Warren Buffett’s annual letters to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders are considered “must-reads” by the business and investment community. And for good reason — they are chock full of wisdom and Buffett’s worldview.
But there is another set of must-read letters: Jeff Bezos’s annual letters to Amazon shareholders, which he’s penned each year since Amazon went public in 1997. One of my favorites was the 2018 annual letter in which Bezos talks about the importance of “wandering” in business.
Amazon has experienced amazing growth over the last 30 years. What started as a website that just sold books is now a digital marketplace that is an “Everything Store” and also a leading provider of cloud services, video streaming, and digital content. Amazon is now the fifth most valuable company in the world, with a market capitalization of $1.8 Trillion.
In the 2018 letter to shareholders, Bezos notes that a key to Amazon’s success is that its culture encourages employees to be curious and invent and to approach business with a “beginner’s mind” because the “path to success is anything but straight.” Success requires iteration: “invent, launch, reinvent, relaunch, start over, rinse, repeat, again and again.” Moving forward requires experimentation and failure. And here’s where wandering comes in. Bezos writes:
Sometimes (often actually) in business, you do know where you’re going, and when you do, you can be efficient. Put in place a plan and execute. In contrast, wandering in business is not efficient … but it’s also not random. It’s guided – by hunch, gut, intuition, curiosity, and powered by a deep conviction that the prize for customers is big enough that it’s worth being a little messy and tangential to find our way there. Wandering is an essential counter-balance to efficiency. You need to employ both. The outsized discoveries – the “non-linear” ones – are highly likely to require wandering.
So it’s best to have two tracks: one based on planning and strategy and another based on wandering.
This is a great notion for businesses, but it is good advice for our personal lives and careers: we should have plans but also wander and explore — search out new experiences and opportunities. Engage in trial and error. Be open to failure.
There’s no way I could have planned out my career in advance. I began my career practicing estate planning law at a big law firm, then moved to a bank trust company, where I spent less than a year because of an opportunity at Arthur Andersen. Then, when Andersen failed, I helped start my current company. Looking back drives home the idea that planning will only take you so far. I am so glad I wandered.
Your “wandering” is also apparent in your eclectic intellectual interests! An admirable characteristic shared with us in the IFOD! Thank you!!!