Forget Dog Years - It Is Amazon Years Every Company Craves

Not every year at every company is valued equally.

Just like a year in a dog’s life is equivalent to seven human years,
the same can be said for experience in certain companies.

Unlike many Monday morning armchair pundits writing about corporate
life, I can talk from experience having worked for Amazon on their
Fashion Leadership Team during explosive growth. We had acquired
Zappos and Shopbop, created MyHabit, and were sowing the early seeds
of private label offerings and breaking the mold at Amazon by
innovative marketing strategies.

That year was the equivalent of ten years at another company. I
secured a seven figure investment in 48hours, got to sit the other
side of the table from Jeff Bezos and be a part of watching his
brilliance at work while laying the foundations for what became one of
the fastest growing profitable divisions of Amazon.

Everyone asks me what it was like to work at Amazon and if all the
stories are true, I wrote about this at the time in my INC Magazine
column that you can read here.

The two biggest challenges that Amazon faces is how they appropriately
scale back their strategic appetite to meet the reality of their
hiring capacity and managing the risk of having Bezos associated with
the Washington Post. If I was on the Amazon board I would tell him to
extract himself from that investment as the political ramifications
are too risky having both roles.

Meanwhile ask yourself, are you at a company where your learning is at
the rate of dog years or even Amazon years? If not perhaps it’s time
to consider how you define and find your perfect next executive role.
You can download a free teleconference I recorded here to explain just
how.

Dedicated to growing your business,

Val

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