“Amazon as a company is very boring, we do the same stuff always; focusing on a large inventory, low prices and faster deliveries.”
I hope the statement was sarcastic enough to amuse you.
This and much more happened at Day 2 of TiECon Delhi, 2015.
As the keynote speaker, Amit Agarwal, Vice President & Country Manager, Amazon India talked about championing Customer Obsession in India, the audience was rapt with attention.
To give you a fair idea of how important customers are to Amazon, you’d be startled to know that one chair at every Amazon meeting called the ’empty chair’, signifies the customer.
So the idea is to not be simply customer focused, instead customer obsessed, so much so that all policies and decisions should be worked customer backwards.
The sensible thing to do is to have a long-term outlook, a clear idea of what the distant goals are and having a good intent of following it through.
A common mistake that most young entrepreneurs make, as pointed by Amit, is that they’re too fixated with the details and unclear of the vision. One should instead be rigid of their vision and flexible with the details. The ‘how’ can be worked out.
India being a hotbed of opportunities right now, ticks all the boxes as far as investments go. So now is a good time as any to make a move.
A distinctive advantage that Amazon India has over its global counterpart is that it is not burdened with the 20-year-old legacy of amazon.com.
This nascent stage of Amazon India allows it to foray into both Fashion Week and Venture Capital simultaneously. There’s room for trial and error. Amit puts it better when he says that in experiments, one can not expect certainties.
These are certainly sound ethos to have in place for business. Jeff Bezos would agree with us.
So keep that in mind when scaling up your business, or better yet, when building one from scratch.
This was one extremely knowledgeable session I attended at TiECon Delhi 2015.
Stay tuned for more updates from Day 2 of the mega entrepreneurship event: TiECon.
http://edtimes.in/2015/10/tiecon-delhi-2015-entrepreneurship-ed-lived-it.html
http://edtimes.in/2015/10/women-entrepreneurs-tiecon-delhi-2015.html
