‘Divinely Discontent!’ — Lionesses of Africa

by Lionesses of Africa Operations Department

“One thing I love about customers is that they are divinely discontent. Their expectations are never static – they go up. It’s human nature. We didn’t ascend from our hunter-gatherer days by being satisfied. People have a voracious appetite for a better way, and yesterday’s ‘wow’ quickly becomes today’s ‘ordinary’. I see that cycle of improvement happening at a faster rate than ever before. It may be because customers have such easy access to more information than ever before – in only a few seconds and with a couple taps on their phones, customers can read reviews, compare prices from multiple retailers, see whether something’s in stock, find out how fast it will ship or be available for pick-up, and more. These examples are from retail, but I sense that the same customer empowerment phenomenon is happening broadly across everything we do at Amazon and most other industries as well. You cannot rest on your laurels in this world. Customers won’t have it.”…and so wrote Jeff Bezos in his 2017 letter to Amazon shareholders. Since then the world has just got significantly faster, customers more demanding for higher quality, lower prices and more speed, until Covid hit the reset button and the world stopped for breath. 

However, if the recent supply chain issues are anything to go by, the world has now awoken from its slumbers (and shock) and expectations have returned to pre-Covid levels. If you missed the chance during lockdown to reset your business, to do some spring cleaning of your operations, of your supply chains, of your customer experience, of your online sales, then sorry for you (to use a South African expression). You are now back to working all hours even during that time between 2.17am and 3.46am when you thought you could possible catch 40 winks and close the eyelids…(yes, we have been watching!).

This ability to ‘rest on our laurels’ is, as we mentioned last weekend (here), a luxury we simply cannot afford. Life is moving at such a pace and as Jeff states so correctly, “…yesterday’s ‘wow’ quickly becomes today’s ‘ordinary’.” We complain about the ‘youth of today’ demanding instant gratification, but the reality is that this is just the way of today’s world – our youth just magnify and vocalize urgency of everyday life in front of our very eyes. 

But is this a race we can never hope to win or even keep up with? How do we even start? The amazing thing is that just as we think something is impossible, so someone actually proves us wrong. Suddenly what seemed impossible becomes within reach and then commonplace…

No one in our grandparents’ day thought the human body could run a 4 minute mile, until Roger Bannister did just that (which was then beaten after barely six weeks!), and now is commonplace with the current record standing at 3.43.13. Women are running at ever increasing speeds with the current outdoor record being held by the amazing Sifan Hassan (4.12.33), the Ethiopian-born Dutch runner, with the indoor record held by the brilliant Genzebe Keneni (4.13.31), another incredible Ethiopian runner. Then when we turn to the Marathon, it is of course Kenya that leads the way…Mary Jepkosgei Keitany who won the 2017 London Marathon in an incredible World Record  time of 2:17:01, with Brigid Jepchirchir Kosgei, the current marathon world record holder for women running in a mixed-sex race, with a time of 2:14:04. All amazing Lionesses of the Track, setting new records, but just as important, setting new benchmarks for those following to surpass…

It appears that where previously we had set our limits, once the record is broken, a new limit is set and this becomes the new goal. That creates ever increasing speeds and demands on our lives and of course ever higher standards that we have to reach, match and then beat.

So how do we keep one step ahead of our consumers and in turn, one (or two) steps ahead of our competition? How do we ourselves become in Jeff’s words – “divinely discontent”? Jeff says in his letter: “There’s no single way to do it – it’s a combination of many things. But high standards (widely deployed and at all levels of detail) are certainly a big part of it.”

High standards. Not a surprise to readers of our weekly musings on the subjects of business, leadership, fabulous Coffee, and, organisational and operational resilience. The joy of high standards is that they spread as if through osmosis across an organisation. If you insist on high standards, all new hires will learn quickly what is expected, likewise, a lax attitude will draw all to the lowest common denominator, not least because great and energetic staff will simply give up and leave. As we wrote previously here, “…in a bad company at these times, one of the often heard complaints is that the ‘Rats deserted the sinking ship’, that is a lie – in fact it is so often the Rats that are left at the end on the ship unable to find anything dry.”

High standards is a way of life for these incredible runners and all athletes who dream of the top around the globe, whatever age. Rise at 5am, go for a run, come home, go to school, return, do homework, down to the track again and so on, and that is just for the girls dreaming of Olympic glory. The jump from representing your School, to your University, to your Club, to your Country, each time there is an exponential jump in performance and the standards they set themselves in an effort to reach such performance and to beat the competition. They are all obsessed with being “divinely discontent”.

In business, of course high standards have to be held firmly by the top and trickle down, and even Marcus Aurelius the last of the great Roman Emperors in his book Meditations talked about ‘Sincerity’ being one of the three main attributes of a great leader (the other two being Kindness and Modesty) as we wrote here: 

“‘Sincerity’.There is no option on this if you want to be a great leader. The rules are simple:

Tell the truth and nothing but the truth. This is a must. Do what you say you will do. Hold yourself strongly accountable to this. LISTEN…”. High standards indeed for us personally as leaders, but one of the best ways  within our business that we move our standards up to an international level, keep the high standards and then show high standards to the world are through the ISO Standards (here). 

If you have never heard of the ISO Standards, their website says: 

“Think of them as a formula that describes the best way of doing something. 

It could be about making a product, managing a process, delivering a service or supplying materials – standards cover a huge range of activities. Standards are the distilled wisdom of people with expertise in their subject matter and who know the needs of the organizations they represent – people such as manufacturers, sellers, buyers, customers, trade associations, users or regulators.”

The wonderful thing about the ISO Standards is that they too are “divinely discontent”. Constantly bringing in the latest experts, be they in Food Manufacturing, Supply Chain Management, Shipping, Warehousing, Fashion, Health and Safety, you name it. If there is an industry, they most likely have interviewed and brought on board these international experts to design the high international standards necessary to run a business within such an industry. With updates and ‘better ways of doing things’ being invented at the coal face of industry daily, these standards are often being updated.