Showing posts with label eShopping. Show all posts
Showing posts with label eShopping. Show all posts

January 8, 2014

Amazing Amazon

So Amazon should be renamed Amazing, because they are.

They are the best online retailer--love 'em!

SELECTION: Amazon has everything. 

PRICE: Amazon is reasonably priced.

SPEED: Amazon Prime gets you your goodies delivered in under 48 hours. 

RETURNS: Amazon takes returns easily; virtually no questions asked. 

Amazon is so customer focused that you can even email Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO himself, at Jeff@Amazon.com. 

Aside from their highly successful retail operation, they have the Kindle tablets, Amazon Web Services (AWS) for cloud computing, Kiva Robots for warehouse operations, and more. 

So what's the secret of their success?

One thing, according to the Wall Street Journal, is their tough hiring practices. 

Amazon has "several hundred" interviewers called "Bar Raisers" that give candidates extremely thorough interviews.

Bar Raisers typically have conducted "dozens or hundreds of interviews and gained a reputation for asking tough questions and identifying candidates who go on to become stars."

Typically, it "takes five or six employees at least two hours each" to evaluate and vet an applicant. 

Amazon makes all this effort in recruiting to weed out people who are the wrong fit for the company. 

They believe that it's better to invest in a sophisticated recruiting process than to make costly hiring mistakes. 

While this certainly sounds like a well thought out and vigorous hiring process, the article makes little to no mention of performance measures showing that their hires really are better matches, have superior performance, or stay with the company longer. 

The one anecdote given was of a Bar Raiser who found a candidate for a programming job that "didn't know much about the specific programming language."

Barring some real statistics though, either you could conclude that Amazon's hiring process is truly superior or perhaps question why it takes them 5 to 6 interviews to do what other successful companies do in 1 or 2. 

Either way though, Amazon is a amazingly great company. ;-)

(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)
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May 8, 2013

Fun, The Good 'ol Fashion Way

This was a funny picture today on the street in downtown D.C. 

This guy was getting a cheap ride down the thoroughfare in a bin. 

She was pushing and he had his arm raised as the winner of the big race. 

It reminded me of when we were kids and used to ride go-karts down the hill--and only after we picked up some speed did we realize that the breaks didn't work that good.

Oh well, a little flip and some chuckles and no worse for the wear. 

Those were the days, young and carefree--nothing to worry about except whose house we were going over to, next, to wreck some havoc. 

I remember, one day we were having a huge wet paper towel fight and one kid ran into the garage to escape the barrage, I gave chase and unwittingly pushed against the glass in the door to follow and oops my hand went right through.

Not a pretty sight, but I thank G-d lived to tell my kids about it, and now they got one up on me when they do something a little out of bounds and fun--actually they are a lot better than I was at that age. 

And it wasn't that I was a bad kid, I was actually one the good ones--or so I was told--but before we all had computers, the Internet, social media, and smartphones, we had each other. 

It wasn't the technology that drove us, but rather the evolving web of interactions (today my new best friend is...), the challenges we made up (let's bike up to Tarrytown in 100+ degree heat), the fun we found ourselves in (from the board game Risk to early gaming on the Atari, or just cleaning out a friends garage for a few bucks)--times were simpler, more innocent, and in a way better.

When we went home at night from work or for the weekend, our time was our own--were weren't glued to email and always on call. 

When we attended an event, we didn't check our Facebook and Twitter, but paid attention to the company we were in. 

When we ate dinner together, maybe the one rabbit-ear TV was going in the background with one of the 3 networks stations, but everyone wasn't being pulled away for gaming, blogging, or some Internet shopping. 

Don't get me wrong, I love my technology as much or maybe more than the next guy, but I also miss just being me in the physical world with my family and gang of friends, and not just so much TheTotalCIO in the office and in cyberspace. ;-)

(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)
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