Absurdly Driven looks at the world of business with a skeptical eye and a firmly rooted tongue in cheek.
If you haven’t experienced it, you’ve seen it happen.
Companies start doing mindless things that have deleterious results.
Outsiders wonder: “Why did they do that?”
Insiders know, but often won’t admit it. Which makes them part of the problem.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos explained this very phenomenon in his annual letter to shareholders.
He said that ensuring that the company always stood at the beginning of their potential — what he calls a Day 1 status — was a must. Companies should constantly experiment and seek new avenues. An obsession with the customer is an absolute priority.
Why?
“There are many advantages to a customer-centric approach, but here’s the big one: customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great. Even when they don’t yet know it, customers want something better, and your desire to delight customers will drive you to invention their behalf,” he said.
Can you hear me, United Airlines?
Then he talked about companies that slide into a Day 2 status.
I imagine his words being read by one of the two men who do all the movie trailers: “Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death.”
And with these 14 words, Bezos encapsulated where it so often goes wrong: “You stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you’re doing the process right.”
Can you hear me, United Airlines?
Slavishly following the rules and not thinking twice about the outcome leads to precisely what happened on the fateful United flight when Dr. David Dao was dragged down the aisle of a plane, his face bleeding.
All because someone at United decided that the rules said its employees take priority over paying passengers. And if the passengers won’t “volunteer,” call the cops.
I heard that some at United actually uttered these words: “What else were we supposed to do?”
Um, think, perhaps?
As Bezos put it in his letter: “It’s not that rare to hear a junior leader defend a bad outcome with something like, ‘Well, we followed the process.’ A more experienced leader will use it as an opportunity to investigate and improve the process.”
He offered one final thought on this issue, one that will surely reverberate around many companies if it’s uttered out loud: “The process is not the thing. It’s always worth asking, do we own the process or does the process own us?”
Can you hear me, United Airlines?
The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.