Innovator or operator that was actually pretty much the primary lesson that I took from the book, “Winner Sells All”. There were plenty, but that one sticks out to me a lot. It was an interesting read about the fight between Amazon and Walmart and how the innovations of people and how they purchased everything and continued to one up each other in terms of giant corporate gamesmanship. I don’t know if you feel sorry about two gigantic corporations, with billions upon billions and record profits trying to make their own bottom line better squeezing the mom and pop businesses out, or squeezing other product makers out to the point where they can’t even subsist anymore, but it is definitely an interesting read.
I feel like I like reading business books because they tell me business secrets, but most times I see that a lot of those places operate on the same principles that you do or I do every day just with more money at stake or more customer potential. Which in its own way should tell you that you have the potential to be as big as Amazon, (maybe not) and even if you didn’t really want to but you know it’s the same principles that work. They make the same dumb or batshit crazy decisions too!
Anyway the innovator versus operator concept was a concept that Mark of diapers.com and jetblack.com sold to both Amazon and Walmart. It was actually during his Walmart days that he coined that phrase, though I think he used to wear two hats. One said innovator and one said operator, meaning that his innovator hat was more of like his fantastical ideas that were “pie in the sky” type ideas that could move and shake the industry itself, but required many years of future changes. Many things that would require many parts of infrastructure that would, you know, make it actually work versus the operator hat. The operator hat was the “actually working” on those ideas and building the infrastructure. Kind of like a dreamer versus a doer. I like the distinction because to me, I often find myself split between the two ideas, and if you don’t know it, you can get lost in your thoughts of a wonderful future without actually doing any of the work to make it happen. I think he did too, hence the hats and concept that you have to do the work to make the innovator happen.
They had one concept called the Smart Cart, which I thought was pretty interesting and never quite got off the ground even through Walmart’s massive budget. I kind of feel a little jealous of Mark himself because he was able to bring a lot of different concepts to fruition and just “think” about them and get bought out by both Amazon and Walmart. Dude could have sat on a beach for the rest of his life and been content, but that’s probably not his character.
I’m not sure I’m ever going to reach those heights just due to my nature of ideas and position, but it’s still a good mantra to focus on in your own personal sphere. That’s not to say that anyone can’t make millions, but often times the execution and dreaming of ideas are two different concepts. Sometimes you need two different people-one to dream and one to execute the actual ideas and implement those into reality. It also reminds me of that event that just happened in England for Willy Wonka’s crackhouse shop. The guy had a dream. We all have dreams, but his execution was so poor he pretty much created his own infamy. At that point, you might realize that while his execution was bad-the concept in itself seemed to make people happy enough that they wanted to buy it. In other words, the demand was there. If he had hired a company or produced the show better, he probably would have made some money. It might not have been “retirement now” money, but he could have been successful. Unfortunately, he didn’t hire or didn’t think he needed it. Such is the nature of life and business.