but this is how to botch owning shit um so first let's talk about the amazon definition of ownership Because you're going to need to know the definition and why it matters to see how bad they blew it. So it says leaders are owners. They think long term and don't sacrifice long term value for short term results. They act on behalf. of the entire company beyond just their own team and importantly they never say that's not my job this is the part of ownership that these folks really blew
Let's take a different look. A lot of you like Jocko Willink and his book Extreme Ownership. It's a great book. Highly recommend it. You can get it off my book list at ethanevans.com slash books.
And so what Jocko and Leaf say, oh, and I bugger. I meant to put Leaf's, I misspelled his name. So my apologies to him. I reversed the I and the E. ah sad i'll have to fix that okay anyway they always say that the leader owns the problem if something failed in their case military if someone didn't know their job if someone
couldn't operate their weapon, if they didn't have the right supplies, if they weren't motivated, if the wrong people were on the team, it's always, always, always the leader. The leader owns it. So this is ownership. The leader owns it. Whether you take the extreme ownership view, I highly recommend this book. You take the Amazon job that says leaders are owners. They never say that's not my job. Either way, the leader owns it. Okay, now let's watch what these people did.
So this is the summit at Snoqualmie ski area. The setting is they're ramping up for season pass sales and they start on Black Friday. So day after Thanksgiving. and it uh basically they get a flash crash of their site it goes down nobody can buy they send an apology email which reads as follows in the beginning Regrettably, our season pass launch went far from planned this morning, causing much more than just an inconvenience for many of you that were waiting to purchase a pass.
We know the weight and issues with the new online store were extremely frustrating. And for that, we are truly sorry. Okay. So far, so good. They state the problem. They empathize with the customer. We know it was extremely frustrating. And they apologize. For that, we're truly sorry. If they had stopped their effing message at this point, I would have no show tonight. Other than GameStop.
But lucky for me, they didn't stop. They go on. It was frustrating for our team as well. Okay, good to know. We had anticipated and planned for a high volume of users and heavy loads in the store. Really? Our team and servers were prepared and tested for a massive wave of demand. Unfortunately, right away, something went wrong with our e-commerce vendor system and everything came to a halt. So...
We did everything right. It's so frustrating for us. They did it. This is a complete fail. This is like complete fail one. of what's gonna be several fails and yeah i know i have a bunch of people from amazon who watch and uh yeah And by the way, I see this comment, only Ethan goes skiing, comes back with PowerPoint slides. You have figured me out. That is who I am to the core. It's true. Gotta do something in the lift chair. Down is fun, up. Gotta think.
All right, they go on to wine some more. Our vendor is working hard. Why the hell aren't you working hard? Why aren't you with your vendor? Why isn't somebody on an airplane? Our vendor is working hard to figure out why they did it. That's what this said. which then resulted in blah blah blah although today's demand was high the load blah blah blah it's all the vendors fault they're working on it that's a conclusion now
When you think someone couldn't F up more than blaming the vendor in public, oh, just wait. The message continues. Because of these immediate issues, we deactivated our products and made them unavailable for sale. Or so we thought. With the understanding that passwords would not be available for purchase, our team then instructed many guests to leave their spot in the queue and await another announcement.
The last thing we wanted was for guests to be able to be wasting time waiting for something that would not be available. OK, so far, fine. They're just explaining. However, an issue with the store allowed some people to purchase passes despite the fact. that we had these products deactivated the italics are mine by the way it was not our intention to allow some people to purchase and others not our intention was to decrease the frustration etc your intentions don't matter
Your results do. This is ownership. I'm glad for your intentions, but the fact is we judge ourselves by our intentions and everybody else judges us by our actions. And your action was some people got to buy and some didn't. one of my good friends was one of these people he actually missed the email so he stayed his browser stayed open and eventually he got to buy his passes only to be told essentially he was a bad guy that made things unfair
And the message goes on to talk about how sad they are that it's unfair and some people got stuff and others don't. All right. so this just goes on i'm looking at um danny's comment real quick oh it's terrible gabe just you wait gabe lincoln it will get worse they double down on failure They double down on blaming everybody but themselves. Just buckle up and hold on. Put down the lap bar on your ski lift seat because you might fall out. All right.
Drop all your plans. We're on a plain ASAP to figure out how to get code into production. Yes, Danny, that was a leader. This, not so much. Okay, let's keep going. This is fun. they then end their message with don't be mean to us lastly we ask for patience understanding and consideration as not everything in this process is under our control now there is your direct
contradiction of either Amazon ownership or Jocko Willink and Leif Babin and extreme ownership. It's not us. We don't control it. Don't blame us. with this in mind with with with in mind that we're not responsible pass the buck take a moment to think about others before engaging everyone is going to need blah blah wine wine our team
Wine, wine is working extremely hard, massive understatement to roll out changes, blah, blah, blah. We appreciate all the compassionate words. Oh my God. So what have you done in this message? You started out okay. We blew it. You've then blamed the vendor, passed the buck. Hey. We blew it, but it wasn't really us. It was them. And by the way, it was all of you stayed in line and went ahead and bought after we turned things off.
And hey, all you people who are upset that we let some people through, but not you, and we have a limited supply and we sold them to some people after emailing you and telling you you could get out of line and there'd be inventory available for you later. Don't be mad at us. Don't be mean. It's not us. Oh, my God. All right. When I do these shows at home, my family tells me I yell too much sometimes. I can't help it.
sweet lord yeah so put your questions in because you got to learn from this what do you need to learn by the way is never fucking do this never do anything like this okay but They're not done. Gabe Lincoln, if you're still here, they're still not done. So we're going to get after it. All right. What do they do next? Oh, predictably, round two. five days later they put the site back up it crashes again and they have to send out a message that says regrettably and to our immense disappointment
Once again, the e-commerce platform provided by Aceso had significant issues this morning when the season pass sale relaunched. So, they blew it the first time. They blame someone else. They obviously didn't hold that partner sufficiently accountable. And now they're just going straight to it and blaming them by name this time. They're no longer a partner. They're throwing them full on under the bus.
They're just like, woo, yeah, we'll get to GameStop ASAT. I see you there. We will get there. This is worse than GameStop. Okay, you want to go short somebody? Figure out who owns the Summit at Snowqualmie. I think it's... boing resorts there or if you don't want to short someone go long on them they need your help these assesso guys too apparently so look
this is even worse you're blaming your part you're shaming your partner in public how's that going to help your relationship but wait there's more when you thought the hole couldn't get any deeper here we go And now you nasty, bad customers. Not only was the store unable to cope with the restricted volume that the queuing system was put in place to provide, but some users were able to bypass the queue altogether.
That unexpected access, further compounded issues, blah, blah, blah, not allowing entry to the store for patient guests that followed the guidelines. So, again, blaming the customers again. People bypassing the queue. and not allowing entry to the store for good people.
So they just keep digging a hole deeper. While the nature of limited pass sales inevitably means blah blah blah, whine whine whine, we acknowledge that users bypassing the queue and issues once in the store itself made this scenario much worse. Just like you. We're just like you. We're very upset that guests were able to bypass the queue as we wanted the process to be fair, and it was not.
Okay, so they at least admit the problem, but they're basically blaming their customers for trying to purchase. And they're like, oh, all you people who did buy, you're bad. Hello, these people just spent $300 to $600 on your shit. You might not want to, because this email goes to everyone, including those people. So I know people who bought and got this. It's like, what a train wreck.
Marky Marksman, ASAT, thank you both for your prime subs. Very much appreciate that. This, also, I think you didn't have to do anything to bypass their cue. um it wasn't like this is a bunch of hackers this is a bunch of people who want to buy a ski pass okay this is not people like cross-site scripting a hack on them all right Lastly, they're not done yet. They need to drag their partner through the mud some more. So they append to the bottom of this message.
a message from Assesso, their e-commerce provider. And as you can read yourself, they basically make them apologize for how bad it is. And this is ridiculous, okay? You can go re-review the slides or rewind the VOD. They screwed it up. They didn't own it. They blamed everybody but themselves. And then they whined that people were mean to them. And then five days later, they did it all again. If you wanted an example of how to not own responsibility, man, this is congressional level.
This is whoever wrote this shit has a career waiting in Washington apologizing for politicians. All right. So what do you actually do to do better? Okay. let's do better so first it's a throwback to my childhood if you've never read the berenstein bears uh if they weren't read you as a kid um you may not get this but in these books papa bear always asked it up
he would have written this email. But he at least had the gall or the guts to tell his wife and kids, okay, this is how not to do it. Like, I blew it. Don't do it the way I did.
um i'll also comment i'm pretty sure and danny's here she can give her perspective or other amazon people who are watching i'm pretty sure i'd have been fired if i had written a message like this to jeff bezos when we had a problem if i'd have said the vendor did it and it's too bad customers are being mean to us some of them hacked us he
Either would have fired me to my face or he would have called my boss and said, so I need somebody else on this and we need to move him along. And he'd have been right. Oh my God. I don't always do everything well, but this is abysmal. Okay. So I'll finish the rant. I'll come back to single camera. We'll talk about any questions for this. And then we'll talk GameStop because clearly a lot of people want to talk about the hot news. But if you want your career to go well...
Let me go to the slide for it. This is what you do instead, okay? If something goes wrong, acknowledge that the responsibility is 100% yours. Do not blame the vendor. You chose the vendor. You knew the load. You talked to the vendor. You could have tested with the vendor. You own the vendor. You pay them. So don't blame the vendor. Your customer doesn't care. They wanted their damn product and they didn't get it. Definitely do not slag your customers. Definitely do not. How can that help you?
These people just gave you $500 and you want to poop on them. Tell them they were bad. They just think you're incompetent. Then be clear about what you're going to do about it. which by the way the messages never said shit about what they were going to do they are super vague um audit the heck out of the vendor but do it in private fire them if you need to get a different one
And then figure out a way to make good on your mistakes. Whenever we botched something in Amazon, we tried to do a make good. So these guys did it all wrong. With that said, you do differently. Usually I'm busy telling you what to do and how to do it. In this case, the 20 minute short version of this show is just don't do shit so wrong and you'll do much better. It's not hard.
You know what, too? All the people, if they just said, look, we effed up, we're going to test our systems and be back as soon as we can. They wouldn't have had to say, please don't be mean to us because. People will be like, all right, I get it. You effed up. You're owning it. And if the phone is too hot to handle, either put leadership on that and let them take the calls and see how pissed their customers are or don't answer the damn phone.
Put a message on says we're busy working on problems. We'll be back to you shortly. But don't whine. Oh, my God. All right. I'm exasperated. It's true. Now. I want to give these guys a little bit of credit. So I went skiing. Again, this is pre-Christmas. And given the rough start, I was expecting the ski area with COVID constraints to be a mess.
Honestly, the people working the lines and running the lifts did a great job. They basically got everybody to wear masks. There's a few people who are jerks and don't, and they have to remind them, but whatever. And the operations have been basically smooth. It's amazing. I want to give credit to the regular working staff at the summit. This is clearly a leadership problem.
So with that, we roll credits on the presentation. We'll hit questions in a second. If you are new to the channel and want to know about me or if you're seeing this on YouTube, there you go. That's my background and what I do now. And if you wanna find more, here's all the links. For people on Twitch now, the mods can put them up in chat. Meanwhile, I post a couple times a week on LinkedIn and everything we do eventually ends up on YouTube.
So with that, join us in Discord and I'll go look for questions. We'll see if you have questions on this before. I won't take questions. I won't take questions yet on GameStop. We'll do those next. And somebody in chat will have to give me any more AOC update.
hmm and i will post these slides over on my website later and i'll put them in discord as well so nobody's asking any questions so look i assume that means everybody here uh understands ownership and can avoid screwing this up it's not hard i've had look i i will say i've screwed up huge things at Amazon and elsewhere. If you simply step up, admit it, and fix it, you get a lot of credit because everyone screws up. Seventh Fleet, hello. Awesome Jossom. Nice to see you in.
AOC is still offline fixing tech issues. Well, I sympathize. I empathize with her. I empathize with her. and um i do that's it that's twitch is if you're not a techie and even if you are twitch has got its complexity so we'll take this one question and then we'll hit um We'll switch to GameStop, etc. The question is, how to respond to criticism you know is factually incorrect or malicious? So, super honestly...
What you do in a case like that is first you say thank you for the feedback. You always thank you for the feedback. And then if you have the evidence in hand. And it's not going to seem like you're whining. Contest it right then. Say I appreciate your perspective. I don't believe it's a complete picture. You don't have to say you are wrong. You don't have to start by.
bumping heads with someone because that entrenches them say instead i don't think you have a complete picture because most people at least then they'll be like oh what am i missing um In that case, you go back to them and say, you don't have a complete picture. Let me give you some more context. And then you work your way through. Here's the evidence. This is why what you're saying is not right.
factually incorrect um if it's malicious try and do this with other witnesses like make the person who's malicious attack you in where where others can be like it doesn't seem like what you know people love to attack in private this is why the anonymity of the internet can be a problem it's because it's so easy to slag on people if you can do it hiding in your little room
and not ever have to have other witnesses so whether they're real witnesses or chat witnesses you try to make people give their criticism in public if it's incorrect or malicious
Also be open to the fact that you might have something to learn. You're deciding it's factually incorrect or malicious. Be curious and say, I don't understand it that way. I'm not... i see these other things tell me more now if someone's truly malicious that's a problem but if they're simply incorrect it may be that you don't fully understand and you're actually incorrect so two things
Make sure you really understand and that you're sure they're incorrect because there have been plenty of times I've thought that person's wrong only to learn that I'm the person who's wrong. So.