Today I wanted to look at vision in leadership and talk about businesses who had the kind of leadership that led them to become a household name, and some who flopped out of the starting gate, and a couple others whose leadership eventually failed them.
In early 2018, Amazon leapfrogged Microsoft to become the third most valuable company in the world. It only took a month for them to pass Alphabet (Google) to take the No. 2 spot, behind Apple. Today they sit at No. 1. All we have to do to figure out how is to look at leadership.
I’m guessing you remember 20-to-25 years ago when the dot-com boom was hitting the world. There was a little company called Amazon.com that was offering books. It didn’t seem any more special than Pets.com for animal supplies or eToys.com for playthings.
Pets.com didn’t put pet stores out of business and eToys.com certainly didn’t cause the removal of toys from department stores. Those two companies failed quickly. So why are the remaining pet stores and toy stores becoming the endangered species that bookstores already are? You got it, Amazon.com (although we dropped the .com years ago).
Amazon focused on one thing, selling new books at a discount. Then it invented the Kindle. This was reinventing the reading experience. You no longer needed a book. You just needed a small electronic tablet – available only through Amazon! Do you think your local bookstore saw that coming?
So, what made Amazon succeed where the other dot-coms failed? I believe it has to do with the formula they chose to grow their business.
Once they firmly had the hardcopy book market, they not only began branching out into the e-book world, they poured a ton of resources into expanding their digital capabilities when it came to the online shopping experience. In the early 21stCentury, sure you could buy things online, but few retailers had user-friendly interfaces. Amazon changed that and created a new kind of shopping experience complete with rewards systems like Amazon Prime for loyal customers.
Along the way, they attracted reseller after reseller, branched into 101 areas, employed more than a half-million and reinvented the shopping experience.
Their leadership (Jeff Bezos) had a slow and steady vision. He didn’t need to be the biggest bookstore overnight. He didn’t need to be the biggest online retailer in the world in the 1990s or 2000s or 2010s. He paced things the right way, adapting new technology as it became available.
How many companies have gone broke because of Amazon? Probably thousands if you include Mom and Pop-level establishments. How many saw it coming? Probably less than a handful. Far too few leaders who get comfortable continue with evolving visions. They reach a plateau, feel good, and think they’re going to stay there forever.
The Mom-and-Pop video stores never saw Blockbuster coming. We can say Blockbuster never saw Netflix coming – except Netflix tried to sell their mail-in business to Blockbuster in the early years. Blockbuster saw no future in the mail-in DVD business, much less the long-term plan of Netflix to stream film directly to people’s homes.
And of course, there’s Kodak. People joke about Kodak missing the digital camera revolution and eventually going belly-up, but many people don’t realize that Kodak actually invented the technology to create the digital camera. They didn’t get left behind. They invented the disruptor and licensed it to the very competitors who put them out of business
I’ve worked with too many people who see business as a game to win or lose. It’s not like that. It’s about resilience, being innovative and being in the best position to adapt. While you can’t control what the Amazons of the world are doing, you can be better prepared for it, and react accordingly if you’ve got a strategy in place to identify potential disruptors. Being a good leader is about having vision.