadership meeting to make his point (management was arguing that the metric was correct), Jeff called their customer service line and smiled as they sat through 10 uncomfortable minutes of silence before someone answered. That was the end of the debate.

Letting the junior person speak first in meetings

In meetings, you want everyone's ideas heard. Seniority is not a good indicator of idea quality. Junior people are influenced by their seniors. If a junior person respects you, your opinion will influence theirs, and their potentially good idea will be lost.

In an ideal world, Jeff likes to receive input and or feedback in order of seniority from most junior to most senior.

In addition, If you're not interested in someone's opinion or input - don't make them attend the meeting.

Generally, leaders are the best listeners; they speak last and least. We can all attest to this ourselves - I've been in many meetings where the leader constantly cuts people off and dismisses their feedback - you can watch in real-time as those junior team members shut down and stop contributing.

Think long-term to solve complex problems.

Jeff suggests many complex problems are solvable when you think on a longer time scale. He tends to think in decades, while others think in days and weeks.

Most businesses run week to week, so solutions that take longer to implement get ignored, even though they are far better and a more permanent solution.

This is a strategic framework, too. Working with shorter timescales like the current thing NPCs are drawn to leads people down dead-ends and via long cuts. Over time, short-term thinkers are orders of magnitude less effective.

Real invention is at odds with efficiency.

The most efficient answer is generally already known from experience or other proof - so it's not innovative. And that's fine - we don't always need to reinvent the wheel.

But extraordinary companies do things differently. They're constantly innovating. And innovation looking backward will seem very inefficient. You have to be okay with taking the long road.

When Jeff sits down to attack a problem, he has no idea where he is going or will end up - he potters drifts and wanders.

And...

Ideas are seeds that need to be explored

Jeff is full of ideas, but he reckons only one in every 100 are goers. And it's not obvious which one that will be. They need room to breathe and blossom.

Don't dampen them before they become fully formed.

Notes:

With lists like these - instead of trying to sprinkle them all onto your life at once. It’s better to pick 1 or 2 that really resonate with you and absorb them first.