The power of 1%

Today is December the 11th and we are all thinking about 2010. The key subject for many of us is how are we going to improve next year, how are we going to grow personally and professionally.

If this is your case, I have a great reading for you.

I read this last year and it is a letter sent by Alfred Lin, COO-CFO at Zappos.com, to all employees of the company. Zappos.com is an e-commerce company specializing in footwear recently acquired by amazon.com

One thing I encourage you to do is to refer back to our Core Values document and specifically the challenge in there: make at least one improvement every week that makes Zappos better. Ideally, we would do this every single day. It sounds daunting, but remember improvements don’t have to be dramatic. Think about what it means to improve just 1% per day and build upon that every single day. Doing so has a dramatic effect and will make us 37x better, not 365% (3.65x) better at the end of the year. Wake up every day and ask yourself not only what is the 1% improvement I can change to make Zappos better, but also what is the 1% improvement I can change to make myself better personally and professionally – because we, Zappos, can’t grow unless we as individual people grow too.

A great message from a management point of view and very adequate for all aspects of life.

So what do you think? is it doable?

Link to the full letter: here
Image source: www.sxc.hu