Getting Our House in Order
Amazon's strategy that changed their trajectory
There was a week during college when 4 exams were happening back to back and on top of that, there were 4 different quizzes and 3 assignments due that seem week.
I decided to be like “alright no worries I will just remember everything and it will just be fine.” The first day was alright and I went to sleep at a decent time.
The next was more of the same and It was not until I was walking to class that one of my classmates walked up to me and asked “What did you think of that exam?”.
I just stood there confused thinking , the exam is tomorrow.
After a while, I realized it was me who was wrong and had missed an exam that morning because I was trying to manage so many things at once. Thinking way further in the future made me miss out on what was important for today.
Luckily the professor was pretty understanding and I was able to reschedule the exam to take it later in the week. Lucked out but it was a pretty close call.
The main challenge was there were too many things to keep track of and at the moment I seemed to have control over things. Time passed and my brain forgot so much information and science backs this up too.
Ebbinghaus pioneered landmark research in the field of retention and learning, observing what he called the forgetting curve, a measure of how much we forget over time. In his experiments, he discovered that without any reinforcement or connections to prior knowledge, information is quickly forgotten — roughly 56 percent in one hour, 66 percent after a day, and 75 percent after six days.
I decided the avoid this kind of mixup from happening again and promised myself to write things down even if it’s the smallest of tasks. This worked wonders. Whenever I felt like I was missing something or did not know what to do next I could just organize my to-do list and do a 5 min reset.
Before Amazon blew up to be the crazy giant it is today Jeff Bezos emphasized a GOHIO (Getting Our House in Order) policy. Often companies struggle at the $1 Billion mark and it becomes so large that a system is required to keep itself from falling apart. Yet, many don’t use a system for this problem. Amazon instead spent a year working on everything within and making it more organized, efficient, resilient, and fast track to today you know just how big Amazon has gotten.
Now, whenever I feel overwhelmed I do a quick GOHIO to get things back on track. It taught me the need to slow down and take a pit stop to go even faster.
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