You may have noticed that Amazon.com Inc. has been edging into Los Angeles. It started a grocery delivery service here in June, its first such initiative outside of its home city of Seattle. And in late July we reported that it was negotiating to lease a big space in Santa Monica to produce online entertainment.
If delivering groceries and creating online productions seem like wildly disparate endeavors, you’re right. But then, Amazon is kind of a nutty company.
I mean, here’s an enterprise that is feared by its competitors, loved by customers and racked up revenues of almost $67 billion in the trailing 12 months. Yet it reported a net loss of more than $100 million in that span and never has made a profit over its life.
Folks have long opined that you have to give it a pass because Amazon is an enterprising tech-oriented startup, the kind of company that isn’t expected to make money yet. Excuse me, but Amazon is no startup. It’s 19 years old – which should be prime earning time in a successful company’s life span.
Others say that Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, is a visionary who’s more interested in creating a powerful business for tomorrow than about profits today. But what kind of business is he building? Amazon is called an online retailer, but lately the company reportedly has been testing its own wireless network and wants to develop its own smartphone. In addition to delivering groceries, that is. And that’s just in the last few months.
Now you have to wonder how much Bezos may be distracted by playing with his newest toy, the Washington Post.
The big problem for Amazon is that if something goes awry – sales drop, a recession hits, a black swan glides by – it may not have the resources to sustain itself. And all those stockholders who have bid up its shares to unbelievable heights will wonder why Amazon hadn’t figured out what it wanted to be when it grew up. Or why it hadn’t bothered to bank any money in its prime earning years.
• • •
There’s a book coming out Oct. 1 that’s a notch above most management tomes. It’s called “The 80/20 Manager,” and it’s by Richard Koch, the same author of 1997’s “The 80/20 Principle.”
Also known as the “Law of the Vital Few,” the principle posits that 80 percent of our results come from 20 percent of our efforts. It’s similar to the phenomenon that explains why 80 percent of humankind’s advancements were the responsibility of about 20 percent of the people. Translated to the business world, it means about 80 percent of your company’s profits come from 20 percent of your customers. And 80 percent of your sales come from 20 percent of your products.
But turn around that calculation: only 20 percent our results come from 80 percent of our work. In short, we waste much of our time. Business people spend about 80 percent of their work time chasing customers who will likely be marginal at best, attending pointless meetings on schedule or beavering away at producing meaningless memos. This book strives to get you to recognize all that for what it is – it’s waste, and it sucks up 80 percent of your time. So, the author argues, stop doing it. Just stop.
A lot of management books emphasize ways to efficiently prioritize your workload: Focus on A and then on B and finally, C. But the 80/20 manager is more radical. Focus exclusively on A if that is what is giving you 80 percent of your results. Blow off B and C, if at all possible. They’re distracting you from focusing on A, the one thing that’s important.
The book can be naïve. (It recommends delegating busywork, but what if you’re the poor soul who gets delegated to?) And it’s only about 250 pages, but it still feels bloated at times. Here’s a predicable cheap shot: You can get about 80 percent of the message by reading 20 percent of the book.
But finally, here is a book that you’ve been waiting for: A serious management text that encourages you to cultivate laziness. No, not a true do-nothing indolence, but an intelligent, strategic laziness. A laziness that gives you ample time to think creatively and act decisively on the matters that are really important. A laziness that doesn’t leave you time to attend those dull meetings or create more mindless memos.
To paraphrase the book’s subtitle: there is a way to work less and achieve more.
Charles Crumpley is editor of the Business Journal. He can be reached at [email protected].
