Amazon has an obsession: its customers. Which means that it doesn’t wait for customers to express what they want or need. Rather, it anticipates them. Jeff Bezos, the company’s founder and CEO recently said: “You want to be customer-obsessed, not competitor-obsessed. Customers are always dissatisfied and they always want more. Removing the tiniest amount of friction from ordinary activities improves customers’ lives.”

In last week’s post I paid tribute to the year’s best April Fools corporate pranks. So it seems only appropriate to follow up this week with another installment of humor-drenched strategic insight from the comedy show Nathan for You.

Once again April 1st was upon us, giving companies around the world the perfect occasion to express their playfulness.  And it seems this year the number of corporate pranksters is way up and coming from all over the world.  A very welcome trend indeed, as humor is a manifestation of creativity, the growth engine of future shaping companies.

In the final weeks before his resignation, Pope Benedict created an official twitter account.  And last month The Vatican was present at South by Southwest, the preeminent gathering of the high tech community where Twitter was famously launched ten years ago.  Just what is the link between these two seeming opposites: A two thousand year old institution and cutting-edge social media platforms?

There is nothing quite like humor to illustrate points you want to make.  In his show on Comedy Central, comedian Nathan Fielder seeks out entrepreneurs and gives them absurd sounding ideas to galvanize their businesses. It just happens that many of his schemes perfectly capture the 3 key principles of The Slingshot Framework. Here is one humorous example.