Know where Amazon Prime as a concept originated? From a junior engineer who had a silly idea and was given enough leeway to test it out long enough to prove the concept which was then refined at scale and now here we are.Īre you giving your team enough leeway to iteratively test concepts that can be refined later? Are you giving yourself room to test and iterate? The rules Amazon plays by are about real time, data driven, iterative problem solving of the as of yet unsolved problems.Ĭase in point, Amazon recently announced that it has 100 million Prime members. They’re not disruptive because they have all the answers, but because they don’t have to play by the same rules.” What makes Amazon such a threat is that the same math just does not apply. “With the average supermarket operating on a 1% profit margin, the economics of the grocery industry are fragile at best. “One question that remains unanswered is how Amazon will use Whole Foods’ 483 physical stores to help solve what’s known in the industry as the “last mile” problem-the final and most expensive step of the delivery process that takes a product from a central hub to its final destination.” The very thing that makes grocery delivery hard-that food goes bad-is the reason it’s so desirable to a company like Amazon.” grocery sector-the last frontier of e-commerce and a massive one at that. “But with the $13.7 billion acquisition, Amazon had bought itself a real shot at remaking the $800 billion U.S. Meanwhile a recent Fortune article highlights the uncertainty & opportunity in the colossal bet Amazon made with the Whole Foods acquisition. The best quote? “It was certainly much easier in my early decades than today’s CEOs have it,” said former Conagra Foods Chief Gary Rodkin, who retired in 2015.” have continued to lose market share, averaging annual sales growth of 2% from 2012 through 2016, compared with 6% for the rest of the industry.”
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Here’s my hypothesis : effective meat & poultry leaders are constant learners with insatiable curiosity, managed egos, and appetite for iterative problem solving.Ī recent Wall Street Journal article highlighted one aspect of collateral damage of rapid change is that “Over the past two years, at least 16 major packaged-food and beverage chief executives have stepped down.” The article goes on to say, “The top 25 food and beverage companies in the U.S. Or, for our purposes, the unchecked ego is the enemy of meat & poultry executives operating in a world that is increasingly complex AND changing at an accelerating pace.
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In other words, the unchecked ego is the enemy of greatness.