Obama and the ‘Amazon Experience’ The President Could Use a Download from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos: Bret Stephens
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304854804579234053792268892?mod=WSJ_Opinion_BelowLEFTSecond
‘Private sector velocity and effectiveness.” “An Amazon-like shopping experience.” Suddenly Team Obama is talking up capitalist enterprise as the model for how Healthcare.gov ought to work. After five years of assailing “millionaires and billionaires” and extolling the virtues of “collective action,” this is progress.
But it is not enough progress.For an “Amazon-like” experience, it isn’t enough to have a website that functions on the front end, the back end and in between. Nor is it enough to have a site that can handle 800,000 users a day without crashing, as the administration now boasts of the health site.
You also need an Amazon-like culture, which is the product of other Amazon-like realities. Such as: Jeff Bezos as the boss, demanding results and innovation from his employees, providing results and satisfaction for his customers and shareholders.
So how does Barack Obama‘s management style measure up to Mr. Bezos’s? Let’s compare:
• Embracing the truth: Mr. Bezos “embraces the truth,” Rick Dalzell, a retired top manager at Amazon, told biographer Brad Stone for his book, “The Everything Store.” “A lot of people talk about the truth, but they don’t engage their decision-making around the best truth at this time.”
Stack that up against the administration’s performance these past two months. On Oct. 1, the first day of Healthcare.gov’s rollout, Mr. Obama said: “We’re going to be speeding things up in the next few hours to handle all of this demand.” On Oct. 25, Jeff Zients, Healthcare.gov czar, said: “By the end of November, Healthcare.gov will work smoothly for the vast majority of users.” On Dec. 1, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius wrote in USA Today: “For those who prefer to shop online, you may want to visit Healthcare.gov in off-peak hours.”
And here is Karen Ignagni, president of the health insurance lobby: “Until the enrollment process is working from end to end, many consumers will not be able to enroll in coverage.” By the reckoning of the Department of Health and Human Services, some 30% to 40% of the second end remains unfinished.
• Sweating the details: “Bezos paid a lot of attention to the flow of the checkout process and the warehouse order processing software,” writes biographer Richard Brandt in his book “One Click.” “And everything had to be stable enough, able to handle enough traffic that it would not crash and leave customers stranded, a common problem, especially in the early days of commercializing the Internet. ‘He was scared to death that we would get all these customers, and then they would go away because the system didn’t work well, wasn’t easy,’ says [programmer Peri] Hartman. “
And here is Ms. Sebelius telling CNN’s Sanjay Gupta about what the president knew, and when:
Gupta: “Do you know when he first knew there was a problem?”
Sebelius: “Well, I think it became clear fairly early on, the first couple of days.”
Gupta: “So not before that?”
Sebelius: “No, sir.”
• Real-time accountability: Mr. Stone describes a meeting during the 2000 holiday season when Mr. Bezos tested a claim by Bill Price, his vice president for customer services, who said hold times on Amazon’s phone lines were less than a minute.
“‘Really?’ Bezos said. ‘Let’s see.’ On the speakerphone in the middle of the conference table, he called Amazon’s 800 number. . . . Bezos took his watch off and made a deliberate show of tracking the time. A brutal minute passed, then two. . . . Around four and a half minutes passed, but according to multiple people at the meeting who related the story, the wait seemed interminable.” Less than a year later, Mr. Price was gone from Amazon.
And here is Ms. Sebelius at a press conference in late October on the subject of accountability:
Reporter: “Who has been fired? Senator Bill Nelson said people should be fired for the website not being up and running by October first. Who have you fired?”
Sebelius: “No one. No one has been fired. My goal is to actually get the website up and running.”
Reporter: ” Madame Secretary, what is your response to people calling for you to resign?”
Sebelius: “The majority of people calling for me to resign I would say are people I do not work for and who do not want this program in the first place.”
• Searching, not planning: The development expert William Easterly makes a useful distinction between “planners” and “searchers”:
The former come to a task with preset ideas about what should work, and then they go about implementing the plan. Searchers, by contrast, spend their time figuring out through trial-and-error what does work.
Amazon succeeds because it searches. How to reassure customers that their credit card information is safe? Should Amazon invest in warehouses or not? (Mr. Bezos at first opposed the idea, then changed his mind.) Should the site feature negative product reviews? Mr. Bezos gambled that customers would appreciate the honesty. And so on.
By contrast, the Affordable Care Act is the brainchild of planners, the people who always think they know best—and are always the most shocked when it turns out they don’t.
“I’m accused of a lot of things, but I don’t think I’m stupid enough to go around saying, this is going to be like shopping on Amazon or Travelocity a week before the website opens if I thought that it wasn’t going to work,” Mr. Obama admitted at a press conference last month, in a rare moment of presidential humility.
Maybe it’s the beginning of something. If the president still wants to create a customer-friendly experience, he could make an effort to learn how it was done in the first place. He can order both biographies—one of them quite critical of Mr. Bezos—on Amazon, glitchlessly.
Comments are closed.
