Amazon's Endless Mishegas

I’m writing this week’s newsletter early, and while looking at the Atlantic ocean. I am in Florida for the 3rd annual Belt retreat, and tomorrow we will be having meetings—meetings!!!—all day. (We have meetings about….4 days per year, and 2 of those are in Florida).

It is certainly not SOP, this Belt retreat, nor is it befitting a press of gritty, DIY Rust Belters. But it works for us. Even if it rather cold this year.

To prepare for the meeting Dan and I did a bunch of reports. I will not lie: every year, when we do these reports, I stare at the numbers and yell “THAT’S IT?! All that work for that much!?”

Maybe we shouldn’t run reports.

That said, there are many narratives you can tell about data. If I want to impress, I can focus on how we increased our revenue by 25% in 2019 over 2018. I think real business business would consider that solid. This year, I told Dan I wanted to tell one narrative at the retreat, connected to plans we have for 2020, and to that we needed to compare di…