One of Amazon’s principles is Bias for Action.. I used to call this Getting Stuff Going until i was pointed to a write-up about Amazon’s core principle. It sounds a lot better so I started using it.

How I understood this means is that when you are running a business, especially a startup, your one effective weapon is speed. Because you are small, you can accord to make mistakes and because you are no one, when you make a mistake, no one will notice and just move on. What you should not do is be risk averse, by starting a new business, you are already taking a big risk. If you plan to do something, think about it for a while and just try it and see if works. If it does not, either try it a different way or do something else.

I have spent many years working at Sage which is one of the biggest software companies for small businesses. I have seen a lot of meticulous planning on new projects and then total failures despite the careful planning. The failures are not always caused by bad execution. When you are doing something new, you are making an assumption or taking a leap of faith. You are taking on a risk. No planning will prove your assumption is correct. As Mike Tyson said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth”. The key thing is to start small and iterate through the process. Big companies tend to favor big launches, come up with a big market budget and then make a big splash launching a new service or a new product. Then hope the big splash will drive enough demand for the new products or service to make it profitable soon. There certainly have been success stories with companies with smart and huge product launches. But for us here at Versa Cloud ERP by Versa, we do not have such luxury.

We have an informal rule internally that during any company meeting, if someone raises an issue about something, then that person gets the action item to do something about it. If the person raises the point does not do anything about it and no one else raises the same point , then clearly it is not important to do it right now. Only important things will get done. When working on important things, start small and no matter how small it is, it is the first step towards your final goal. Because you are taking small steps, any mistake you make can be easily correctly and the cost of such mistake is minimal. We have launched new feature in the product and then realized it is complete wrong so we have to redo it. In some companies, you call this a failure but we would like to see it as a learning. You learn what not to do which is still valuable.