Subordinates haunted by Amazon boss's one-character email

Amazon CEO -Jeff Bezosfamous for haunting lower-level department heads with emails that contained only one character. That was a question mark.

In a recent interview,Bezos explained that, kHi junior managers get emails with just "?", they immediately understood that he was concerned about some customer complaint.

"I still have an email address that clients can write to," the billionaire confirmed, adding that he doesn't usually respond to these emails personally, but does read them. "I read most of them. I read them and forward them to the directors in charge with a question mark. That's my shorthand for 'Why is this happening,'" he explained.

Amazon CEO - Jeff Bezos.

Receiving such emails is quite common at Amazon. Managers in charge will then forward them to their direct reports. Many of the recipients have shared withBusiness Insiderthat, receiving emails like this is not a small pressure.

Managers must immediately jump into the problem, investigate, come up with a solution, and write a response email. This can mean working through the night or on weekends to deliver results.

Jeff Bezos believes that having an email to receive direct feedback from buyers is a way for a CEO to be close to customers, instead of just looking at reporting figures.

"We have a lot of metrics. When you're shipping billions of packages a year, you need good data,"Bezos said statistics matter. However, if the company's numbers reflect one thing but customers say another, he will believe the customers.

"I've found that when there's a discrepancy between the anecdotes and the numbers, the anecdotes are often right. There's something wrong with the way you're measuring it, for example,"Bezos said.

The Amazon boss claims that the ultimate reason for the one-character emails is the company’s core value: customer obsession. Often companies say they are customer-focused, but they are actually competitor-obsessed and spend most of their energy worrying about the competition.

"If your entire company's mindset is obsessed with competitors, it's hard to create motivation if you're ahead of them. Meanwhile, customers are always dissatisfied, dissatisfied, and want more. Therefore, no matter how far ahead you are of your competitors, you're still behind your customers. They're the ones pulling you forward," the world's richest billionaire said./.