Two lessons for leaders who want to drive profound growth

You might have heard about Google’s growth ambitions. Back in 2013, founder Larry Page announced that the internet behemoth would be shifting from a 10% to a 10x mindset: a commitment to do things 10 times better than anything else out there. And that includes growing.

A 1000% growth and improvement target might sound daunting, but in fact, 10x thinking has been part of the secret sauce in Google’s stratospheric success. In an industry defined by non-stop disruption, relentless competition and the ever-present uncertainty surrounding what’s next, Page’s vision has proved to be a clarion call to innovators everywhere.  

Take Echo, Amazon’s intelligent, voice-controlled household app. A major challenge for Amazon’s engineers was latency, the time it takes for the app to respond to a query or a request. When the team presented CEO Jeff Bezos with their plan to reduce latency to just two seconds, they met with a surprising response. “One second,” Bezos told them. Echo needs to react to its user in one second.

A couple of years and a good deal of hard work later, Amazon had done the impossible. And in launching Echo, they’ve created an entirely new computing paradigm giving them an edge on major rivals like Apple.