#22 Divinely discontent 😞
In this (2017) letter to shareholders, Bezos shares his beliefs on how a company can stay ahead of ever-rising customer expectations.
Bezos states that customers are divinely discontent. Their expectations are never static - they go up. It’s human nature. People have a voracious appetite for a better way, and yesterday’s “wow” quickly becomes today’s ordinary.
In order to stay ahead of ever-rising customer expectations, Bezos indicates that a company needs to maintain high standards.
Key elements of high standards:
High standards are teachable. People are pretty good at learning high standards simply through exposure. High standards are contagious. Bring a new person onto a high standards team, and they will quickly adapt. The opposite is also true. If low standards prevail, those too will quickly spread.
High standards are domain-specific. You have to learn high standards in every area of interest. What do you need to achieve high standards in a particular domain area?
First, you have to be able to recognize what good looks like in that domain.
Second, you must have realistic expectations for how hard it should be to achieve that result - the scope.
Bezos provides two examples of how unrealistic expectations get in the way of high standards. One from a friend who wanted to learn to do a perfect free-standing handstand. Here is what her coach advised her on the first day “Most people think if they work hard, they should be able to master a handstand in about two weeks. The reality is that it takes about six months of daily practice. If you think you should be able to do it in two weeks, you’re just going to end up quitting”. The other example is when six-page narrative memos at Amazon aren’t great. This is because the writer feels that the memo can be written in one or two days or even a few hours when really it might take a week or more. The great memos are written and rewritten, shared with colleagues who are asked to improve the work, set aside for a couple of days, and then edited again with a fresh mind.
Bezos shares how high standards benefit an organization:
You can read Bezos' letter here.
PS: Summary of all the Amazon Shareholder letters from 1997-2018 are available as a Kindle book.