Always Day One: How the Tech Titans Stay on Top by Alex Kantrowitz
BOOK REVIEWS BY BINOD
BINOD’S RATING: 7/10The central thesis of Kantrowitz’s book is that all of the companies he researched — Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft — believe they have to continually reinvent their business, or they will die. In other words, it’s “always day one,” a term that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is credited with.
When asked during an all-hands meeting in 2017 what day two would look like, Bezos said “Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline.”
The book’s chapters are divided by company, going through Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple, and Microsoft.
In the 1920s, the average life expectancy of a Fortune 500 company was sixty-seven years. By 2015, it was fifteen.
Key concepts
Most companies today are set up for Day Two. They build advantages and defend them fiercely, rather than invent the future. But Amazon and fellow tech titans Facebook, Google, and Microsoft are operating in Day One: they prioritise reinvention over tradition and collaboration over ownership.
Kantrowitz suggests that what he calls the “Engineer’s Mindset” is the key to success at companies such as Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. We often speak about the tech giants in a way that make them seem mysterious, unbeatable, and unknowable. But having looked deeply inside these companies, there's little they do that's out of reach for the rest of us. It starts with the mentality.
The Engineer’s Mindset is a way of thinking — not a technical aptitude — that is the foundation for a culture of building, creating, and inventing. It’s based on the way an engineer typically approaches work. The Engineer’s Mindset has three main applications: Democratic Invention [inventive ideas are encouraged at all levels and in all areas of operation], Constraint-free hierarchy [anyone can approach anyone else to discuss ideas], and Collaboration [between and among relevant constituencies].
Take Microsoft. Under ex CEO Steve Ballmer, Microsoft had a culture that prioritised the loudest voice in the room, was concerned almost entirely with Windows, and spent a lot of time supporting that product. When Satya Nadella took over, he prioritised listening to all voices, putting Microsoft's future ahead of Windows, and using technology to enable more "idea work" and hence more invention.
Or Google, which is the most interesting example when it comes to navigating perpetual change. Everyone thinks of Google as a company that cracked the search code and milked it for all it's worth. In truth, it's adapted over and over. Google has transformed the way it's delivered search from doing so in a website to a browser extension (Google Toolbar), to a browser (Chrome), a mobile operating system (Android), and a virtual assistant (Google Assistant). Each Google reinvention challenged its existing set of products. But Google didn't hold back, grasping that getting sentimental about a flagship product would hold back its future.
The most telling insight into the “Day 1” philosophy is: "The outside world can push you into Day 2 if you won't or can't embrace powerful trends quickly. If you fight them, you're probably fighting the future. Embrace them and you have a tailwind.
Continual reinvention means Amazon has gone from being just an online bookstore to one of the world’s largest retailers, with a cloud computing business, an entertainment business, a grocery store that has no checkout clerks etc.
At Facebook, another way of describing the “always day one” strategy is paranoia, the suspicion that somebody somewhere out there is inventing the thing that is going to destroy you. Facebook takes this paranoia seriously, partly because Zuckerberg has a competitive streak, and partly because threats to Facebook can emerge quicker than threats to Amazon. If you want to challenge Bezos, you have to design and build a global supply chain, but if you want to challenge Zuckerberg, you just have to come up with a twist on existing communication tools and get a bunch of teenagers to download it.
One interesting conclusion is that Apple — which has a market capitalisation of $ 2 trillion — may not be able to extend its dominance because it doesn’t take the “always day one” approach. Apple is in danger of missing the next computing shift, similar to how Microsoft missed mobile. The iPhone is thirteen years old and other Apple products didn't take off or have been put on the back burner. For example, Apple TV and the HomePod have inferior market share compared to the competition, and Apple Car has yet to come to market. CEO Tim Cook has a background in operations but is not a visionary and although he's done a great job of leading Apple since the passing of Steve Jobs, Kantrowitz thinks that Apple needs a major overhaul.
What I liked
The first two chapters around Amazon and Facebook. Learned quite a few things about their cultures. That’s mainly because Kantrowitz had inside access to Amazon’s key people and facilities and even met Zuckerberg, resulting in some fascinating anecdotes and insights.
Highly readable; its something you can finish in one sitting.
If you’re not steeped in tech, this book is a reasonable, if a bit shallow, summary of how the biggest tech companies got to stay big through the latter part of the 2010s.
What I didn’t like
It’s tempting to map the chief executive’s personality and formative upbringing to their company’s actions, as if the rest of the organisation—including other strong executives with their own personalities and backgrounds—were simply subservient.
True, all of these companies are indeed successful and rely on engineers to build their wares, but the counterexample offered—Apple, which tends to compartmentalise its teams and keep their work secret—has also been really successful for 2 decades running as well.
Nothing new, but a quick overview of today's major tech companies.
Conclusion
Most companies will wait until the last second before reinventing themselves (a "pivot").
These acts of desperation rarely succeed. It doesn't have to be this way. And today, we're living in a world where many companies are reinventing themselves out of necessity due to coronavirus. It will help them build the muscle to reinvent again and again going forward.