In this week's edition of Things I Think I Think, Mark shared his thoughts on the recent New York Times article discussing Amazon's workplace practices. (You can read the Times article here.)
(Things I Think I Think is Mark's weekly email to paid Licensees where he discusses issues of professional and personal interest, which often don't justify the full treatment given by our podcast guidance).
The NYT did a long feature this week on the supposedly “bruising workplace” at Amazon. The piece has sparked an interesting, broad and useful debate. One of our licensees, Tom Buckley, wrote and asked me what I thought. Here you go Tom:
I don’t believe it. I know people at Amazon, and have known people there, and I believe that while some of these anecdotes are technically true, they do not represent an indictment of Amazon’s culture worthy of a broad-brush treatment such as this.
Did Amazon use to have a culture that favored performance over people? Yes, they did. That’s mostly because virtually all startups do, and especially technology startups. Part of the relatively new reason for this that most people miss is that up until 30-40 years ago, work was about capital and labor, which meant bank loans and physical labor. Compare the ability of someone to write code for 12 hours a day to someone running a metal press on a factory floor for that long. One is sustainable, one isn’t. Further, the advent of communications and modern transportation systems shrank the commercial world to the point where the company in Tacoma Park MD was now competing with one in Tacoma WA or even one in Shanghai, encouraging longer hours.
Part of the reason I mention this is that while Amazon IS a technology company they deal with an enormous amount of physical product by nature of their business [unlike Microsoft, say] . The reference to an un-air-conditioned warehouse and 100+ degree heat was widely reported several years ago. When the tech-startup-long-hours-performance-culture was tried in the physical labor world, it broke down for them (and they fixed it).
Look, startups are hard. Jeff Bezos, the founder, has shared stories of not having enough tables to stuff boxes in their very early days, so they kneeled on the floor for hours. Ouch. Relative to the “bare-bones desks,” that’s a well-known and revered paean to a pre-Amazon success desk made out of a door. I’ve seen them, and frankly like them. The idea that they can be used metaphorically to represent cheapness is ludicrous, and, I’m sad to say borderline mendacious.
Mike and I routinely worked 30 days in a row irrespective of weekends when we first started MT. We’ve printed client decks at home while waiting for Thanksgiving dinner to be served. Work hours are one way to compete, especially if you burn with the ambition of your idea.
Have they changed? Of course they have. I have never seen growth such as theirs sustained with a culture of “we don’t need to keep anyone who isn’t prepared to work 100 hour weeks.” I simply do not believe it CAN be done, over a period of time.
Do I believe some of the incidents mentioned occurred (crass treatment of employees in a family/health crisis, misuse of peer feedback to sabotage others, etc.)? Yes, I do believe them. (I also believe they were highlighted somewhat sensationally, more on which later.) And if mostly true, they are sad and shocking and take it from me – not as uncommon as we would all want them to be.
The fact is, every manager represents the company. If a manager does something to you – makes a decision, assigns work, provides guidance, interprets things – the company is doing that to you. But that doesn’t mean that every manager’s every behavior is a fair representation of the intended culture of the company. The sum total of all managers’ behaviors DOES represent the managerial culture of a firm… but a Gaussian Curve can be pretty wide. I would guess, based on a long history of teaching and consulting to many corporate hiring and retention systems, that Amazon’s explosive growth led to a small percentage of bad hires, which over a large number makes for a notable enough actual bad hires that the stories that are told in Seattle about Amazon eventually reach the attention of the Times. (And Amazon’s response to this previously acknowledged dystopia is its rigid hiring process today, which impresses me.)
But applying ‘one bad apple spoils the bunch’ thinking is misguided here. ALL large organizations have bad managers in them. (Thus, MT). Extrapolating this way is tendentious.
The presentation of “data” as it relates to measuring performance has the sneer of disdain that is unbecoming of a careful reporter. Had the reporters done more homework, they would have seen a great deal of positive feedback, and a much more balanced approach to talking about performance. There were items taken out of context, and items about positive performance not covered that in my opinion fatally wound the article’s integrity. If they saw and/or knew of these things and did not choose to report them because they did not support the intent of the article, then that encroaches on professional malpractice.
When thinking about corporations, remember to apply the same rule as you do to yourself: are ALL of my actions above reproach? Would I want others to evaluate me on my entire body of work, or perhaps an unrepresentative sample?
Thinking more broadly than Amazon: I believe that the ideal culture is one of sustainable excellence. And by excellence I mean nothing more than performance to an organization’s purpose at an exceptional level. I believe that there are corporations today that highlight performance, like Amazon, and other tech startups. In their beginnings, they are perhaps performance-oriented to the point of non-sustainability. This was probably true at Amazon, and is no longer (they just grew into a big company so fast that they were still a startup but also big, and we expect different things of big companies than we do of startups.) It’s not true any longer.
I also think there are some big companies that focus on sustainability, and lose their way to excellence. Bureaucracy, bad hiring, bloated benefits and lack of standards all contribute.
The great companies find a way to balance a sustainable employee experience with the drive and passion that both produces excellence and can be overdone. And it’s not easy…but it’s an effort worthy of our best.
Mark
Some follow-up notes that may be helpful and I feel obligated to include:
- I’m a huge fan and customer of Amazon, and we have trained many of their managers and many of them are licensees. For those of you who feel that this may bias me, I offer two thoughts: first, my direct critique of Zappos’s move to holacracy (Amazon owns Zappos.) Second, if you know me, you know I won’t pull a punch. Ask around ;-).
- Sadly, I have watched the New York Times’ standards fall over the past 20 years. The Times was, for over a century, a bastion of pure journalistic standard. The Times’ Style Guide was so revered that it held up printing of the paper once by 45 minutes because of an argument over one punctuation mark.
Thirty years ago I would have told you if it’s in the Times it’s true, and accurate. Now, some of their editorial bent all too often creeps into their news reporting. While some bias is inevitable, the Times has reached a level where I believe they are blind to their own biases.
One small example. In comparing Amazon to other tech companies that are known for unique perks and benefits, it says this: “Amazon, though, offers no pretense that catering to employees is a priority.” Using “pretense” isn’t reporting. It’s an innuendo, and an ugly one that implies dishonesty. Shame on you, NYT.
In the Times’ defense, I would bet 10,000 USD today that an editor absolutely went over this piece in incredible detail, with an eye toward defending it. I am glad they named sources. Could I then say they have tape recordings of their interviewees saying the exact quotations printed? No, but I believe they think they would be able to defend their assertions.
If you’d allow me to guess, I’d say that Amazon’s recent notoriety for being “the world’s biggest retailer” was a factor in this piece’s publication. [This title applies due to their valuation, which I believe is a misuse of the metric. They are the most valuable, but Wal-Mart is the biggest in revenue.]
Why do I think this? I think it’s because that bigness changes them from a darling tech startup where young people pursue their dreams in shorts and flip-flops, into a big corporation, against which the Times’ often rails (despite their own membership therein.) That makes them another Wal-Mart, worthy of attention, and sadly, reproach.