Umair Haque wrote a post for the Harvard Business Blog a couple of months ago talking about “Awesomeness”, the principal being that being Awesome will trump innovation. Personally, I prefer amazing to awesome. Being amazing… well it amazes. It leaves people with their jaw open, tweeting people, facebooking people, whatever it is, being amazing means that people want to shout about your service. I’ve been amazed twice in this last week and I shared it on twitter which started me really thinking about the amazing principle.
Seth Godin is amazing. He’s conceived the idea and put the team together to share a free book called “What matters now”. A bunch of really smart people have contributed a page each about a concept that really matters to them. The people in the book are amazing. Some of the people are people who’s books, lectures, blogs etc I’ve been following for some time, people like Fred Wilson, Tony Hsieh, Chris Anderson, Hugh Macleod and a lot of others – sorry I’m too lazy to link to all of them, but if you don’t know who those people are do a search for ‘em. And there’s some people I haven’t heard of before as well. It’s a great little book, sharing little bits of wisdom and I’m sure everyone would find some information that’s inspiring in there. Here’s the kicker though. It’s free! People are tweeting about it, people are downloading it, other really smart people are blogging about it. And it’s a great way to promote all the people in there as well as a great charity, www.roomtoread.org. In short it’s amazing.
Zappos is amazing. I met Alfred, the COO/CFO at Zappos last week in Paris, and I heard Tony Hsieh the CEO, speak in Paris as well. One of the things that really got me was that they have a culture book written by the employees and they give it for free to anyone who asks. I couldn’t believe it. So I emailed Zappos and asked for a copy to be sent to Switzerland. It arrived in literally 3 business days. 3 BUSINESS DAYS TO SWITZERLAND. I’m not a customer, I can’t be a customer as they don’t serve to Europe! And they still sent me a copy with some kind of priority post. That’s amazing.
I truly believe being amazing is key. If you can amaze people they’ll write about you, they’ll tell people about you, they’ll buy your product and most importantly they’ll use you over and over again. Being amazing might not be the most profitable, but squeezing margin could hurt your business in the long term (service suffering), being amazing is the key to sustainability. Zappos and Seth aren’t alone, but they’re the ones who’ve amazed me recently. Who amazes you?
