Spending more than $ 100 million on a Fire Phone and getting a bad result, Jeff Bezos said: ‘Never feel bad about failure, even for a minute’

In July 2014, Amazon launched its own smartphone called Fire Phone. However, this product was quickly considered a failure. In September 2015, Amazon decided to stop selling the Fire Phone business and suffered a loss of 170 million USD.

That’s the kind of failure that can make some CEOs angry but not Jeff Bezos! He once told the New Yorker: “You can’t, even for a minute, feel bad about your failure. I didn’t lose sleep at all after that ‘incident’.”

Fire Phone is just one of the two examples of leadership principles and success of the richest man on the planet.

The first principle: Failure is an indispensable part of development

In an annual letter to shareholders in 2018, Bezos wrote: “As a company grows, everything needs to scale up, including the scale of the failed test. If they don’t increase, you will It’s hard to make a change, it’s worth taking risks because then, the blockbuster success can make up for the previous failures, we will work hard but not all the bets. are producing the expected results “.

Bezos’ second secret of success: Ready to take the time to ‘wander’, curious and tinkering.

According to New Yorker, the Fire Phone team has grown to 1,000 employees and cost the company more than $ 100 million. When Freed, the project leader, showed Bezos some of the Fire Phone software, Bezos was very interested in voice recognition software.

Soon after, the billionaire asked to build a team and technology to respond to voice commands. Four months after the launch of the Fire Phone, Freed introduced the Echo smart speaker, which experts at the time considered to be less creative and unnecessary.

But ultimately, the time and effort spent on the failed smartphone helped Amazon push Echo’s unexpected success.

At the consumer electronics show in January 2020, Amazon announced that hundreds of millions of Alexa virtual assistants (built into its Echo smart speaker devices) are being used worldwide. That’s an impressive double that of the 100 million devices Amazon sold at the same time last year. ”

According to Bezos, that success stems in part from Amazon’s willingness to take risks, seize opportunities, and test. The billionaire believes that in order to facilitate creativity and invention, it takes time to be curious and pursue ideas.

In a letter to shareholders, he wrote: “Sometimes in business, you know where you are going and when you should do something. That means working effectively. Designing a concrete and realistic plan. On the contrary, ‘wandering’ in business will not be effective, although wandering can help us find useful values. hunch, intuition, curiosity and an essential counterweight to efficiency. You need to use both flexibly. ”

According to CNBC