Week 2 in the News

Week 2 - In the news…

By Torii Lebel

November 9, 2014

DeVry University

Prof Chao-Hrenek

Business Policy

Founder of Amazon Jeff Bezos has demanded much of his team but the most crucial in his demands is creativity. “I encourage our employees to go down blind alleys and experiment,” says Bezos. “We’ve tried to create tools to reduce the cost of doing experiments so that we can do more of them. If you can increase the number of experiments you try from a hundred to a thousand, you dramatically increase the number of innovations you produce.” That is a key to the success of Amazon, it is not dependent on the owner being the creative one and others implanting the idea, it is the team being creative and implanting the ideas, this ensures that with or without Bezos Amazon can succeed.

As Salesforce founder Marc Benioff emphatically put it during a recent conversation with Dyer and Gregersen at Forbes “I can’t do it all. I don’t have all the ideas. That isn’t my job. My job is to build a culture of innovation. That’s something that we try to enforce. We encourage it. We value it. We notice it. We compensate for it. We require it.” Salesforce. In our world of fast paced instant gratification and the ever growing technology advances, having a company that is willing to recognize that the owner isn’t the backbone behind the company the team they create is will put the success in their pocket. Benioff is spot on with his approach and it shows by his company being number 1 three years in a row on the Innovative Companies list. Even Benioff knows the fault in what he is doing because he can’t pass on to someone what he has created without it being damaged in the process, the next person will have to come up with their own innovations to keep the creative process going and be able to do that before Benioff steps down so that the company doesn’t suffer from his departure.

Bezos on the other hand has positioned Amazon to be a long-term innovator with or without...