Wonderfully, Beautifully Dissatisfied

I had eighteen 30-minute calls that day. In each, I notified a colleague their job was eliminated or their team was reorganized. I was an interim Chief People Officer leading a full enterprise restructuring, while also serving as Chief Experience Officer.

Six months earlier, I stepped in as interim Chief People Office after our CPO left unexpectedly. Little did I know that I would be tasked with leading a restructuring. It was one of many surprises ahead.

It was the hardest day of my career. For those who lost jobs, it was far harder. They were talented colleagues. Saying goodbye was heartbreaking. They’d done nothing wrong.

We didn’t see it coming. Eighteen months earlier, we’d celebrated record revenue growth and strong profits. Consumer demand was so strong we scoured the globe for inventory.  We invested heavily in new capabilities and teams.

Then consumer demand slowed, an industry trend that would continue for several years. We were overextended and overinvested. We’d been deceived by temporary demand fueled by the pandemic. All the while, the consumer was shifting. We missed it.

Many of us have experienced disruptions like this. In fact, I’ve seen them at a regular cadence throughout a career. These experiences have taught me many things, often painfully. Three stand out:

·      Organizations and people imperfectly assess risk and misjudge the pace of change. Myriad blind spots and imperfect mental frameworks cause us to misread or ignore customer signals.

·      Change is the rule, not the exception. From 9/11 to global recession to a pandemic to technology-driven disruption, our lives and careers have and will continue to be punctuated by dramatic change.

·      We’re in never-ending pursuit of the customer. Customers are loyal until they’re not. When a competitor finds a better solution to customer needs, your loyal customer will leave in a heartbeat. Customers have no interest in the status quo.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos summarized it best: “Customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great.”

In short, customers have a perpetual thirst for better products, better outcomes and better solutions. This fuels never-ending change, accelerated by ongoing technological innovation, that disrupts those who don’t adapt quickly enough in service of customer needs.

Knowing this, what can we do?

Pay Attention to Faint Signals

“They are a fly by night company.”

“No one will buy things online.”

“We will hire you back when it doesn’t work out.”

These were all comments made to me when I accepted a job at Amazon in late 1998. The last comment was from an executive at the publishing company I left. That same company went out of business several years later, disrupted by the very trends fueling Amazon’s dramatic growth.

Amazon has since become a dominant company of the 21st century because it meets customer needs better than competitors. It uses technology and invention to lower costs, increase speed and improve the experience in multiple industries.

Earlier in my career, when I was a journalist, I saw the same pattern. Consumers shifted to channels that deliver news faster, more conveniently and less expensively. The industry, whose mental models were forged in the pre-digital age, did not see it coming. They were optimizing the status quo rather than inventing on behalf of customers.

You might wonder: How can intelligent, reasonable people be so wrong?

Because we can’t or don’t want to see faint customer signals around us. Because venturing beyond familiar ways of working is scary. Because we play it safe when that is the least safe thing to do.

But customers are not vested in our desire for familiarity or safety. They want better solutions.

I remember the first time I used the internet. An editor at the publishing company I worked for showed me an early browser called Mosaic.

It was like a wizard showing an eager apprentice their first magic trick. It felt like discovering fire. Accessing the world’s wisdom through a computer for the first time was a profound experience, a glimpse into the digital future.

Jeff Bezos detected this faint signal while working as a quantitative hedge fund manager in New York City. He saw that the nascent internet was growing exponentially. He imagined how it could solve customer problems more effectively than existing solutions. He left his high paying job on Wall Street and drove west. He bet on that faint signal.

That bet was Amazon. Bezos bet on other faint customer signals over time, including cloud computing and digital books. In each instance, technology enabled better solutions for customers. The signals were there but others chose to ignore them. They were too vested in the status quo.

Publishers and booksellers could have invented the Kindle. Music labels could have invented iTunes. Blockbuster and movie studios could have invented Netflix. But they were too close to conventional paradigms. They ignored what customers wanted. They played It safe, the least safe move of all.

Be Productively Paranoid

First, Barnes and Noble was going to kill us. Then eBay was going to kill us. Then Walmart. Then Google.

In my years at Amazon, we lived in a constant state of productive paranoia. It was not a fear or focus on competitors. Rather, we woke up every morning fearing someone would more effectively solve customer problems around price, selection and convenience.

In fact, the premise of my newsletter is this:

Our primary objective as leaders must be never-ending pursuit of a customer who is never satisfied. We must embrace the brutal truth that today’s loyal customers will happily leave tomorrow for a product that better serves their needs.  How we meet those needs today will soon be irrelevant. That future is coming sooner than we think.

I have seen this in transformation roles in retail, travel and healthcare. In most cases, the organizations I joined were catching up the customer. It was sometimes painful and messy. Becoming a customer-centric, digital organization requires profound changes in every part of the organization.

The same wave of disruption fueled by digital is beginning again with AI. The pattern will repeat itself. The winners will detect faint signals, be productively paranoid and aggressively customer needs.

This means we are in a constant state of change that wreaks havoc in our organizations, which are built around aging models. Change often feels sudden but faint signals are there if you pay attention.

It is not easy to live and work this way. But it is better than the alternative. The safe bet and the familiar approach is the least safe bet. In an unpredictable and volatile world where customers are always dissatisfied, we need to pay attention to faint signals and remain productively paranoid, always in pursuit of a beautifully dissatisfied customer.