Zappos is an online apparel retailer that started out selling shoes but ended up in as a full apparel retailer. Their mission statement is not unique, but I feel what is different about them is how they align themselves to meet that goal objective. They have a great sense of humor and they really are embracing the whole social media thing.
Today I came across this excellent blog post from their CEO, Tony Hsieh, and there are a few bullet points I just want to re-iterate here:
- Table selection is the most important decision you can make. [Evaluating market opportunities]
- Figure out the game when the stakes aren’t high. [Strategy]
- Learn by doing. Theory is nice, but nothing replaces actual experience. [Continual Learning]
These are excellent ideas. Lets try apply them to Brunei’s ICT industry [report by Dr Yong Chee Tuan and Hj Abdul Rahim Derus].
These two posts by Tony Hsieh and Dr Yong Chee Tuan are such rich sources of material for us to talk about. e.g. the Digital Review of Asia Pacific 2007-2008 report mentions a lot of OSS, and re: Brunei “many of the e-government project proposals that are based on open source applications are not usually lower in cost than those based on proprietary systems. The lower initial cost of open source systems is sometimes offset by the implementation/customization and the long-term maintenance costs.”.
But that’s a story for another blog post … more after the break: