the most important job of management is to focus really intently on the building of great teams.

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

how often do you think companies drop the ball when it comes to customer service, despite all the talk about improving the customer experience?

If you want to know what people are thinking, there is no good replacement for simply asking them, best of all face to face.

billion annually. Research also shows that word of bad customer experiences spreads to twice as many people as that of good experiences. This is a problem that must still by and large be solved by people. Despite attempts to offer customer service through computer bots or preprogrammed FAQs or messaging systems, face-to-face or voice-to-voice servi

data informed rather than data driven.

People need to see the view from the C suite in order to feel truly connected to the problem solving that must be done at all levels and on all teams, so that the company is spotting issues and opportunities in every corner of the business and effectively acting on them. The irony is that companies have invested so much in training programs of all

Employees should be told never to withhold questions or information from you or their direct superiors.

When leaders not only are open to being wrong but also readily admit it—as Reed did that day, and regularly did—and when they do so publicly, they send a powerful message to their teams: Please speak up!