The Stress Test Every Business Needs

10Are strategy, finance, and operations integrated for optimal value creation?

Sharath Sharma and Daniel Burkly

Day 1

For decades now, Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO, has been reminding internal and external stakeholders that it is always “Day 1” at Amazon.¹

Day 1 represents the early stage of a company’s life when growth and innovation are typically at their peak. Amazon’s culture promotes a sense of urgency that you would expect in a start-up, but not necessarily in one of the largest companies in the world.

What does Day 2 look like?

According to Bezos, “Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.”

Amazon began as a 1990s dot-com internet start-up, selling books from Bezos’s garage. Since that time, Amazon has evolved into a technology conglomerate with operations in a wide range of industries—retail, grocery, health, and film, to name a few.

Two of Bezos’s four essentials for a Day 1 mindset are high-velocity decision making, and embracing external trends.

High-velocity decision making

According to Bezos, “Day 2 companies make high-quality decisions, but they make them slowly.”

The following are some of the ways Bezos recommends enabling rapid decision making.

• Recognize decisions with two-way doors. Distinguish between decisions that are reversible (Bezos refers to these as two-way doors) and those that are not. For those that are reversible, a faster, more streamlined ...