Latest / Lead With Clarity: Practical Insight for Senior Leaders / The Fire Phone Problem
Transcript
- Blake Holman: Welcome to Lead with Clarity. This is a space for leaders who want to grow without losing themselves in the process. Each episode is a short reflection on leadership, influence, and the inner work that shapes how we show up for others. Not hype, not noise, just clear thinking for the journey of leading well. Today's episode is entitled The Fire Phone Problem. Here we go. I want to start with a piece of hardware remembered for exactly the wrong reason, and a piece of hardware almost everyone owns now. Because they came from the same 18 months of work. Here's a quote that connects them. Jeff Bezos said, if you double the number of experiments you do per year, you're going to double your inventiveness. The Firephone shipped in the summer of 2014, and it failed fast and publicly. Reviewers were unimpressed, customers stayed away, and Amazon eventually took a write down north of $170 million on unsold units. By any normal normal corporate scorecard, The project was a disaster, and in a lot of companies the team behind it would have been broken up, reassigned, or quietly shown the door as a lesson to everyone else about the cost of swinging big and missing. That is not what happened. Many of the same engineers, working from many of the same underlying technologies, in particular the far field voice recognition work built for the phone's Firefly feature, moved directly onto a different project. Roughly a year later, Amazon shipped the first Echo. The device that seemed to embarrass the company became, within a couple of years, one of the seeds of a genuinely new product category. Bezos has talked about this pattern often enough that it clearly was not an accident. He has said publicly that Amazon needed to be willing to fail at the scale of a multi-billion dollar business, or the failures were not big enough to matter, because the kind of invention that moves a company forward requires taking swings large enough to occasionally lose seriously. The quote about doubling experiments is the mechanism behind that philosophy. It is not really a comment about optimism. It is closer to statistics. If a fixed percentage of attempts succeed, the only lever available for producing more successes is running more attempts, which mathematically guarantees running more failures as well. Here's where the idea commonly gets misread inside organizations that want to sound innovative without actually behaving that way. Leaders will celebrate the phrase in a keynote and then, the very next quarter, treat a failed pilot as evidence the team needs tighter oversight and fewer independent bets going forward. The math never changes. If you want double the inventiveness, you need double the attempts, and roughly double the visible failures that come along with them on the way to the wins. The instinct to shrink the experiment count after a visible failure is completely understandable and almost always wrong. A public miss creates real pressure, from a board, from the press, from anxious employees, to look more careful going forward. Careful in that context usually means fewer swings, smaller bets, longer approval chains. Inventiveness quietly declines exactly when everyone believes they are becoming more disciplined. This has a direct bearing on how leaders should think about tools that can now generate ideas at almost no cost. A language model can produce a hundred plausible product concepts, marketing angles, or strategic options in the time it used to take to brainstorm five. That abundance does not solve the actual bottleneck, though, because the bottleneck was never a shortage of ideas. It was always the willingness to fund enough of them, watch enough of them fail in public, and stay in the game long enough for the next echo to show up inside what looks, from the outside, like just another fire phone. Choosing which of a hundred generated ideas deserves real resources, and which failure is worth mining closely for what it actually teaches is still an entirely human judgment call. Here's what I would suggest you carry into this week. Look at whatever counts as your team's experiment count right now: formal projects, pilots, small bets, and ask honestly whether that number has been shrinking under pressure to look careful. If it has, Pick one small, cheap experiment you've been avoiding, specifically because it might fail visibly, and run it anyway. The fire phone was never really the failure that mattered. The willingness to keep experimenting immediately afterward, without treating the flop as a verdict on the whole strategy, was the thing that actually built Alexa.