# Part 1 thoughts
I really like the authors attitude--very positive and customer focused while being reasonable too.  

Excellence seems like a quality with very little supporters today. I love the idea of doing things excellently at a high degree of quality.

I love the idea of each employee having a $2000 allowance to make sure a customer was happy.  The stories he shares of employees using this (to buy metal detectors to find a wedding ring, to fly to Hawaii to get a laptop) are incredibly inspiring.  WAs there ever abuse of it?

I love the long-term view he sets out. Short term cost cutting, shortcuts or other things only lead to everyone losing in the end.  The customer doesn't get your product anymore.  You don't get their money anymore. The employees lose their jobs.

Mostly, what he's teaching is essentially just good treatment of other people--ie, how you should treat anyone you encounter, whether in a business context or not. It all aligns with the biblical worldview of treating people.

I really loved his story about getting to the root of the problem of room service not being done quickly. I turned out to be the large delays in the elevator arriving to take the room service guy to the room.  This was because the laundry service guys were blocking the doors.  This was happening because they didn't have enough linens for each bed which was a cost-cutting measure from the opening of the hotel that had never been addressed!  Finding the root of the problem was a lengthy process that no one would have guessed without the investigation he launched.

Applying the "everyone has $2000 to make customers happy" concept to us, I think this can be seen as the freedom we developers have to fix bugs and deploy the changes to production without jumping through all the hoops of approval or pull request reviews, etc.  We have license and authority to do what it takes to fix things for people.

How do you effectively get everyone on board to serve customers with such high quality?

# Part 2 thoughts
#logos [[2024-08-22 (Thursday)]] 
I really like his thinking around _selecting_ workers during the hiring process versus "just hiring". Find the characteristics and personality traits that make for a good and happy worker in the position you're hiring for and select that kind of person during the hiring process. 

In my case, what makes for a good commerce team developer?  Something to think about...