What Healthcare Can Learn from Jeff Bezos’ Letters

Every year since it’s IPO in 1997, Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos writes a letter to his shareholders articulating his philosophy of business, innovation, technology, and leadership. I recently took a stroll through the 44,000 words across 23 letters, and oh my goodness, there are some gems in there! Healthcare could learn a few things from Jeff Bezos.

The Most Common Word? Customer.

 A blogger combined all letters and ran them through a word-cloud generator. The most common word? Customer! Appearing over 400 times. In contrast, “Amazon” only appeared 340 times.

In 1997, Bezos wrote, “From the beginning, our focus has been on offering our customers compelling value.” In 2002, “Obsess over customers: our commitment continues.” In 2008, “In this turbulent global economy, our fundamental approach remains the same. Stay heads down, focused on the long term and obsessed over customers.” And again, in 2013, he proclaims, “We have the good fortune of a large, inventive team and a patient, pioneering, customer-obsessed culture.”

And, from 2018, my favorite quote: Wandering isn’t an efficient practice for a business, but it isn’t random. It requires a culture of builders. It requires a deep customer obsession. And it requires an understanding that you should always listen to the people who use your products, ultimately imagining and inventing on their behalf.

Want to dive deeper into the letters? Check out the complete archive on Amazon’s website, and this awesome book, The Bezos Letters: 14 Principles to Grow Your Business Like Amazon.

Healthcare Should Be Customer Obsessed Too

Being customer obsessed means fiercely focusing on the humans that are engaging with your products, services, and experiences. It means deeply understanding their goals, motivations, context, and needs, and then designing something that solves a problem for them.

In healthcare, we need to be obsessed with our patients. How might we design the best patient experience, from beginning to end? It means we need to be obsessed with our clinicians too. How might we ensure our healthcare workers are not only safe, but happy too? What tools, processes, technologies, systems must be create to ensure the end-users achieve their goals? Healthcare needs to measure its success by the success of its patients and providers.

Customer obsession means listening and learning from end-users. We must empathize with patients from the beginning of their healthcare journey. We must engage with healthcare workers that are the ones actually providing the care to understand how we might help improve their workflows, their tools, their processes.

Customer obsession is NOT about imposing a solution onto end-users that we think is “cool” or we think is “best for them.” Customer obsession is collaborative. It is a partnership. It means including both patients and healthcare works in the ideation and prototyping of new experiences.

What customer obsessed healthcare systems can you think of? Comment below or request to join my private LinkedIn Group where we can discuss together!