What We’re Reading
A few good articles the Collab team came across this week …
Divinely discontent
From Bezos, this is great:
One thing I love about customers is that they are divinely discontent. Their expectations are never static – they go up. It’s human nature. We didn’t ascend from our hunter-gatherer days by being satisfied. People have a voracious appetite for a better way, and yesterday’s ‘wow’ quickly becomes today’s ‘ordinary’. I see that cycle of improvement happening at a faster rate than ever before. It may be because customers have such easy access to more information than ever before – in only a few seconds and with a couple taps on their phones, customers can read reviews, compare prices from multiple retailers, see whether something’s in stock, find out how fast it will ship or be available for pick-up, and more. These examples are from retail, but I sense that the same customer empowerment phenomenon is happening broadly across everything we do at Amazon and most other industries as well. You cannot rest on your laurels in this world. Customers won’t have it.
In praise of fair-weather fans
Agreed, sports should maximize for entertainment:
Fans shouldn’t put up with awfully managed teams for decades just because their parents liked those teams, as if sports were governed by the same rules and customs as medieval inheritance. Fans should feel free to shop for teams the way they do for any other product.
Competitive advantage
This surprised me:
It’s about 50 percent cheaper to raise hogs in North Carolina than in China. This is due to less-expensive pig-feed prices and larger farms, but it’s also because of loose business and environmental regulations, especially in red states, which have made the U.S. an increasingly attractive place for foreign companies to offshore costly and harmful business practices.
Longevity
We’re nearing the longest economic expansion in history:
Mindshare
More Americans have Amazon Prime than vote for president or go to church:
Incentives
Hospitals in Britain were taking too long to admit patients, so a penalty was instituted for wait times longer than 4 hours So, some hospitals had ambulances stall and drive longer to shorten in-hospital wait time, perverted very function of the institution.
Competition
According to Mr Hastings, our need for sleep is actually its main barrier.
“You know, think about it, when you watch a show from Netflix and you get addicted to it, you stay up late at night,” he said.
“We’re competing with sleep, on the margin. And so, it’s a very large pool of time.”
Have a good weekend.