"Bezos created a technological and retail giant by relying on some of the same
impulses: eagerness to tell others how to behave; an instinct for bluntness
bordering on confrontation; and an overarching confidence in the power of
metrics, buoyed by his experience in the early 1990s at D. E. Shaw, a financial
firm that overturned Wall Street convention by using algorithms to get the most
out of every trade.
According to early
executives and employees, Mr. Bezos was determined almost from the moment he
founded Amazon in 1994 to resist the forces he thought sapped businesses over
time — bureaucracy, profligate spending, lack of rigor. As the company grew, he
wanted to codify his ideas about the workplace, some of them proudly
counterintuitive, into instructions simple enough for a new worker to
understand, general enough to apply to the nearly limitless number of
businesses he wanted to enter and stringent enough to stave off the mediocrity
he feared.
“You can work long,
hard or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose two out of three,” Mr. Bezos
wrote in his 1997 letter to shareholders, when the company sold only books, and
which still serves as a manifesto. He added that when he interviewed potential
hires, he warned them, “It’s not easy to work here.”
At Amazon, workers
are encouraged to tear apart one another’s ideas in meetings, toil long and
late (emails arrive past midnight, followed by text messages asking why they
were not answered), and held to standards that the company boasts are
“unreasonably high.” The internal phone directory instructs colleagues on how
to send secret feedback to one another’s bosses. Employees say it is frequently
used to sabotage others. (The tool offers sample texts, including this: “I felt
concerned about his inflexibility and openly complaining about minor tasks.”)
Some veterans
interviewed said they were protected from pressures by nurturing bosses or
worked in relatively slow divisions. But many others said the culture stoked
their willingness to erode work-life boundaries, castigate themselves for
shortcomings (being “vocally self-critical” is included in the description of
the leadership principles) and try to impress a company that can often feel
like an insatiable taskmaster. Even many Amazonians who have worked on Wall
Street and at start-ups say the workloads at the new South Lake Union campus
can be extreme: marathon conference calls on Easter Sunday and Thanksgiving,
criticism from bosses for spotty Internet access on vacation, and hours spent
working at home most nights or weekends."
No comments:
Post a Comment