“When the data and the anecdotes disagree,” he said in an interview, “the anecdotes are usually right.”
But verify. Here’s the full quote:
Very early in the history of Amazon, Jeff Bezos was going over a set of documents with his team at the weekly business review. He’d heard that many customers were complaining (the territory) about call wait times, yet looking at the data (the map), he couldn’t figure out why. “When the data and the anecdotes disagree,” he said in an interview, “the anecdotes are usually right.” At the meeting, the head of customer service reported the waittime metric as under sixty seconds, which was in line with expectations. Bezos paused the meeting, picked up the phone, and dialed the 1-800 number for customer service. He waited on hold for over ten minutes, which made the point that something was wrong with the data collection. Mental models are maps. While they might not be perfectly accurate, they are useful. Mental models and maps are both useful to the extent they are explanatory and predictive.