Failure has to be part of growth.
“As a company grows, everything needs to scale, including the size of your failed experiments. If the size of your failures isn’t growing, you’re not going to be inventing at a size that can actually move the needle,” Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon wrote in his 2018 annual letter to shareholders.
This tolerance for failure is deeply ingrained in Amazon’s culture. It’s a point Bezos has made every year since the very first Amazon shareholder letter in 1997.
“We will continue to measure our programs and the effectiveness of our investments analytically, to jettison those that do not provide acceptable returns, and to step up our investment in those that work best. We will continue to learn from both our successes and our failures.”
References:
- https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/22/jeff-bezos-why-you-cant-feel-bad-about-failure.html
- https://www.businessinsider.com/how-amazon-ceo-jeff-bezos-thinks-about-failure-2016-5