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Jeff Bezos, the visionary founder of Amazon, attributes much of the company's success to its unwavering commitment to customer obsession. However, as companies grow larger, maintaining this focus becomes increasingly challenging.
photo: Getty Images
In the early days of a startup, every team member is directly engaged with customers, ensuring their needs are met and feedback is incorporated into product development. However, as companies expand and organizational layers form, a disconnect can emerge between decision-makers and customers.
"When you get to be a bigger company, you've got middle managers, and you've got all these layers. And those people aren't on the front lines.
Middle managers and layers of bureaucracy can inadvertently insulate executives from direct customer interaction, leading to a reliance on metrics and processes as proxies for customer happiness. This shift can slow down decision-making velocity and impede innovation.
They're not interacting with customers every day. They're insulated from customers. And they start to manage not the customer happiness directly, but they start to manage through proxies, like metrics and processes."
Bezos highlights the tendency for decision-makers within larger companies to treat all decisions as heavyweight and irreversible, even those that could easily be reversed. This cautious approach can stifle agility and hinder progress.
"And some of those things can become bureaucratic. So it's very challenging. But one of the things that happens is that decision making velocity slows down."
To combat this challenge, Bezos emphasizes the importance of maintaining a startup mindset, where decisions are made quickly and iteratively, with a focus on customer feedback. By empowering employees at all levels to prioritize customer needs and encouraging a culture of experimentation, companies can overcome the pitfalls of bureaucracy and maintain their customer-centric focus.
Listen to his words:
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