Andrew Browning

Amazon's internal metrics said customers waited under 60 seconds for customer service. Jeff Bezos picked up the phone in a meeting and waited more than 10 minutes. The head of customer service had been defending the number. Bezos said "Ok, let's call." He dialed Amazon's 1-800 line on speaker. The room sat there for over ten minutes before a rep answered. The metric didn't survive the meeting. Bezos has a saying: when the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. Metrics don't measure reality. They measure what you designed them to measure. Customer service dashboards commonly filter out abandoned calls, cap hold time at the IVR timeout, and start the clock after the menu tree completes. Every one of those choices pushes the average down. The customers hanging up at minute 9 are not in the denominator. The 60-second number was technically accurate and practically wrong. That call broke through a defended metric in a way no spreadsheet could have. The head of CS had dashboards and a team whose job was to report that number going down quarter over quarter. Bezos had 10 minutes of hold music and a room full of people watching. This is the executive test almost nobody runs. Call your own 1-800 line. Try to buy your own product in incognito. Every senior leader can do it in under 15 minutes. Almost none do, because the dashboards feel like the truth and the dashboards say things are fine. The measurement got redesigned. Wait times actually fell. When your data says you're winning and your customers say you're losing, the customers are right. The data was built by people whose job depends on it going down.

A single accountant stole $53 million from her employer over 20 years and nobody noticed Rita Crundwell was the comptroller of Dixon, Illinois with a population of 15,000 She opened a secret bank account called “Reserve Sewer Capital Development Account” For two decades she transferred city funds into it while filing fake invoices She used the money to become the most successful quarter horse breeder in America Owned 400 horses, multiple farms, a custom bus, and a $2.1 million motorhome She won the World Championship in quarter horse breeding four times while actively robbing a small town Only got caught because a substitute accountant covered her desk while she was on vacation The city had been cutting firefighter jobs and road repairs for years while this was happening $53 million. One woman. 20 years. One vacation.

Building anything in Britain now requires 3,200 pages of reports. A new report gets added to the UK planning system every year. When does the paperwork become the project?

There's a new Lords amendment that will give Mayors the power to approve new underground or tram projects instead of waiting 3+ years to get the Transport Secretary to sign off. That means Tracy Brabin could approve the Leeds tram or Sadiq Khan could approve the Bakerloo Line Extension. This amendment needs to be adopted. Mayors know their area best. They should be able to pledge to voters that they will build new infrastructure and then be able to approve, fund and deliver it. In Spain and France, local leaders have all the power to deliver local transport. In turn, they build projects 2x faster and for less than half the price.

Strasbourg in France has a comprehensive tram network of 6 lines and 35 miles of track, which serves its population of 500,000. Leeds has a population of 812,000 and it goes without. What's the difference between the two? Mayors that have the power to build 🧵