An Amazon Story 2… Sometimes err on the side of the caution…

One of my favorite authors is Ms. Susan David, Psychologist, Harvard Medical School, TED Speaker, Author of the Emotional Agility. Co-Founder of Institute of Coaching.

In her enlightening book” Emotional Agility”, she suggests that we need to simply put a space between our emotions and actions. This is, what I call, a reference book, that I always keep close to me as a veteran people manager because it is so powerful and practical.

In her book, she also refers to an approach described by Viktor Frankl, “Between the stimulus and response there is space, in that space is our power to choose our response, in our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

Thanks to her teachings, I was able to open up that space between how I feel and what I do about those feelings throughout the entire process of selling in Amazon, erroneously suspending our seller account for, more than 5 months in the name of “protecting their community”.

Following months of hopeless efforts to remove the “err”, we had no other choice but to contract a law firm to reinstate our seller account. And finally, a few days ago, we received the “good news” below:

"We reviewed your account and the information you provided, and we have decided that you may sell on Amazon again. In our efforts to protect our community, we sometimes err on the side of caution. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused."

A vague apology… Please don′t get me wrong. We are aware of Amazon′s customer obsession and we have the utmost respect for it. Even though we are not the ones with “err” in this case, we had the opportunity to investigate our processes and revised quite a few of them to be better equipped for our customers. So, we are better off… despite loss of sales, suppliers, clients…. And yes, we accept the apology.

This short story might seem to be irrelevant for some, or perhaps a pointless buzz over a small matter. Make no mistake, the digital world will step on your foot as well and whatever you do, wherever you work, one day you will have your portion of the “err”. So do your homework and be agile…