In the book, Mr. Jenkins Told Me… Forgotten Principles That Will Grow Any Business by Jonathan Bancroft, it’s clear that Dewey Jenkins, the chairman of Morris-Jenkins, focused on the same type of customer-obsessed questions Jeff Bezos did in building Amazon.com.

  1. How can we give our customers a better experience?
  2. What can we eliminate or make easier so that doing business with us is effortless, happy, and fun?

You also probably want to build a $100 million dollar business and think you’re customer-centric. 

A Bain & Co. survey shared that 80 percent of company executives believed they delivered a “superior experience” to their customers. But when Bain & Co. asked the executive’s same customers about their perceptions, only 8 percent of customers felt those companies were delivering. That’s a huge disconnect. How can that be?

Great metrics often disguise mediocre performance.

Don’t focus on your metrics, start with your culture. Are you and your team customer-obsessed? Are you obsessed with reducing friction? Don’t answer that yet.

An Inc. magazine survey first asked executives what percentage of their employees could name the company’s three top priorities.

The executives guessed 64%. When the researchers surveyed their employees, the actual number was only 2%.

“Two out of 100 employees knew what the company stood for. If you stop and think about how a company’s priorities are literally the reason it exists, you realize just how mind-boggling that number is.” – Alan Stein, Jr.

Align your values and your metrics will follow

It is vital for an organization to align its values and beliefs into an internal narrative that can be shared through storytelling. Only at that point can we tell if the metrics it is monitoring tell the true story.

Also, if you want to Be Like Amazon, just message us, and we’ll gladly send you a copy of our book.

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