I’ve read a number of books that refer to a story of an Amazon employee who brought about Amazon Shopping Cart Recomendations by creating a prototype and running experiments.
I finally discovered that Greg Linden was the employee and he wrote a blog post about this story. Greg’s post provides more insights than the business books so go ahead and read his post.
The last paragraph summarizes the importance of experiments.
"Everyone must be able to experiment, learn, and iterate. Position, obedience, and tradition should hold no power. For innovation to flourish, measurement must rule."
Everyone must be free to experiment.