This Working Life: The ‘never normal’ is the way forward

The pandemic has pushed companies to trust employees and take calculated risks to learn quickly because they understand the status quo poses a far greater risk to them, says Phil Le-Brun of Amazon Web Services

As the future unfolds in front of us, it’s too easy for companies to become immersed in their own complexity. Picture: Stock image

To paraphrase Jeff Bezos, customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied. Understanding this and genuinely obsessing about customers is at the heart of creating a culture of innovation.

At Amazon, we call this our “Day 1” culture. It is focused on reinvention and continually strives to understand customers better while not becoming complacent based on past successes.

There’s been a counterpoint to this philosophy, though. The phrase “the new normal” entered our vocabulary last year, heralding ...