Years ago, I was working with the Promotional Products Association International. It was one of my alltime favorite engagements becaus of the CEO and his senior leadership team – excellent professionals fully engaged.
It was a highly fragmented industry (it may still be). There were 10,000 + members selling everything from branded T-shirts to notebooks and coffee mugs. A handful of large companies controlled much of the business, while thousands of smaller players competed for the rest. That’s when Amazon entered the market.
What struck me wasn’t simply that Amazon was a formidable new competitor. It was how they entered. They didn’t wait until they had everything figured out. They put something into the marketplace that was essentially half-ready. Customers used it. Things didn’t work. People complained, and Amazon learned. They made changes in real time. Within a remarkably short period, what had initially been a pretty rough offering was dramatically better.
I remember thinking about how differently most established organizations operate.They want all their ducks in a row before they expose something to the marketplace. They study it, discuss it, build the business case, work through the risks, improve the plan. There are good reasons for that. If you’re processing someone’s paycheck, maintaining an accreditation system or protecting sensitive data, “let’s put it out there and see what happens” is not an acceptable strategy. Reliability matters.
But not everything requires the same degree of certainty. Some activities need to be reliable. Others need to be experimental. The leadership challenge is knowing which is which because if you impose the standards required for your most critical operations on every new idea, you can make experimentation almost impossible. And while you’re getting all your ducks in a row, someone else may already be in the marketplace. They’re making mistakes, listening to customers, changing the product. They’re learning.
By the time you’re ready to launch, they may be on version five. The question I increasingly ask leaders isn’t simply, “Are we ready?” It’s: “Where do we need to be ready, and where do we need to get in the game, engage our customers, and start learning?”
