But the difference between baseball and business is that baseball has what Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos cleverly called “a truncated outcome distribution.” Home runs can only be so big. In a letter to shareholders, he wrote: When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four. In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000 runs. This long-tailed distribution of returns is why it’s important to be bold. Big winners pay for so many experiments.
