MERCENARY OR MISSION DRIVEN?

Be Strategic and Honest in Your Obsession, and Then Obsess to Win

Man is so made that when anything fires his soul, impossibilities vanish.

—Jean de La Fontaine

In the first grade, I had a friend who knew he wanted to be a surgeon. Not just a doctor, mind you, a surgeon. And he became one. I was always jealous of his certainty and the clarity of his mission.

How do you create passion and develop a mission if the path is not innately clear? It’s a question I posed to myself, and it’s a question I pose to leaders. Perhaps, I tell them, the art of leadership is the ability to uncover the passions of each individual and find ways to align and build value from each person’s strengths to accomplish the mission of the organization.

There is nothing wrong with being motivated by other priorities, such as the ability to pursue personal passions, garner influence, or achieve financial stability. In fact, for many business models, careers, and personal lives, these are probably requisite for success. Looking back over my own career, it’s clear my intrinsic interest has been to improve business performance through three approaches: (1) efficiency, or creating processes that yield better quality with lower costs; (2) integration across disparate processes, data, systems, and ecosystems to create seamless capabilities; and (3) the development of new business models and capabilities allowing a business to compete differently.

I once had a colleague who defined mercenary as someone who was “coin operated.” By that, he meant that the only thing mercenaries care about is making money. The term carries some negative connotations. If you’re out to build a strong culture, you probably won’t be calling for a bunch of mercenaries.

Ultimately, financial returns and sales are output metrics. As a leader, you don’t have direct control over them. They are the result of many other things you do. What you can control are the inputs. To win in digital, you must be deeply connected to your customers and users because that’s where the insights are.

In all fairness, success is primarily measured by financial results. Shareholders frequently like mercenaries because a team of mercenaries can drive a burst of short-term revenue. As a result, to have employees with a mercenary streak in them is not necessarily the worst thing in the world. A hybrid can be created. The key is making sure that your mercenary is a patriot. What’s a patriot?

BUILDING A PATRIOT

Jeff talks a lot about how mission-driven teams build better products. That’s great, but what does it mean to be mission driven?

It’s said that wars are won by patriots, not mercenaries. We fight and care differently if we have a stake in the outcome of the war, if the commitment is cemented by something personal. And while it is great if the cement is mixed with a deep passion for the customer, a cement mixed with other ingredients can be just as strong and beneficial to the cause.

Here’s the deal. Most employees don’t start off as patriots. Usually, they’re grateful for the job, but they are only mildly interested in the mission, and they are generally unclear on it. If they can’t be inspired, they usually shrug their shoulders and start focusing on doing a good enough job to continue collecting paychecks every two weeks.

As a leader, it’s your responsibility to transform these people from self-centered mercenaries to dyed-in-the-wool patriots. So how do you convert these mildly interested employees into the passionate ambassadors you need for your company to be able to compete successfully in the digital era? You must find a way to clearly define the mission, inject it with a sense of legacy and importance, and then figure out how to connect that mission to each and every one of them.

I joined Amazon in early 2002 to lead the launch of the Amazon Marketplace business. Today, that business accounts for over 50 percent of all units sold at Amazon, and there are over 3 million sellers on the platform. However, when I came aboard, two earlier attempts at a “third-party” business had failed and eBay had what felt like an unassailable position. A different strategy was needed, and the entire Amazon leadership team was hoping that the third time was going to be the charm. Of course, when I arrived, I was met with skeptics. Yes, “customer obsession” was alive and well, but I discovered a profound internal apathy for the vendors. I sensed that the organization viewed sellers as third-class citizens. Of course, these were the people we were counting on to populate the very business we were building. They had to be the lifeblood.

Amazon needed to convince these merchants to invest in building their businesses to serve Amazon customers. We had to sell them on these great tools and capabilities that we had built for them to succeed. We had to enable them with everything we could to help them deliver to demanding standards. In short, we needed to build, almost from scratch, an obsession for merchants.

I started by writing out this vision and understanding, holding several town hall meetings, and making the connection that “merchant obsession” was key to winning in this business. And, boy, did we need this business to work for us. The pressure was immense.

As I built the merchant organization, I needed a wide variety of technical, project management, and business skills. Yes, I could have (perhaps “should have”) insisted that everyone have an incredible passion for customers and sellers, but I was not going to let “perfect be the enemy of good enough.” If I hired motivated, excited, and talented people, I felt I could harness them to the mission. It was vital to develop a personal relationship with the employees as individuals. I had to learn their personal passions, strengths, and motivations. Finding their individual unique connections to the mission and guiding their passion to its legacy were keys to success. And the process never ended. It required that I continuously wave the seller-obsessed mission banner before them as a constant reminder and inspiration that we were doing something revolutionary, something world changing.

BEZOS’S POINT OF VIEW

Jeff talks about the need for a committed, customer-obsessed team. Quite frankly, it’s one of his greatest hits, and he plays it often:

I strongly believe that missionaries make better products. They care more. For a missionary, it’s not just about the business. There has to be a business, and the business has to make sense, but that’s not why you do it. You do it because you have something meaningful that motivates you.¹

Jeff’s point is clear and hard to debate. But it is also incomplete. It’s incomplete because it doesn’t explain that the business or team mission has to be aligned with every individual’s mission. Furthermore, if the opinion is that people can’t develop this mission if they don’t have it when entering a business, then hiring or transitioning a team gets tricky. Define the mission, figure out how it connects to passions, interests, and personal missions, and consistently integrate the mission in communications and meetings. You will be able to bring much more of the team along.

If you can continue to build excitement and purpose for yourself and your team, you will build a better product, a better experience, and a better business serving customers. And you will be setting the stage to be a Day 1 business.