Divergence is the critical organizational skill in the practice of planned serendipity. We can put people in the path of serendipity by getting in motion, and we can see the possibilities serendipity presents to us by developing the skill of preparation, but without the ability to take divergent action, serendipity will never stick. Divergence is how we exercise and recognize our creativity in the presence of chance, and the way we take advantage of all the work we’ve done to get to this point.
When we do it right, the results can be stunning. Occasionally, a company will make a move so seemingly improbable that it’s hard to imagine how it could possibly lie within their branching range. The divergent path that this company takes is so bold and unexpected that it appears to casual observers to be completely disconnected from anything that came before in the company’s main business even though the truth is it’s a natural result of consistent divergent practices. This amazing feat doesn’t require suspending the laws of divergence; it’s merely the next step in making divergence a core activity in the business. By continually stretching their branching range, sometimes in unconventional directions, these companies find themselves in a position to act on possibilities than no one else can even fathom.
Amazon.com is such a company, and its CEO, Jeff Bezos, is a maestro of divergence. Amazon surprised its entire industry in 2004 when it launched a revolutionary new product called Amazon Web Services (AWS), and the story of how AWS came to be is instructive. As we’ve seen, Amazon had become masterful at investing in many simultaneous branches. Yet each of these business groups had its own technology that had to work with the centrally managed systems that all the business groups used. The significant coordination overhead created by all these different technologies was sucking up a huge amount of time and slowing things down across every business unit. In response, Bezos issued an edict that would in very short order transform the company.
Here’s what it said: all teams in the company from that point forward must create software that could talk to other software inside Amazon. This alone was a big deal, forcing every developer to write their applications in a way that would allow others to access it over the network with no additional coordination. This solved the initial problem that Amazon was struggling with, because now every service and piece of software could interact seamlessly. But Bezos’ edict also required something else, which would turn out to be an even bigger deal. It required that every single one of those applications be written in a way that would allow software developers from outside the company to access it.
What this meant, in layman’s terms, was that every part of Amazon’s expertly managed infrastructure—from its computers that process mountains of data, to its infinitely scalable hard drive storage, to its streamlined payment systems—could now be offered as services to the outside world. It would take the next several years, but one by one Bezos began offering these services to third-party software developers for a fee.
AWS was completely unlike any product Amazon had ever offered before—instead of an e-commerce offering, or a service designed to facilitate online sales for other businesses, AWS was a pure technology offering aimed at companies building services on the Internet. Further more, it was a product unlike anything the market had ever seen before. Previous to AWS, when a company wanted to launch a Web business, it had to invest significant amounts of money into putting together the technology platform to support it—buying or renting servers, hosting them in a dedicated location, and paying the high bandwidth costs associated with running a commercial site online. Amazon now provided these components as a utility service—pay for what you use, and scale up or down your usage at any time. To top it off, AWS was offered at a lower price point than anything else on the market. Amazon was able to do this because of the economies of scale it had incurred building up its own infrastructure, as well as smart technical decisions it had made as it grew, that now allowed it to sell that infrastructure to anybody.
But a student of planned serendipity can see that there was much more to it than that.
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Bezos had stumbled onto a problem—the massive difficulty of providing technology services for all Amazon’s different business lines—and made a creative leap that allowed him to envision a completely new path where he offered these services to any company on the planet. And not just any path, but one that challenged the way an entire industry thought about how to sell technology services.
From an outsider’s perspective, this new business line had nothing to do with what seemed to be Amazon’s core business of selling products via e-commerce, but Bezos had a different understanding of what his core business was (and the geek brain to help him maintain enough psychological distance to keep that understanding intact). He knew that the amazing platform his team had built could be good for so much more than it was currently being used for, and it was that knowledge, combined with his certainty about the possibility this new direction represented, that allowed him to branch so significantly.
Most companies haven’t evolved a comparable ability. These nonlinear moves require a boldness and willingness to imagine possibilities that have no current comparable. They tend to face “triple-headed” uncertainties: market (will customers want this?), technology (will it work?), and timing (is the market ready for this?). If one dollop of uncertainty is a de-motivator, a triple dose can be absolutely suffocating.
But done right, as Bezos did, the results can be transformative. This discontinuous leap has allowed Amazon to position itself in a new category—cloud computing—within the information technology market that it wasn’t even in previously. The results have been remarkable: by 2010, it was estimated that Amazon had close to 75 percent market share (or $700 million) in this new category, which wasn’t a blip on the radar five years before.
Bezos’s breakthrough idea of offering his platform as a service to other companies was indeed a huge organizational divergence, but it was one that his company was well prepared for. He had been expanding its range, branch by branch, year after year.
GET LUCKY
AUTHOR: Thor Muller, Lane Becker
PUBLISHER: Wiley
PRICE: $26.95
ISBN: 9781118249758.
Excerpted with permission from the publisher. Copyright Wiley. All rights reserved.
