Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility

In product development, if something doesn’t work, you get rid of it. I realized we could apply that same principle to managing people.

incremental adaptation: trying new things, making mistakes, beginning again, and seeing good results.

We hadn’t created it for broadcast. We created it as an internal company document, using it to communicate the culture to new hires and make sure we were perfectly clear about how we wanted them to operate.

data informed rather than data driven.

Everyone in customer service, from day one, should understand exactly how the experience they provide customers directly impacts the bottom line. Making that clear isn’t difficult. Every company has calculated its cost of customer acquisition, and each person who becomes a customer on another customer’s recommendation saves the company that amount

It’s a matter of identifying the behaviors that you would like to see become consistent practices and then instilling the discipline of actually doing them.

One was to conduct an exercise we called “Start, Stop, Continue” in our team meetings. In this drill, each person tells a colleague one thing they should start doing, one thing they should stop doing, and one thing they’re doing really well and should keep doing.

You’ve got to constantly monitor the message and update it. This is a job that you should be doing forever.

the truth is that most people really appreciate the opportunity to get a better understanding of their behavior and how it’s being perceived, as long as the tone of delivery isn’t hostile or condescending.