Relationships Everywhere!
As maybe one of the most marked turns in the history of mainstream military strategy, Thomas Friedman quotes a US officer in Afghanistan saying, “We don’t count enemy killed in action anymore.”
Early in both Iraq and Afghanistan our troops did body counts, à la Vietnam. But the big change came when the officers running these wars understood that R.B.’s (“relationships built”) actually matter more than K.I.A.’s. One relationship built with an Iraqi or Afghan mayor or imam or insurgent was worth so much more than one K.I.A. Relationships bring intelligence; they bring cooperation. One good relationship can save the lives of dozens of soldiers and civilians. One reason torture and Abu Ghraib got out of control was because our soldiers had built so few relationships that they tried to beat information out of people instead. But relationship-building is painstaking.
That’s especially interesting after I was recently introduced to the notion of “relationship centred medicine” by Andrew via email. It’s quite new for me but I’ll surely be looking out for it more often.
Today we also heard about Amazon’s purchase of Zappos — uber-exemplar of not just customer relations but employee relationships and organizational culture as well.
I first heard of Zappos when I read a story last year that they pay new employees to quit.
Here’s Zappos-prez Tony Hsieh presenting at the Web 2.0 Summit a while back, and here’s today’s video of Jeff Bezos talking about Amazon and the immediate implications of the deal.
Hmmm… another topic to watch.
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Tags: afghanistan, amazon, customer service, employee relations, military, military strategy, organizational culture, organizations, relationship centred medicine, relationships, strategy, zappos
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