I'm not going to recap everything but in a nutshell...
Zappos made an error in pricing on one of it's sites - costing them $1.6 million dollars.
The Director of Brand marketing addressed the error on their blog and the CEO Tony Hsieh added his two cents.
@cvharquail posted a super discussion about this issue on her blog Authentic Organizations. To pull from her post:
"Zappos did some problem analysis, they identified the systemic issue, leaders took responsibility, and the problem was not blamed on the poor folks who made the coding error. That’s learning from mistakes, and that’s leadership. And, for Zappos, it’s authentic behavior."
Here's what I like about this situation...
The company decided that the process was the problem - not the people.
From what I can read into this they started by deciding the people were competent, the people didn't do this because they were stupid, lazy, disengaged, or malicious.
They started with a positive view of the people.
I'll ask you this... in your organization would this happen? Would a $1.6 million error be handled the same way?
That my dear readers is a quality organization. If you want to know what a role model looks like - this is a role model.
I tried to link to the post on the Zappo's site but they're having some server issues and the link was broken. Don't know if it is permanent or if it was just a timing thing. But even that was a pleasant surprise. Here's the screen shot of their error page... nice eh?
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