Gardening may be an unusual metaphor for business building, but it works on a number of levels.
My grandfather was a keen, and hugely knowledgeable gardener, with a marvellous array of plants, edible, original, and decorative, coming together in a display that Henri Matisse would have been proud of, all year round.
As a young boy, drafted into digging some of his evil smelling concoctions into the gardens with the spade he kept just for me, he used to tell me he had only three jobs in the garden:
- Shape the environment in which the gardens (front and back were distinctly different) lived to best serve the plants he might want
- Plant the seeds at the right time, in the right numbers, in the best spots possible
- Nurture the shoots, giving them every opportunity and assistance to grow, but being prepared to dig them out when they failed to thrive, or a better use for the ground emerged.
This sounds very like what Bezos is doing with Amazon, the business, exemplified by the creation of Amazon Spheres, the gardens, at the Seattle headquarters.
