When Jeff Bezos started Blue Origin, people asked, “Who does he think he is?” 25 years later, Blue Origin rockets fly to space. Amazon Web Services (AWS) received similar criticism and doubt early on. Truly big ideas always sound crazy at first.
AWS was ridiculed internally and externally as an overreach; they said Amazon was getting out of its depth. Few people understood why any retailer would build enterprise computing services, but now AWS is the industry leader.
One of Jeff’s most famous quotes is, “Entrepreneurs must be willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.” He put this into practice with Blue Origin, AWS, Prime, and many other products and businesses throughout the years.
One reason innovative entrepreneurs must be willing to be misunderstood is that radical ideas create cognitive dissonance. They challenge our current mental models, and humans (especially smart, successful ones) have a tendency to default to skepticism when faced with unfamiliar methods, modes, and ideas. The second reason is that true innovation always takes place over a long period of time.
Most of us don’t realize how quickly our hunter-gatherer brains translate “new” into “threat.” As a result, organizations, even nimble ones, often react to transformational ideas with resistance. The more radical the idea, the stronger the reflex. This often leads to innovative ideas being killed before they have the chance to develop over years and decades.
The automobile, the airplane, the personal computer, the internet, and just about every major innovation took years or decades to reach mainstream adoption. If it weren’t for the people and companies pushing through skepticism for long periods of time, they wouldn’t have reached it at all.
To foster innovation, leaders must acknowledge these patterns of behavior and develop proactive mechanisms to combat them. The methods for cultivating, developing, and managing a new product or business are at odds with the management of an established enterprise.
The methods for innovation start with the intention to be open-minded and patient, to be willing to bet on new ideas, and to continue working on them for long periods of time.
Because of this, being misunderstood is a necessary byproduct of building something new.
In our book, Working Backwards, we describe how Jeff Bezos went beyond good intentions and established management practices to foster innovation inside Amazon while simultaneously rapidly scaling its core e-commerce business.
To learn how he did it, check out our book: https://lnkd.in/gzJ4qb45
