The danger is do you lose focus, the classic challenge of losing focus? So there's a balance. And I think in Amazon's case, if you notice, everything is very tightly connected. If you remove one part, the whole becomes less. That's the key question that are the pieces fitting together nicely, or they just happen to be another business because it's profitable. We've done a couple of cases on cold call that touch on the organizational impact of firms that move into new businesses. In other cases, it seems to have disrupted the culture in negative ways.
Since its founding in 1994, Amazon has expanded into streaming, cloud computing, content creation, and even groceries. But if traditional business strategy tells us that the key to success is focus, why does Amazon work?