I just finished The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone. As a reader and a parent who buys Christmas gifts, Amazon has gotten a lot of my money and time. The book was a fascinating look at their culture and the leader who started that culture.
Two things stood out about Amazon and Jeff Bezos: their focus on the customer and their desire to be the biggest and best store online, hence the title.
Here are 9 things I learned and what pastors can learn from Bezos and Amazon:
- “We are genuinely customer-centric, we are genuinely long-term oriented and we genuinely like to invent. Most companies are not those things. They are focused on the competitor, rather than the customer. They want to work on things that will pay dividends in two or three years, and if they don’t work in two or three years they will move on to something else. And they prefer to be close-followers rather than inventors, because it’s safer. So if you want to capture the truth about Amazon, that is why we are different. Very few companies have all of those three elements.” This is the driving force of everything Amazon does. How many churches can say they have that kind of clarity, and that kind of clarity on reaching people who don’t know Jesus. Churches get lost in committees, programs, finances and lose sight of what we are called to do. We lose sight of those who don’t know Jesus while trying to appease those who are already there. Making discipleship only about growing believers, losing sight of the fact we are called to help those who lost be found.
- Looking at things in new ways can enhance one’s understanding. Pastors need to get out of their camps and their bubbles to learn new things and new ways of doing ministry and leadership. If you haven’t learned anything new, been made uncomfortable as a leader recently, that is a problem.
- Bezos chose to start his company in Seattle because of the city’s reputation as a technology hub and because the state of Washington had a relatively small population (compared to California, New York, and Texas), which meant that Amazon would have to collect state sales tax from only a minor percentage of customers. Your location as a church says a lot about you and who you are trying to reach. Have you thought proactively about it? Why are you where you in your city? How does that translate into your vision?s.”
- Figure out what you can do better than anyone and do that: This was a key part of Amazon’s early strategy: maximizing the Internet’s ability to provide a superior selection of products as compared to those available at traditional retail stores. Too many churches and pastors try to be someone or some church they are not. Be you. What can you as a leader do that no one else can? What passion, wiring do you have that no other pastor has? Who are you passionate about reaching that someone else isn’t? The greatest companies and churches have this clarity.
- Our biggest mistake was thinking we had the bandwidth to work with all these companies. When you get to complex, disaster strikes. Like most churches, Amazon has had seasons of complexity. Whether they were buying companies or starting new things. When this happened, Amazon got off track and they felt the cost of it. Burnout, turnover, loss of profit. When churches get busy or complex, they get off track. The problem is that you don’t feel the effects of that until down the road when you are playing catch up.
- During one memorable meeting, a female employee pointedly asked Bezos when Amazon was going to establish a better work-life balance. He didn’t take that well. “The reason we are here is to get stuff done, that is the top priority,” he answered bluntly. “That is the DNA of Amazon. If you can’t excel and put everything into it, this might not be the place for you.” While I’ve written about the work-life balance and health and don’t necessarily agree with how Bezos drove his employees into the ground, he was at least clear on his objective as a CEO and company. He was more concerned about the customer than his employees. He was at least clear and clarity is something a leader can never lose. This was so clear for Amazon that stone wrote, “Bezos was obsessed with the customer experience, and anyone who didn’t have the same single-minded focus or who he felt wasn’t demonstrating a capacity for thinking big bore the brunt of his considerable temper.”
- Every product, shelving unit, forklift, roller cart, and employee badge has a bar code, and invisible algorithms calculate the most efficient paths for workers through the facility. Pastors and churches need to think about how to be more efficient. Time is wasted in meetings, programs, setting up and tearing down, follow up. Things and people overlap tasks because pastors have not asked, “how can we be as efficient as possible?” Does this matter? Yes because this is a stewardship issue. Every moment I spend on something is stewarding my time for God. It needs to be on the right thing.
- Amazon invested heavily in technology, taking aggressive swings with digital initiatives like the Kindle. Amazon also focused on fixing and improving the efficiency of its fulfillment centers. EBay executives searched for high-growth businesses elsewhere, acquiring the calling service Skype in 2005, the online-ticketing site StubHub in 2007, and a series of classified-advertising websites. But it let its primary site wither. Customers became happier over time with the shopping experience on Amazon and progressively more disgruntled with the challenges of finding items on eBay and dealing with sellers who overcharged for shipping. Amazon had battled and mastered chaos; eBay was engulfed by it. Just like #4, eBay tried to be Amazon and Amazon tried to be Amazon. Guess who won?
- “When given the choice of obsessing over competitors or obsessing over customers, we always obsess over customers,” he said, reciting a well-worn and, considering the past few years of competition with Zappos, credulity-straining Jeffism. “We pay attention to what our competitors do but it’s not where we put our energy.” I love the laser focus of Amazon and wish more churches had that. Think for a minute about why focus matters. It clears up what you will do, why you will do it, how you will spend your time and money. Now, what is at stake for your church compared to Amazon? Eternity versus selling things. And Amazon has more clarity than most churches.
All in all, I loved this book. Tons of wisdom for leaders in it and a great story about a great company. I thought it was fascinating.