E59 | Innovating Through Operational Excellence with John Rossman

Are you looking to innovate your business? To make it more agile? More effective? Then who better to receive advice from than the former Amazon executive who launched and scaled the Amazon Marketplace business, the guy who ran the enterprise services business at Amazon for 3 years?

That’s right, today’s guest on The Melting Pot is none other than John Rossman, the highly sought after analyst who worked for Amazon.com in its early days and who has since been featured by The New York Times and CNBC amongst others.

“I was an early person at Amazon, I was there from early 2002 through late 2005. I got to launch the Marketplace business. So that’s 58% of all units shipped and sold [on Amazon] are now on that Marketplace business.”

Today, John works with companies and leaders showing them how to innovate and operate better within their space, by teaching them new tools, techniques, strategies and leadership principles to do just that.

He’s also recently released a book called ‘Think Like Amazon - 50 ½ Ideas to Become a Digital Leader’. He talks at length with Dom about ideas in the book, as well as how operational excellence feeds into innovation, citing numerous examples of where Amazon have been successful.

Seriously, this is the episode, as a business leader, you won’t want to miss out on.

On today’s podcast:

• Why the best innovators are the clients in crisis
• Why digital transformation is about personal leadership
• How operational excellence feeds into innovation
• How Amazon launched Marketplace
• What didn’t go to plan with Amazon Marketplace
• Why John left Amazon
• The importance of writing simple clear communications
• Why his books aren’t about Amazon, they’re about the reader

Links:

• Think Like Amazon - 50 ½ ideas to become a digital leader
• The Amazon Way: 14 Leadership Principles of the World’s Most Disruptive Company
• The Amazon Way on IoT: 10 Principles for Every Leader from the World's Leading Internet of Things Strategies